The 2024 Social Mobility Index, published today, underscores the fact that higher education providers up and down the country are having a transformative effect on students’ lives, and especially on the lives of students from socio-economically deprived backgrounds.
Tweaks made to the index methodology this year have helped in this regard. The index now looks at HE providers’ contribution in raising graduate salaries relative to the median salary of their local area and it is clear from the rankings that providers do this in all English regions. Judging social mobility outcomes against uncontextualised graduate earnings figures could inadvertently privilege London-based providers and the regional weighting applied to the 2024 index helps to bring out the contribution of a very wide range of providers across the country to the Government’s ‘opportunity mission’. We are pleased to see our members feature prominently in a diverse top 100 list.
We welcome the index’s focus on ‘distance travelled’ for graduates, which is a fairer means of assessing social mobility outcomes than looking at access rates or student outcomes in isolation. How well the cohort-based access and outcomes measures used by the index proxy for the actual distance travelled by individual students at different providers is, however, open to debate.
Previous research by London Higher has proposed a household-income based metric for use in widening participation work and if this were to be utilised in future efforts to assess progress on delivering social mobility through HE, it could help to evidence, at an even clearer and more granular level, how and where universities are serving as engines of opportunity and growth.
