Mobile roaming

Universities have been asked to take a long, hard look at their outreach activities.

Social mobility has always been a difficult concept to define. The idea that a person born into disadvantage should not be held back by that, or excluded from attending the country’s highest seats of learning and acquiring the most prestigious jobs, sounds like a truism. Nobody would argue against it.

What social mobility does not address, though, are the many issues and difficulties that have allowed such inequality to emerge in the first place. There is also no hard and fast definition to draw on: when do we know if someone has been socially mobile? One of the preferred metrics, as we well know, is access to higher education.