 Is ‘first in family’ a good indicator for widening university participation?Anna Adamecz-Völgyi, Morag Henderson and Nikki Shure Economics of Education Review, 2020, vol. 78, issue C Abstract: Universities use ‘first in family’ or ‘first generation’ as an indicator to increase the diversity of their student intake, but little is known about whether it is a good indicator of disadvantage. We use nationally representative, longitudinal survey data linked to administrative data from England to provide the first comprehensive analysis of this measure. We employ parametric probability (logit) and non-parametric classification (random forest) models to look at its relative predictive power of university participation and graduation. We find that being first in family is an important barrier to university participation and graduation, over and above other sources of disadvantage. This association seems to operate through the channel of early educational attainment. Our findings indicate that the first in family indicator could be key in efforts to widen participation at universities. Keywords: Higher education; Widening participation; First in family; Educational mobility; Machine learning; Predictive models (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:78:y:2020:i:c:s0272775720305240 DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2020.102038 Access Statistics for this article Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier |
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