Universities challenged on racism

Race inequality remains prevalent in all areas of higher education, including staffing, admissions and employment, according to a report released by UK race equality think tank the Runnymede Trust.

The report, Aiming higher: race, inequality and diversity in the academy, finds that black and minority ethnic (BME) students have to do better than their white peers in order to get into university in the first place, and are still less likely to get into the more prestigious institutions.

Despite an increase in BME students in higher education overall, they are still under-represented at the best universities, less likely to get jobs that match their education level or to progress to professorships.

In fact, 92% of professors (15,905) in UK academia are white, and 0.5% (85) are black, with just 17 of those being women. Only 15 black academics in the British university system perform senior management roles.

Runnymede Trust director Omar Khan said: “Evidence that white British students with lower A-level results are more likely to get into elite British universities than Asian students with higher A-level results suggests there is unconscious bias, if not positive discrimination, in favour of white university applicants in 2015.

“The obvious question, then, is, if these racial inequalities persist across every measurement of outcomes in higher education, will black and minority ethnic students continue to pay £9,000 a year for a much poorer experience than their classmates?”

www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/Aiming%20Higher.pdf