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ABSTRACT
Statistics published by the Universities Central Council on Admissions (UCCA) show that one of the reasons why a relatively high proportion of British university students come from middle-class homes is that the grades gained in school-leaving examinations by university applicants are related to social class.
A postal survey of a 10% sample of undergraduates entering British universities in 1986 was carried out to check the accuracy of UCCA's statistics of social class. Three-quarters of the codings were found to be accurate. In the remainder the coding tended to be too low. This error, however, is cancelled out by the incorrect assumption that uncoded students have the same social class distribution as the rest.
A comparison with figures collected in 1961–2 shows a rise in the proportion of students drawn from social classes I and II which reflects a change in the composition of the working population.