Vikki Boliver
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 286944 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Vikki Boliver |
| NOMBRES | Vikki |
| APELLIDO | Boliver |
| FIRMA | BOLIVER V |
| AFILIACIONES | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5629-5544 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 29 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 365 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2010 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
The hyper-commodification of higher education in England in cross-nationally comparative perspective
Higher education in the UK and particularly in England has become increasingly commodified in recent decades as public spending on universities and students has been replaced by loans for tuition fees and student maintenance repayable by higher education participants cast as private consumers. A study by Willemse, N., & De Beer, P. in Journal of European Social Policy 22 (2), 105–117, (2012) drawing on 2007 data for nineteen countries showed that…
Illuminating inequalities in students’ sense of belonging at university from a Bourdieusian perspective
This paper reports on a survey and follow-up focus groups with students attending a highly academically selective and socially ‘elite’ university in England. Informed by Bourdieu’s theory of class-based capitals, the research explores three distinctive dimensions of (non)belonging at university among our study participants relating to levels of (1) economic capital evident in feeling financially able to participate in the extracurricular aspects …
Evaluating Contextual Offer Making at Durham University
In common with many other higher tariff universities in the United Kingdom, Durham University uses contextual data about the socio‐economic circumstances of applicants to inform decisions about whom to admit to its undergraduate degree programmes. This paper draws on data for undergraduates who entered Durham University in the period 2018–2020 ( N = 11,392) to assess the extent to which contextual offer making has been successful in widening part…
Students’ Perceptions of Racial Diversity and Inclusion in UK Universities
Building on previous studies of racial inequality in higher education, this paper reports the findings of an online survey (N = 407) exploring the extent to which UK university students recognised the existence of racism in wider society and perceived the need for greater racial diversity and inclusion on campus. Utilising the CoBRAS scale developed by Neville and colleagues together with a new Racially Inclusive Attitudes Scale (RIAS) designed b…
Does grammar school attendance increase the likelihood of attending a prestigious UK university
In 2018 the UK government launched a £50 million scheme to fund the expansion of existing grammar schools provided that they increase efforts to attract more pupils from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. This initiative assumed that grammar school attendance boosts the educational attainment and the higher education progression rates of pupils judged to be of high ability. It is already well established that grammar school pupils' high…
Educational tracking and social inequalities in long-term labor market outcomes
In this country-comparative study, we ask to what extent differentiation in secondary education accounts for the association between social origins and social destinations in adult age. We go beyond the widely applied formal definitions of educational tracking and particularly pay attention to country-specific approaches to educational differentiation. Our main expectation is that once we factor in these particularities, the degree to which educa…
The private higher education provider landscape in the UK
The private higher education (HE) sector in the UK is subject to little oversight or regulation. Consequently, it remains a largely unknown quantity. Yet, the UK government is keen to foster the growth of private providers as a means of stimulating competition across the entire HE sector that will purportedly lead to ‘a greater choice of more innovative and better quality products and services at lower cost’ (DBIS Citation2016a, 8). We document t…
Reconceptualising fair access to highly academically selective universities
The higher education regulator for England has set challenging new widening access targets requiring universities to rethink how merit is judged in admissions. Universities are being encouraged to move away from the traditional meritocratic equality of opportunity model of fair access, which holds that university places should go to the most highly qualified candidates irrespective of social background, in accordance with the principles of proced…
Who counts as socioeconomically disadvantaged for the purposes of widening access to higher education
This paper evaluates a range of measures commonly used to target and measure the success of efforts to widen access to higher education. We demonstrate empirically that the area-level widening access metrics advocated by England’s Office for Students, POLAR and TUNDRA, are unfit for purpose because they yield unacceptably high rates of false positives (individuals identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged when they are not). We argue that the…
Experiences of first-generation scholars at a highly selective UK university
Targets set by the UK Office for Students require highly academically selective UK universities to enrol a greater percentage of students identified as least likely to participate in higher education. Such students are typically at a disadvantage in terms of levels of academic preparedness and economic, cultural and social capital. Drawing on eighteen interviews with first-generation students at Durham University, we identify five sites of pressu…
What Do We Know About Black and Minority Ethnic (Bame) Participation in UK Higher Education
Here, we offer a synthesis of recent evidence and new developments in relation to three broad aspects of Black and minority ethnic (BAME) students’ participation in UK higher education (HE). First, we examine recent trends in ethnic group differences in rates of access to, success within, and positive destinations beyond HE. Secondly, we examine the nature of UK universities as exclusionary spaces which marginalise BAME students in a myriad of wa…
Introduction to “Mechanisms of educational stratification”
Does ability grouping affect UK primary school pupils’ enjoyment of Maths and English
Lives on track? Long-term earnings returns to selective school placement in England and Denmark
We explore the influence of between-school ability placement at lower secondary education on earnings across the life course in England and Denmark. We go beyond the mid-career snapshot provided by previous studies by exploiting the availability of four decades worth of earnings data for individuals born in the mid-1950s. Members of this cohort who were judged to be among the most academically able attended grammar schools in England (19%) and ad…
The use of access thresholds to widen participation at Scottish universities
The Scottish Government has set ambitious targets for widening access to full-time undergraduate degree programmes. Meeting these targets will be a real challenge, not least because young people from socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts continue to lag substantially behind their more advantaged peers when it comes to achievement at Higher level. Following the recommendations of the Commission on Widening Access, the Scottish Government has ma…
Reliability of Longitudinal Social Surveys of Access to Higher Education
Longitudinal social surveys are widely used to understand which factors enable or constrain access to higher education. One such data resource is the Next Steps survey comprising an initial sample of 16,122 pupils aged 13–14 attending English state and private schools in 2004, with follow up annually to age 19–20 and a further survey at age 25. The Next Steps data is a potentially rich resource for studying inequalities of access to higher educat…
Which are the most suitable contextual indicators for use in widening participation to HE
Universities are increasingly making decisions about undergraduate admissions with reference to contextual indicators to identify whether an applicant comes from a disadvantaged family, neighbourhood or school environment. However, the indicators used are often chosen because they are readily available, without consideration of the quality of possible alternatives. A review of existing research literature to assess potential contextual indicators…
Performance-based university funding and the drive towards ‘institutional meritocracy’ in Italy
Many countries, including Italy, are increasingly managing their public higher education systems in accordance with the New Public Management principle that private-sector management practices improve efficiency and quality. A key mechanism has been the introduction of performance-based funding systems designed to reward ‘high-performing’ institutions and incentivise ‘lesser-performing’ institutions to improve. Instead of improving efficiency and…
Organisational Identity as a Barrier to Widening Access in Scottish Universities
Widening access policy has historically focused on tackling the socioeconomic barriers to university access faced by prospective students from under-represented groups, but increasingly policy makers are seeking to also address the barriers to wider access posed by undergraduate admissions policies. In this vein, the Scottish Government has recently called upon universities to set separate academic entry requirements for socioeconomically disadva…
Exploring ethnic differences in the post-university destinations of Russell Group graduates
The high aspirations of British ethnic minorities are evident in their high rates of participation in higher education. However, some ethnic minority groups remain strikingly under-represented in the most selective universities, and recent studies have shown that university graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds are less likely than otherwise comparable white graduates to gain employment in a higher salary, graduate-level job after their degr…
Misplaced optimism
How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, by
Exploring Ethnic Inequalities in Admission to Russell Group Universities
This article analyses national university applications and admissions data to explore why ethnic minority applicants to Russell Group universities are less likely to receive offers of admission than comparably qualified white applicants. Contrary to received opinion, the greater tendency of ethnic minorities to choose highly numerically competitive degree subjects only partially accounts for their lower offer rates from Russell Group universities…
Are there distinctive clusters of higher and lower status universities in the UK?
In 1992 the binary divide between universities and polytechnics was dismantled to create a nominally unitary system of higher education for the UK. Just a year later, the first UK university league table was published, and the year after that saw the formation of the Russell Group of self-proclaimed ‘leading’ universities. This paper asks whether there are distinctive clusters of higher and lower status universities in the UK, and, in particular,…
Social Mobility Over Three Generations in Finland
Erola and Moisio (2007) argue that in Finland the class positions of grandparents and grandchildren are almost independent of each other, once parents’ social class has been taken into account. We show that this conclusion of ‘almost conditional independence’ is not supported by the results reported in their article. We further show that the strong evidence against conditional independence is not due to the large N of the Finnish mobility table a…
Education under New Labour, 1997-2010
This article reviews the evidence on New Labour’s educational achievements. It focuses on those aspects of policy that Labour itself highlighted in its manifestos, such as the raising of educational standards. A major issue, particularly on the issue of standards, is the methodological weaknesses of the statistics used. No firm conclusion can be drawn on whether standards rose or not: they probably merely kept pace with those in other countries. …
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 acce…
The Grandparents Effect in Social Mobility
Using data from three British birth cohort studies, we examine patterns of social mobility over three generations of family members. For both men and women, absolute mobility rates (i.e., total, upward, downward, and outflow mobility rates) in the partial parents-children mobility tables vary substantially by grandparents' social class. In terms of relative mobility patterns, we find a statistically significant association between grandparents' a…
Exploring Ethnic Inequalities in Admission to Russell Group Universities
This article analyses national university applications and admissions data to explore why ethnic minority applicants to Russell Group universities are less likely to receive offers of admission than comparably qualified white applicants. Contrary to received opinion, the greater tendency of ethnic minorities to choose highly numerically competitive degree subjects only partially accounts for their lower offer rates from Russell Group universities…
Do comprehensive schools reduce social mobility?1
This paper investigates the claim that the shift from a selective to a comprehensive school system had a deleterious effect on social mobility in Great Britain. Using data from the National Child Development Study, we compare the chances, for both class and income mobility, of those who attended different kinds of school. Where media attention focuses exclusively on the chances for upward mobility of those children from lowly origins who were (or…
What Do We Know About Black and Minority Ethnic (Bame) Participation in UK Higher Education
Here, we offer a synthesis of recent evidence and new developments in relation to three broad aspects of Black and minority ethnic (BAME) students’ participation in UK higher education (HE). First, we examine recent trends in ethnic group differences in rates of access to, success within, and positive destinations beyond HE. Secondly, we examine the nature of UK universities as exclusionary spaces which marginalise BAME students in a myriad of wa…
Exploring ethnic differences in the post-university destinations of Russell Group graduates
The high aspirations of British ethnic minorities are evident in their high rates of participation in higher education. However, some ethnic minority groups remain strikingly under-represented in the most selective universities, and recent studies have shown that university graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds are less likely than otherwise comparable white graduates to gain employment in a higher salary, graduate-level job after their degr…
Misplaced optimism
How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, by
Which are the most suitable contextual indicators for use in widening participation to HE
Universities are increasingly making decisions about undergraduate admissions with reference to contextual indicators to identify whether an applicant comes from a disadvantaged family, neighbourhood or school environment. However, the indicators used are often chosen because they are readily available, without consideration of the quality of possible alternatives. A review of existing research literature to assess potential contextual indicators…
Social Mobility Over Three Generations in Finland
Erola and Moisio (2007) argue that in Finland the class positions of grandparents and grandchildren are almost independent of each other, once parents’ social class has been taken into account. We show that this conclusion of ‘almost conditional independence’ is not supported by the results reported in their article. We further show that the strong evidence against conditional independence is not due to the large N of the Finnish mobility table a…
Educational tracking and social inequalities in long-term labor market outcomes
In this country-comparative study, we ask to what extent differentiation in secondary education accounts for the association between social origins and social destinations in adult age. We go beyond the widely applied formal definitions of educational tracking and particularly pay attention to country-specific approaches to educational differentiation. Our main expectation is that once we factor in these particularities, the degree to which educa…
Lives on track? Long-term earnings returns to selective school placement in England and Denmark
We explore the influence of between-school ability placement at lower secondary education on earnings across the life course in England and Denmark. We go beyond the mid-career snapshot provided by previous studies by exploiting the availability of four decades worth of earnings data for individuals born in the mid-1950s. Members of this cohort who were judged to be among the most academically able attended grammar schools in England (19%) and ad…
Does ability grouping affect UK primary school pupils’ enjoyment of Maths and English
Performance-based university funding and the drive towards ‘institutional meritocracy’ in Italy
Many countries, including Italy, are increasingly managing their public higher education systems in accordance with the New Public Management principle that private-sector management practices improve efficiency and quality. A key mechanism has been the introduction of performance-based funding systems designed to reward ‘high-performing’ institutions and incentivise ‘lesser-performing’ institutions to improve. Instead of improving efficiency and…
Reliability of Longitudinal Social Surveys of Access to Higher Education
Longitudinal social surveys are widely used to understand which factors enable or constrain access to higher education. One such data resource is the Next Steps survey comprising an initial sample of 16,122 pupils aged 13–14 attending English state and private schools in 2004, with follow up annually to age 19–20 and a further survey at age 25. The Next Steps data is a potentially rich resource for studying inequalities of access to higher educat…
The use of access thresholds to widen participation at Scottish universities
The Scottish Government has set ambitious targets for widening access to full-time undergraduate degree programmes. Meeting these targets will be a real challenge, not least because young people from socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts continue to lag substantially behind their more advantaged peers when it comes to achievement at Higher level. Following the recommendations of the Commission on Widening Access, the Scottish Government has ma…
Organisational Identity as a Barrier to Widening Access in Scottish Universities
Widening access policy has historically focused on tackling the socioeconomic barriers to university access faced by prospective students from under-represented groups, but increasingly policy makers are seeking to also address the barriers to wider access posed by undergraduate admissions policies. In this vein, the Scottish Government has recently called upon universities to set separate academic entry requirements for socioeconomically disadva…
Who counts as socioeconomically disadvantaged for the purposes of widening access to higher education
This paper evaluates a range of measures commonly used to target and measure the success of efforts to widen access to higher education. We demonstrate empirically that the area-level widening access metrics advocated by England’s Office for Students, POLAR and TUNDRA, are unfit for purpose because they yield unacceptably high rates of false positives (individuals identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged when they are not). We argue that the…
Introduction to “Mechanisms of educational stratification”
Expansion, differentiation, and the persistence of social class inequalities in British higher education
Do comprehensive schools reduce social mobility?1
This paper investigates the claim that the shift from a selective to a comprehensive school system had a deleterious effect on social mobility in Great Britain. Using data from the National Child Development Study, we compare the chances, for both class and income mobility, of those who attended different kinds of school. Where media attention focuses exclusively on the chances for upward mobility of those children from lowly origins who were (or…
Education under New Labour, 1997-2010
This article reviews the evidence on New Labour’s educational achievements. It focuses on those aspects of policy that Labour itself highlighted in its manifestos, such as the raising of educational standards. A major issue, particularly on the issue of standards, is the methodological weaknesses of the statistics used. No firm conclusion can be drawn on whether standards rose or not: they probably merely kept pace with those in other countries. …
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 acce…
The Grandparents Effect in Social Mobility
Using data from three British birth cohort studies, we examine patterns of social mobility over three generations of family members. For both men and women, absolute mobility rates (i.e., total, upward, downward, and outflow mobility rates) in the partial parents-children mobility tables vary substantially by grandparents' social class. In terms of relative mobility patterns, we find a statistically significant association between grandparents' a…
Social Mobility Over Three Generations in Finland
Erola and Moisio (2007) argue that in Finland the class positions of grandparents and grandchildren are almost independent of each other, once parents’ social class has been taken into account. We show that this conclusion of ‘almost conditional independence’ is not supported by the results reported in their article. We further show that the strong evidence against conditional independence is not due to the large N of the Finnish mobility table a…
Are there distinctive clusters of higher and lower status universities in the UK?
In 1992 the binary divide between universities and polytechnics was dismantled to create a nominally unitary system of higher education for the UK. Just a year later, the first UK university league table was published, and the year after that saw the formation of the Russell Group of self-proclaimed ‘leading’ universities. This paper asks whether there are distinctive clusters of higher and lower status universities in the UK, and, in particular,…
Exploring Ethnic Inequalities in Admission to Russell Group Universities
This article analyses national university applications and admissions data to explore why ethnic minority applicants to Russell Group universities are less likely to receive offers of admission than comparably qualified white applicants. Contrary to received opinion, the greater tendency of ethnic minorities to choose highly numerically competitive degree subjects only partially accounts for their lower offer rates from Russell Group universities…
Misplaced optimism
How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, by
Organisational Identity as a Barrier to Widening Access in Scottish Universities
Widening access policy has historically focused on tackling the socioeconomic barriers to university access faced by prospective students from under-represented groups, but increasingly policy makers are seeking to also address the barriers to wider access posed by undergraduate admissions policies. In this vein, the Scottish Government has recently called upon universities to set separate academic entry requirements for socioeconomically disadva…
Exploring ethnic differences in the post-university destinations of Russell Group graduates
The high aspirations of British ethnic minorities are evident in their high rates of participation in higher education. However, some ethnic minority groups remain strikingly under-represented in the most selective universities, and recent studies have shown that university graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds are less likely than otherwise comparable white graduates to gain employment in a higher salary, graduate-level job after their degr…
Reliability of Longitudinal Social Surveys of Access to Higher Education
Longitudinal social surveys are widely used to understand which factors enable or constrain access to higher education. One such data resource is the Next Steps survey comprising an initial sample of 16,122 pupils aged 13–14 attending English state and private schools in 2004, with follow up annually to age 19–20 and a further survey at age 25. The Next Steps data is a potentially rich resource for studying inequalities of access to higher educat…
Which are the most suitable contextual indicators for use in widening participation to HE
Universities are increasingly making decisions about undergraduate admissions with reference to contextual indicators to identify whether an applicant comes from a disadvantaged family, neighbourhood or school environment. However, the indicators used are often chosen because they are readily available, without consideration of the quality of possible alternatives. A review of existing research literature to assess potential contextual indicators…
Performance-based university funding and the drive towards ‘institutional meritocracy’ in Italy
Many countries, including Italy, are increasingly managing their public higher education systems in accordance with the New Public Management principle that private-sector management practices improve efficiency and quality. A key mechanism has been the introduction of performance-based funding systems designed to reward ‘high-performing’ institutions and incentivise ‘lesser-performing’ institutions to improve. Instead of improving efficiency and…
The use of access thresholds to widen participation at Scottish universities
The Scottish Government has set ambitious targets for widening access to full-time undergraduate degree programmes. Meeting these targets will be a real challenge, not least because young people from socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts continue to lag substantially behind their more advantaged peers when it comes to achievement at Higher level. Following the recommendations of the Commission on Widening Access, the Scottish Government has ma…
Experiences of first-generation scholars at a highly selective UK university
Targets set by the UK Office for Students require highly academically selective UK universities to enrol a greater percentage of students identified as least likely to participate in higher education. Such students are typically at a disadvantage in terms of levels of academic preparedness and economic, cultural and social capital. Drawing on eighteen interviews with first-generation students at Durham University, we identify five sites of pressu…
What Do We Know About Black and Minority Ethnic (Bame) Participation in UK Higher Education
Here, we offer a synthesis of recent evidence and new developments in relation to three broad aspects of Black and minority ethnic (BAME) students’ participation in UK higher education (HE). First, we examine recent trends in ethnic group differences in rates of access to, success within, and positive destinations beyond HE. Secondly, we examine the nature of UK universities as exclusionary spaces which marginalise BAME students in a myriad of wa…
Introduction to “Mechanisms of educational stratification”
Does ability grouping affect UK primary school pupils’ enjoyment of Maths and English
Lives on track? Long-term earnings returns to selective school placement in England and Denmark
We explore the influence of between-school ability placement at lower secondary education on earnings across the life course in England and Denmark. We go beyond the mid-career snapshot provided by previous studies by exploiting the availability of four decades worth of earnings data for individuals born in the mid-1950s. Members of this cohort who were judged to be among the most academically able attended grammar schools in England (19%) and ad…
Reconceptualising fair access to highly academically selective universities
The higher education regulator for England has set challenging new widening access targets requiring universities to rethink how merit is judged in admissions. Universities are being encouraged to move away from the traditional meritocratic equality of opportunity model of fair access, which holds that university places should go to the most highly qualified candidates irrespective of social background, in accordance with the principles of proced…
Who counts as socioeconomically disadvantaged for the purposes of widening access to higher education
This paper evaluates a range of measures commonly used to target and measure the success of efforts to widen access to higher education. We demonstrate empirically that the area-level widening access metrics advocated by England’s Office for Students, POLAR and TUNDRA, are unfit for purpose because they yield unacceptably high rates of false positives (individuals identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged when they are not). We argue that the…
The private higher education provider landscape in the UK
The private higher education (HE) sector in the UK is subject to little oversight or regulation. Consequently, it remains a largely unknown quantity. Yet, the UK government is keen to foster the growth of private providers as a means of stimulating competition across the entire HE sector that will purportedly lead to ‘a greater choice of more innovative and better quality products and services at lower cost’ (DBIS Citation2016a, 8). We document t…
Does grammar school attendance increase the likelihood of attending a prestigious UK university
In 2018 the UK government launched a £50 million scheme to fund the expansion of existing grammar schools provided that they increase efforts to attract more pupils from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. This initiative assumed that grammar school attendance boosts the educational attainment and the higher education progression rates of pupils judged to be of high ability. It is already well established that grammar school pupils' high…
Educational tracking and social inequalities in long-term labor market outcomes
In this country-comparative study, we ask to what extent differentiation in secondary education accounts for the association between social origins and social destinations in adult age. We go beyond the widely applied formal definitions of educational tracking and particularly pay attention to country-specific approaches to educational differentiation. Our main expectation is that once we factor in these particularities, the degree to which educa…
Sociology (21 obras) · Economics (19 obras) · Political science (19 obras) · Higher Education Research Studies (14 obras) · Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies (14 obras) · Economic growth (13 obras) · Higher education (13 obras) · Psychology (12 obras) · Demographic economics (10 obras) · Inequality (8 obras)