The weekend before the release of A-Level results, I listened to a popular radio presenter make the case that British universities are no longer fit for purpose. The argument was logical and persuasive. International recruitment is on the decline. Institutions have responded by lowering entry requirements for home applicants to fill the gap. And the inevitable result, the argument goes, is a watering down of everything: the grades, the material, the standing of the degree itself. Callers mostly phoned in to agree, some warmly, others with real disdain for the people and institutions they were describing.

I want to be careful here because the difficult thing about an argument like that is that it is mostly correct.

International demand has softened. Clearing has always been a time to be flexible with entry criteria, as that is what it is by definition. Entry tariffs move year to year, course to course. However, it is also true that a programme designed for one kind of intake and delivered to another creates genuine friction. None of this is invented, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

To their credit, the presenter touched on the point that matters most here: that students arriving with lower grades need not, for that reason, receive a lesser education. And at least one caller — a parent whose own child is now in higher education, and who had come through a widening participation university themselves — pressed the same nuance. The single story was already fracturing on air, if you listened for it.

Whenever I speak about or listen to conversations about higher education, particularly about how it isn’t delivering on its promises, I can’t help but keep returning to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk about the single story. The danger of a single story, she reminds us, is not that it is untrue. It is that it is incomplete, that it takes one version of a place, or a person, and lets it stand in for the whole.

So here is what the single story leaves out.

If a course was designed for students entering with BBB, and students arrive with CCD, the honest question is not whether those students belong on it. They were offered a place; that decision has been made. The honest question is what the institution has built around them. Have we oriented and onboarded them into a system that assumes knowledge they were never given the chance to acquire? Are we still teaching with the vocabulary and culture of a selective sixth form, as though every student in the room arrived with the same preparation, and then treating the resulting gap as a failure of the student rather than a failure of design? A drop in entry grades does not, on its own, lower the quality of anyone’s education. What lowers it is an institution that changes whom it admits without changing how it teaches.

“What lowers the quality of their education is an institution that changes whom it admits without changing how it teaches.”

@intentionalacademic

That is the tension the single story refuses to hold. It is far easier to conclude that the students should not be there.

You could hear that conclusion in some of the callers. One was openly derogatory toward people who had not made the pre-clearing grades being in the same class and ‘pulling them back.’ Another had gone from a widening participation university to a postdoc at a top research-intensive university and was, by his own account, doing well, yet still carried the assumption that a person’s worth could be read off three letters on a results slip. There is an elitism that runs through this kind of conversation even when the speaker means well. It is a quiet confidence that A-levels are a clean proxy for who deserves a place, but it isn’t. Yes, A-Levels are hard work, a worthwhile investment, and achieving top grades is worthy of celebration. However, it is a qualification that can also serve as a proxy for the school you attended, the household you grew up in, and the support that was or was not there at sixteen. To distil a person’s future down to that measure is not rigour. I don’t know whether meritocracy is a myth, but it does favour the privileged.

And the stakes of getting this wrong are not abstract. If we decide that university should belong only to those who cleared a high tariff at eighteen, we are choosing, in effect, to return to something closer to the pre-Blair settlement, a system where higher education was largely the preserve of the wealthy, drawn from particular schools, and where the lawyers and the doctors and the engineers came overwhelmingly from one cadre of society. What does that say about us as a democracy, if people are expected to remain in whatever stratum of life they happened to be born into? I do not think that can be the answer. Not everyone needs to go to university. But everyone who can and wants to should have a genuine path to it.

I say this as someone who has spent my whole career in widening participation, so my bias is on the record. But it is a bias built on what I have watched happen. Every year, I have taught students who are now in the NHS, at leading firms within and outside STEM, pursuing doctoral studies, etc. They are students who were told, in one way or another, that they did not deserve to be there and went anyway. I have taught students who took their first degree with us, who came through foundation years that people look down on precisely because the A-level grades were not there, and who then excelled in Russell Group environments, completed PhDs, and built careers that any of those callers would recognise as success. The learning gain from those journeys is real and enormous. It simply does not fit the single story, so it goes untold.

None of this means everything in the sector is well. It may be that some courses are not being taught as they should be, and that some institutions are not doing right by the students they have admitted. Those are fair questions, and they deserve scrutiny rather than defensiveness.

This is only a small voice in a much larger conversation. But it is a voice worth adding: widening participation exists for a reason, and for a great many people it is the thing that makes an ambition possible at all. Any honest account of British higher education has to hold that alongside everything else, or it ceases to be the whole story.