Twenty years of effort to widen access to university has, by one measure, worked. In England, a quarter of full-time entrants now come from the most deprived fifth of neighbourhoods, which is more than come from the least deprived fifth. That is no small achievement, and it was not inevitable. What has moved much less is what happens to those students once they are in. According to national figures, they are about 9 points less likely to continue into a second year and about 11 points less likely to complete. They are nearly eighteen points less likely to leave with a first or an upper second, and about eleven points less likely to be in graduate work or further study afterwards. Those gaps have been more or less the same for a decade. On this reading, it seems the sector got its students through the door and has been rather quieter about what it expects of them once inside.
A commentary this week named part of the reason, borrowing a term from the study of schools. Every university, it is argued, has a hidden curriculum: a set of expectations about how to behave that students are assumed to understand and are never actually taught. What office hours are for, and whether turning up to one is a sign of weakness or seriousness. How to read a page of feedback written in a register the student has not met before. That in some seminars silence is read as absence. How formal an email to a lecturer should be, and what it means when the reply is one line long. None of this appears in a module handbook, and yet all of it is assessed, indirectly, from the first week.
What the institution assumes
The usual explanation for why some students struggle with this is that they lack cultural capital, and the explanation is not wrong. But it is worth noting where it places the deficit: in the student. It may be more useful and more honest to place it within the institution, as a shortfall in transparency. A university that has expectations it has never written down is not neutral about who meets them. The students who already knew the rules were taught them elsewhere, by a graduate parent, at a school that rehearsed the conventions, or by an older sibling who went first. For them, the first year largely confirms what they were told. For the others, it is a year spent working out what the rules are whilst being marked as if they already knew them.
That working out takes time, and time is the resource those students have least of. Around two thirds of undergraduates now hold paid work during term, and the proportion is highest among those from the poorest households. A student who leaves a lecture for a shift does not stay behind to ask what the feedback meant, nor do they drift into the conversation after the seminar, where a good deal of the hidden curriculum is, in fact, passed on. The student who never went to office hours because nobody said what they were for is not, on the whole, a student who did not care. The institution had simply assumed a piece of knowledge, and the assumption cost that student something it did not cost the student in the next seat.
It does not end at graduation. A study of the top professions some years ago, drawing on national labour force data, found that people from working-class backgrounds in those professions earned around six thousand pounds a year less than colleagues with the same qualifications, in the same roles, with the same experience. The interviews behind the figure described how the gap was held in place: by unwritten codes of dress, speech and manner and by the habit among senior people of sponsoring juniors who seemed familiar to them. The hidden curriculum of a university, on this reading, is a rehearsal for the hidden curriculum of working life. What a student does not learn about the rules of the seminar room they will meet again in the rules of the partners’ meeting.
Cheaper and harder
Making expectations explicit is, in one sense, the cheapest intervention a university could make. It needs no bursary, no outreach team and no new building, only the writing down of things the institution already expects. In another sense it is the hardest, because an institution has to notice what it assumes, and assumptions are invisible to the people who hold them. Those who have led institutions may recognise the difficulty. The people best placed to see the hidden curriculum are the students who arrived without it, and they are, almost by definition, the students least likely to be asked, since the same quietness that kept them from the office hour keeps them from the feedback form.
None of this should be read as an argument that access work was misdirected, or that explaining conventions would close the gaps. Money, housing, caring and travel do more damage to a student’s chances than any unexplained office hour, and some of what gets called the hidden curriculum is simply the culture of a discipline, which cannot be written down without flattening it. The point is narrower. An institution that has measured its intake by postcode for twenty years has rarely asked itself, with the same care, what it assumes of the students it admits. Its own figures now seem to point to the second question rather than the first.
There is an uncomfortable thought underneath this. A hidden curriculum, left unwritten, rewards students who already know it and calls the result merit. If that is even partly right, then the gaps in continuation and attainment are not only a residue of disadvantage the institution inherited at the door. Some part of them may be produced each year, in good faith, by assuming. That would be harder to accept than a funding shortfall, because a shortfall is somebody else’s doing, and an assumption is one’s own.
Three questions may be worth a senior team’s time. Could it write down, on a single page, what it expects a first-year student to know already how to do, and would the list surprise it? Who in the institution could say which of those expectations are taught somewhere and which are merely assumed? And when the gaps in continuation and attainment are next discussed, will the question be what the institution assumed, or, as usual, what the student lacked?