Who is missing from higher education in New Zealand?

Abstract

There is disagreement in the literature regarding the influence of social and cultural factors on the propensity for young people to undertake higher education. This study draws upon a national data set of over 45,000 young people to assesses their propensity to progress to bachelor level study, while controlling for their ethnic backgrounds, their socio‐economic status (as measured by the decile of the last secondary school they attended), their gender, and their school achievement. The results are discussed in light of recent policy developments designed to ensure that access to bachelor‐level study is not closed to under‐represented groups.

Notes

1. This paper extends earlier work by the second author (Engler, 2010).

2. More information on the national student number can be found at http://www.minedu.govt.nz/NZEducation/EducationPolicies/Schools/SchoolOperations/NationalStudentNumber/InformationForParentsAndStudents/FrequentlyAskedQuestions.aspx

3. For students who did not progress on to any type of tertiary study, ethnicity information is only available from the school achievement data. This has the potential to under‐count ever‐ethnic categories for those who do not go on to tertiary study, since a person in this category has less opportunity to indicate their ethnic identification. In practice, bias that might have been introduced was minor, and did not affect the conclusions drawn.

4. This system of reporting ethnicity was first used in New Zealand in health research by Pomare et al. (1995).

5. Ninety per cent confidence intervals are used so that readers can be at least 95% certain that, when the intervals do not overlap, the means are statistically different (Schenker & Gentleman, 2001; Payton et al., 2003).

6. It should be stressed that there is considerable evidence that school decile ratings measure important differences between schools (Biddulph et al., 2003).

7. Research has reported significant differences between boys and girls (as well as between different ethnic groups) in their motivation to achieve the NCEA (Meyer et al., 2009).

8. Both Northland and the Central North Island contain areas of poverty.