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The relationship between A-level subject choice and league table score of university attended: the ‘facilitating’, the ‘less suitable’, and the counter-intuitive

Dilnot, CE; (2018) The relationship between A-level subject choice and league table score of university attended: the ‘facilitating’, the ‘less suitable’, and the counter-intuitive. Oxford Review of Education , 44 (1) pp. 118-137. 10.1080/03054985.2018.1409976. Green open access

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Abstract

English students from less privileged backgrounds and state, rather than private, schools remain significantly under-represented at high-status universities. There has been little work to date on the role of A-level subject choice, as opposed to attainment, in access to university. Using linked administrative data for three recent cohorts of English entrants to UK universities, I examine the relationship between league table score of university attended and A-level subject choices, using a taxonomy of A-levels categorised according to their published efficacy for Russell Group university admission as ‘facilitating’, ‘useful’, or ‘less suitable’. I further examine the relationship of three ‘less suitable’ A-levels with league table score of university for related degree courses commonly leading to professional business careers (accountancy, business, and law). Holding more facilitating A-levels is associated with attending a higher ranked university overall, even controlling for degree subject, and the converse is true for ‘less suitable’ subjects. The heterogeneous relationships of professionally-related A-level subjects with university ranking make decision-making for aspirational 16-year-olds problematic: an apparently sensible subject choice for students wishing to prepare for a professional career may, in fact, put them at a disadvantage.

Type: Article
Title: The relationship between A-level subject choice and league table score of university attended: the ‘facilitating’, the ‘less suitable’, and the counter-intuitive
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2018.1409976
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2018.1409976
Language: English
Additional information: © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: A-level subject choice, facilitating subjects, fair access, university league tables
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10045680
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