Access Is Not About Taking People Who Are Already Superstars: Exploring Constructions of Merit and Fairness in the University of Oxford’s Undergraduate Admissions Routes, 2022-2023

There is a well-researched tension between conceptions of academic merit based on prior attainment and equity concerns regarding widening participation at selective UK universities. Given its decision not to implement contextual offer-making policies, this is particularly true at the University of Oxford. This thesis explores how admissions stakeholders conceptualise merit and fairness in the context of the Astrophoria Foundation Year’s (AFY) development and implementation. The AFY is an innovative admissions programme for applicants from acutely disadvantaged backgrounds; its introduction represents a moment of disruption in the context of Oxford’s admissions because it systematically lowers the entry grades required of its applicants,challenging existing norms which oppose such action in mainstream admissions.

The project focuses on the narratives and conceptual framings of merit and fairness which academics and student representatives construct and enact in the mainstream admissions process and the AFY. Using a Bourdieusian framework incorporating doxa and institutional habitus as my primary analytical tools, I explore the spectrum of normative views salient in the mainstream undergraduate admissions space. I find that Oxford’s doxic boundary of autonomous academic judgement facilitates the existence of both credentialist and contextualist conceptions of merit,which operate in the mainstream admissions process as institutional habituses. These tensioned practices are stabilised and maintained via a legitimised mode of relational interaction, a new concept I term the relational institutional habitus. The introduction of the AFY generates both support and opposition among admissions stakeholders, articulated in complex and messy ways by participants; it disrupts the relational institutional habitus, generating new forms of strategic action I theorise as institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). The AFY programme becomes a site of contestation where divergent constructions of the appropriate value frameworks in admissions are advanced, critiqued, synthesised and managed, reflecting the performance of these narratives in the mainstream admissions process. I explore differing attitudes to the relationship between the mainstream admissions process and the AFY, offering insight into how change and stasis in attempts to widen undergraduate admissions in Oxford, both through policy positions and their enactment, occur.

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