Social mobility ranking ‘could be antidote to league tables’

Think tank says index would help prove all types of institutions contribute to social mobility

Universities have been urged to adopt a social mobility ranking to prove how far they help their students, and to act as “an antidote to the detrimental pressure of newspaper league tables”.

In a report published on 4 March, the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) explained that the lack of tools to assess how well universities contributed to social mobility meant that the issue was “sometimes reduced to broad projections of graduate salaries” that “take little or no account of individuals’ personal circumstances and how far they have travelled” socially.