The Oxford University student paper, The Cherwell, published a great piece on an access outreach program at Oxford designed to encourage students without a history of higher education participation in their families to consider university and Oxford specifically. The program involves bringing students selected by their respective schools to Oxford to participate in a murder mystery. The murder mystery exposes the students to various fields of academic study such as classical history, chemistry and geography. The program is also designed to de-mystify Oxford in particular with college dinners, exploring the colleges and the city (for the full story & some video on the murder mystery program, please see http://www.cherwell.org/news/academic/2011/04/20/murder-in-the-cloisters-a-lighter-take-on-access-).
Why is it important to mention this program? Because it is one of the programs that will suffer as a consequence of cancelling the UK's AimHigher program (for details of the AimHigher program & its demise, please see my previous post http://andrew-bloggs.blogspot.com/2011/03/missing-target-great-mistake-of.html). Now, one could suggest that Oxford can continue to run this outreach program without the AimHigher support. In fact, the UK's Office For Fair Access (OFFA) requires English universities charging more than £6,000 per year in student fees MUST have outreach programs (Oxford has declared it will charge the permitted upper limit of £9,000). And it is true that Oxford can continue to run a murder mystery for potential students.
However, what AimHigher added was coordination of schools to identify the students to participate in these programs. Individual universities cannot do is this nearly as effectively as AimHigher was doing. While Oxford's murder mystery does sound fun, the point of the program is to expose students who could benefit from being exposed to a university (or, more particularly, a highly selective university like Oxford). Oxford can't do this itself. If it could, it would have. The point of AimHigher was to identify and expose those students not considering university to higher education. The main complaint against Oxford's admissions process is that the university doesn't attract students from disadvantaged backgrounds. AimHigher brought these students to the gates of the Oxford colleges to see what is available and open to them.
The Cherwell has put a human face on the victims of the government's short-sighted, mean and poorly-considered decision to sacrifice AimHigher in the interest of deficit-fighting. AimHigher was a program that would fight the negative consequences of England's new fee regime. Too bad the government hasn't realized this.
