10,000 wealthy students would have to be denied access to top universities each year to meet equality targets

10,000 wealthy students would have to be denied access to top universities each year in order to meet the regulator’s equality target, a study has found.

The higher education watchdog, the Office for Students (OfS), has set an ambitious goal for Russell Group institutions to "eliminate" the gap in admissions between wealthier students and their less well-off peers within 20 years.

But unless universities rapidly expand the number of places they offer, this would mean effectively capping the number of middle class students they admit, according to an analysis by the Higher Education Policy Institute.

Their analysis found that it would take almost a century for the gap to close altogether, based on the progress that has been made over the past five years in closing the gap in admissions between rich and poor.

The report's lead author, Lee Elliot Major, a professor in social mobility at Exeter University, models the different ways that the OfS target could be achieved within the desired time frame of 20 years.

One option is to double the number of places available at Russell Group institutions, to make space for a five-fold increase in poor students.

“If, on the other hand, the number of degree places was kept at current levels, then you would need to cut the number of places for advantaged pupils by as much as 10,000 – a third of their current places – to equalise participation rates,” the report says.

“This assumes that participation rates for young people from the middle quintiles remain constant.” Nick Hillman, director of the Hepi, said that the report’s findings demonstrate that to meet the OfS targets, “either we need massive university expansion or the middle classes need to stop going in such big numbers”.

Earlier this year, the higher education watchdog said that poor pupils with one B and two Cs at A-Level should be considered for places at Oxbridge to increase diversity in top institutions.  

The OfS claimed that so-called contextual offers give bright students from deprived areas a route into university, without risking a fall in academic standards.

It suggested England’s higher education sector needed to be “more ambitious” with how it handles applications from  candidates with deprived backgrounds, similar to US and Scottish institutions.

Candidates from the most affluent neighbourhoods are nearly six times more likely to reach the top universities than their peers on the opposite end of the social scale, data from 2018 showed.

This comes despite a “significant growth” in the number of contextual offers over recent years, according to the OfS.