Education and social mobility are so closely linked, that many conversations about the latter focus consistently on the former. This makes sense. Jo Blanden and colleagues (2007) find that half of all social immobility flows through differential access to, and success in, education. Although there is much to be done, progress has already been made in this area in Britain. Making education universal to 18, and mostly doing away with grammar schools, has served to create a more level playing field in primary and secondary education, albeit one in which competition for the best school places in the state sector remains fierce, and plays out through the housing market.

The last, or perhaps merely the next, frontier in educational expansion is therefore into higher education. This area too has seen a large-scale increase in participation, from 3.4 per cent in 1950 to more than 50 per cent in 2019. However, despite some calls for a comprehensive higher education system, higher education in general, and universities in particular, remain highly selective, and tuition fees, even structured as they are, mean that such education is not freely available to all.

The growth of the proportion of young people taking part in higher education has two major drivers. Expansion of providers, both at the intensive and extensive margin (there are now more higher education institutions, and universities are on average larger) is one cause, and so too is the change in a large number of professional qualifications to reclassify them as ‘degree level’ subjects, including nursing, midwifery and social work.

The increase in student numbers is, almost mechanically, a tool for widening participation to groups who otherwise would not have been able to participate previously. Despite claims of meritocracy, university education in previous decades was predominantly the domain of a privileged few. Yes, students had achieved good grades, but they were also overwhelmingly White, male and middle class. To take an extreme example, the vast majority of students studying at Eton, an elite private school, attend university, both in the 1950s and in the 2020s.