ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN OUR UNIVERSITIES
Ever more people from ethnic minorities are going into higher education for the first time
NEARLY one in every four full-time university students was from an ethnic minority in 2016/17 - the highest figure on record.
There were around 1.2 million UK students whose ethnicity was known studying for their first degree that academic year.
Of these, 297,190 students were either black, Asian, Chinese, mixed race or from another ethnic minority, analysis of figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show.
They accounted for almost a quarter of the student population, at 24.9% - the highest proportion of students from an ethnic minority that modern records show.
Figures go back to the academic year 2012/13, when 21.6% of students were from an ethnic minority. That rate has risen every year since. Medicine and Dentistry degrees saw the highest proportion of ethnic minority students, at 37%.
That was followed by Law (36.1%) and Business and Administration (34.8%) degrees.
Veterinary Science degrees, on the other hand, saw just 5.1% of all UK full-time students come from an ethnic minority.
There are vast differences in which universities have high and low proportions of ethnic minority students, however. There are 24 Russell Group universities in the UK - generally perceived to be the most prestigious higher education institutions across the country. Of these, The Queen’s University Belfast had the worst rate of ethnic minority students in 2016/17 (including postgraduates) - just 3.6%. Closely behind was The University of Glasgow (8.8%), The University of Exeter (9.6%) and The University of Edinburgh (10.0%). Queen Mary University of London, on the other hand, saw more than half of its student population (58.3%) come from an ethnic minority that year.
Other London Russell Group universities that ranked highly include the London School of Economics and Political Science (43.6%), King’s College London (43.6%), and the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine (40.8%).
Meanwhile, despite being two of the most prestigious universities in the world, Oxford and Cambridge have lower-than-average rates of ethnic minority students.
At the University of Oxford, just 16.7% of students come from an ethnic minority, compared to 19.7% of students at the University of Cambridge. The University of Oxford in particular came under fire this year after Labour MP David Lammy revealed that students were twice as likely to get in if they were white than if they were black. At the time, Oxford’s director of undergraduate admissions, Samina Khan, said: “We are not getting the right number of black people with the talent to apply to us and that is why we are pushing very hard on our outreach activity.”