A new composite measure of ethnic diversity: investigating the controversy over minority ethnic recruitment at Oxford and Cambridge universities Seminar
Event details
Measuring ethnic diversity currently amounts simply to counting ethnicities. This makes it impossible to correlate with achievement, to track changes over time or to compare institutions in a meaningful way. It is not clear, for example, whether it is more diverse to have many ethnicities with a large majority in one or two categories, or to have fewer ethnicities with a larger proportion in each.
This seminar is not about race per se, but develops indices from cryptography and ecology to solve the problem of measuring diversity properly. Using data from university admissions offices, it analyzes the ethnic diversity of undergraduate recruitment at Oxford and Cambridge universities over the past ten years to resolve one of the most controversial issues in higher education today.
It is an important contribution to research methodology, with clear applications in the field of school effectiveness, and informs the debate on social justice in education, particularly in a period of significant demographic change across Europe.
Speaker information
Professor Tony Kelly , Professor of Education (Former Head of Southampton Education School)