How fair is access to more prestigious UK universities?

Now that most UK universities have increased their tuition fees to £9,000 a year and are implementing new Access Agreements as required by the Office for Fair Access, it has never been more important to examine the extent of fair access to UK higher education and to more prestigious UK universities in particular. This paper uses Universities and Colleges Admissions Service ( UCAS ) data for the period 1996 to 2006 to explore the extent of fair access to prestigious R ussell G roup universities, where ‘fair’ is taken to mean equal rates of making applications to and receiving offers of admission from these universities on the part of those who are equally qualified to enter them. The empirical findings show that access to R ussell G roup universities is far from fair in this sense and that little changed following the introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and their initial increase to £3,000 a year in 2006. Throughout this period, UCAS applicants from lower class backgrounds and from state schools remained much less likely to apply to R ussell G roup universities than their comparably qualified counterparts from higher class backgrounds and private schools, while R ussell G roup applicants from state schools and from B lack and A sian ethnic backgrounds remained much less likely to receive offers of admission from R ussell G roup universities in comparison with their equivalently qualified peers from private schools and the White ethnic group.