Leaving university early: exploring relationships between institution type and student withdrawal and implications for social mobility

Fair access to university continues to dominate public and intellectual discourse in the United Kingdom. There is mixed evidence for the effect of recent UK policy to widen participation. Significant variation in representation across types of higher education institution (HEI), with the most selective institutions demonstrating the least diversity in their student profile, point to the persistence of social class inequalities affecting and exacerbated by access to higher education. There is less attention in research literature and public debate in relation to students withdrawing or leaving their studies before graduation and very little about the post-access performance of traditional and non-traditional students in more and less selective institutions. Drawing on research which made use of a unique national dataset of students from 86 UK HEIs between 2006 and 2012 including students who left their studies early, this paper presents and explores the implications in terms of social mobility of two key findings: that 'non-traditional' students are, across the board, more likely to leave university early; but also that they appear proportionally more likely to leave from more selective institutions