Educational Opportunity: The Geography of Access to Higher Education

My book ‘Educational Opportunity: The Geography of Access to Higher Education’ has just been published by Ashgate and summarises much of my educational research over the past 5 years.

Abstract
While in recent years the burgeoning Higher Education (HE) sector has been set an agenda of widening participation, few HE institutions have strategies in place for reaching the full range of potential students who would most benefit from (and successfully complete) their current subject and course offerings. Universities and colleges are often unsystematic in the ways in which they identify schools and colleges for outreach and widening participation initiatives, and sometimes uncoordinated in how they present the full institutional profile of subjects of study in these activities. Using innovative methodology, this book sets out some relevant aspects of the changing HE policy-setting arena and presents a systematic framework for widening participation and extending access in an era of variable fees. In particular, this book illustrates how HE data and publicly available sources might enable institutions to move from piecemeal analysis of their intakes to institution wide strategic and geographically linked market area analysis for existing and envisaged subject and course offerings.

Singleton, A.D. (2010) Educational Opportunity: The Geography of Access to Higher Education. Farnham, Ashgate.