While one might imagine that disadvantaged students from rural backgrounds fare roughly the same when it comes to applying to elite universities as their similarly disadvantaged peers from urban backgrounds, but new research from the University of Bath suggests that isn’t the case at all.

After researching data from around 800,000 English students starting university in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016, they found that cities appear to provide an “escalator effect” into these universities that don’t exist in rural areas.

The analysis reveals that while rural areas, in general, have higher progression to university than urban areas, this doesn’t apply when looking specifically at disadvantaged students who were less likely to do so.

A range of factors

The researchers believe a range of factors contribute to this phenomenon, including the social mix in more diverse urban settings, policy interventions that are aimed at urban areas, and the targeting of outreach efforts by universities to these areas.

While the findings obviously underline the importance of social class in terms of progression to top universities, they also highlight the drawbacks of using geographic measures to determine disadvantages.  Often they fail to account for the diverse nature of deprived areas, and therefore universities can end up missing out on talented but disadvantaged students.

“Our paper shows that whilst social background is still the most important predictor for progressing to an elite university, there may also be further geographic factors compounding access,” the researchers say. “We believe that the use of Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping methods, as used within our own research, could enable elite universities to target under-represented students more effectively, especially disadvantaged students living in rural areas with otherwise good progression rates.”

The results present a more complex picture than that provided by the urban/rural divide, and have important implications for higher education policy.  It provides lessons that are already being implemented at the University of Bath, which has entered into a partnership with Villiers Park Educational Trust to further support students from previously neglected coastal and rural communities to access universities, such as Bath.  The program provides students with coaching and mentoring support.