‘Extending’ participation in higher education — Implications for marketing

Abstract

The concern of this paper is access to higher education (HE) in the UK. With ever increasing numbers of applications to HE and government commitment to widen participation to those neighbourhoods traditionally under-represented, cause for concern has been raised by practitioners and in the media over the different methods used for measuring the extent to which particular groups within society are under-represented and how they are then to be targeted. Also, with increased competition for applications between the universities and changes to how students finance their time at universities, all HE providers have become much more marketing-focused and as a result have begun to analyse their students in much more detail than ever before. The paper discusses the importance of defining the government’s aims carefully in order that marketing can be utilised most effectively. Via a series of analyses which drill down into application patterns it demonstrates how elusive the perceived end result can appear and, in turn, how difficult it is to devise the most appropriate marketing tactics.