Otherwise a uniform national quota would be very easy to fill in one place and almost impossible

“Otherwise a uniform national quota would be very easy to fill in one place and almost impossible to fill in another,” he says.For these and other reasons, Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, argues that it would be “madness” to have targets unless you have done your analysis properly. And as a university that is a favourite with independent schools, it may be off-putting to black people from the inner city. That’s because Hefce has found no under-representation of ethnic minorities in pre-1992 universities.”There isn’t a global problem,” he says. “If you look globally at black minority ethnic groups, they are represented in the pre-1992 universities in the numbers that you would expect. We’re not talking about a phenomenon like social class or state schools. It’s terribly important in this area that you get your evidence right.”Vice chancellors were wary about Phillips’s comments on targets.Professor Steve Smith, vice chancellor of Exeter University and chairman of the 94 Group of the “small and beautiful” universities, says that his university is putting a lot of time and money into getting black and ethnic minority students to come to Exeter.As one of the whitest universities in Britain (97 per cent white), Exeter could be said to reflect the region in which it is situated.

We’re working to get better data.”Should Hefce develop a performance indicator for ethnic minority student numbers as it does for the percentage of entrants each university takes from state schools and from different social classes? This might help to put pressure on those universities with low percentages to raise their game Selby thinks not. “And there is some evidence from a different study that there may be an issue in medicine. There is some possible evidence for students of Pakistani background generally being under-represented but, in all cases, the numbers are quite small and the evidence is not strong enough to say anything is going on. When they graduated they suffered higher unemployment than their white counterparts.But John Selby, acting director for widening participation at the Higher Education Funding Council (Hefce) who also spoke at the conference, said that there is no evidence of systematic bias in the admissions process once you have taken account of subject choice and qualifications, according to Hefce research.”There is some evidence possibly in admissions to law courses,” he said. That report showed, for example, that minority ethnic students were clustered in big city universities, in London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester and were under-represented in certain subjects, the physical sciences, humanities and education. Uduak Archibong, professor in diversity at Bradford University, which has a greater than 50 per cent ethnic minority student population, said that Bradford had targets and met them “We publish our statistics I think all universities should do that.

It should not just be one of those targets that you set because you have been asked to.”At last week’s conference a report was published arguing that funding bodies and universities were being complacent about the problems. Delegates decided to set up a new national organisation called the Black and Minority Ethnic Education Network to ensure that all universities recruited their share of ethnic minority students.Speakers complained that policymakers view all minority ethnic groups as the same and so refuse to recognise that students from African-Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds go to university in much smaller numbers than other groups and are concentrated in particular courses.Helen Connor, joint author of a government report that was published two years ago, said that she was disappointed that the problems she identified then had still not been acted upon. We are looking for the very best performers in a range of other tests and at interview.”Phillips’s comments, however, struck a chord with his audience. “We oppose any kind of discrimination and keep our procedures under constant review,” said a spokeswoman.”Applicants to Oxford are admitted on the basis of merit alone and we would resist any attempt for us to use positive discrimination We do not just look at applicants’ A-levels.

There is something not right about that.”Oxford University defended its record and said that with 12,000 candidates, all predicted to get three A grades, competing for 3,000 places, it was inevitable that well-qualified applicants of all ethnic backgrounds would be rejected. The result is that they are denied opportunities to fulfil their potential and to mix with other cultures.Phillips singled out Oxford and Cambridge for particular criticism, arguing: “The proportion of those admitted from ethnic minorities is out of line with those who apply and who are qualified. But the concern of Phillips and others is that many ethnic minority students are not aiming high enough, either because they are ignorant of the range of institutions they could apply to or because they opt for a place close to home that their friends attend. The institution with the highest concentration of all is the School of Pharmacy, University of London, with 92.2 per cent, bearing out the claim that South East Asians flock to study pharmacy.Another institution that takes a large number of ethnic minority students (64.1 per cent) is Queen Mary, part of the University of London, which, like the School of Pharmacy, is not a former polytechnic.The picture is complicated, then. Fifty universities have fewer than five black Caribbean students and, in 122 institutions of higher education generally, students from black Caribbean backgrounds make up less than 1 per cent of the student body.Universities with high ethnic minority concentrations include London Metropolitan, Middlesex and the University of East London. Phillips, who is adamant that he doesn’t want universities to manipulate their admissions artificially, is clearly trying to make the university world conscious of an issue that exercises him greatly – the segregation of ethnic minority students into certain institutions.