England’s ‘Access Agreements’ as Model for U.S.

The U.S. should “seriously consider” adopting the English practice of entering into mandatory “access agreements” in order to expand access to higher education, argues a new working paper, “English and American Higher Education Access and Completion Policy Regimes: Similarities, Differences and Possible Lessons.” The report also argues that the U.S. should expand its use of income-contingent loans and follow England’s lead in providing prospective students with nationally comparative data about student experience, satisfaction and income returns at the level of individual programs.

The working paper by Kevin J. Dougherty, of Columbia University, and Claire Callender, of University College London, explains that most English universities are required to submit access agreements in which they outline specific plans for widening participation and set performance targets. The agreements, which specify tuition fees and levels of scholarship support and describe planned retention and outreach activities and how much will be spent on them, are publicly available, and are reviewed by a public, nongovernmental agency.

The paper says that it’s difficult to determine just how much of a role the access agreements have played in expanding higher education access in England. But the authors argue that they could be a useful tool in the U.S., where they have no counterpart.

"The U.S. push for greater access to higher education institutions across the spectrum of selectivity could be aided by adoption of something like England’s policy of access agreements," they write. "This is not because access agreements have markedly democratized access to higher education in England so far. However, as we have seen above, the advent of access agreements has encouraged English institutions to become more thoughtful and persistent in their adoption of practices that might result in widening access to higher education."

“It would therefore seem useful for the United States to consider using access agreements at a time when there is rising concern about the large degree of racial/ethnic and class inequality in access to higher education generally and to selective institutions particularly … The requirement to have access agreements has the promise of pushing institutions to become more transparent, thoughtful and determined in their pursuit of wider access. Moreover, in committing to certain practices and outcomes, institutions could be more easily evaluated on their success and their use of practices that are rooted in sound evidence.”

As for lessons that England can take from the U.S., the paper recommends a need for more attention to England’s equivalent of community colleges, the further education colleges, which the authors argue have historically received relatively little policy attention, and greater skepticism about the expansion of the for-profit sector. The authors also recommend an increased emphasis on grants in financial aid, caution in adopting performance-funding structures, greater support for guidance counseling in elementary and high schools, and an expanded role for “contextualized admissions,” in which universities take socioeconomic information into account.