The University of Oxford will review its postgraduate admissions policies and scholarship support across all departments after approving a bespoke graduate access strategy.

In what is believed to be a first for a UK university, Oxford’s governing council has signed off a university-wide plan to diversify admissions at postgraduate and doctoral levels, which is separate to its work on improving , as overseen by the Office for Students.

The strategy aims to build on recent initiatives to increase scholarship support for under-represented groups, provide mentoring and internships for potential masters and DPhil students and trial new selection procedures.

Under the strategy, signed off last month, additional resources will be provided to employ staff in each of Oxford’s four divisions – humanities, social sciences, medical sciences and mathematical, physical and life sciences – to coordinate graduate access activities with a view to creating more bespoke schemes for different disciplines and subjects.

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The strategy follows Oxford’s decision to begin collecting data directly from postgraduates and DPhil applicants in 2018, with postgraduates now making up just over half of its 26,000 students.

“That was an important first step because it was the first time that we had evidence to state that graduate students looked very similar in socio-economic terms to our undergraduates, even though two-thirds are from overseas,” explained David Gavaghan, professor of computational biology who has helped lead efforts on graduate access at Oxford. “That told us we needed to do something similar at graduate level as we’d done at undergraduate level,” he added.

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Some of the initiatives that followed sought to address perceptions that “Oxford was not for everyone”, continued Gavaghan. These included the  at Oxford, for instance, which now welcomes 130 promising undergraduates into laboratories for a seven-week summer programme designed to prepare them for further study.

Other policy changes, however, recognised that applicants from under-represented groups might not have the opportunity to undertake such research internships for financial reasons, continued Gavaghan. “Many students don’t have the opportunity to build their CVs because they are working in shops over the summer so we can’t expect them to compete on exactly the same academic excellence terms as some applicants,” he said, adding that admissions procedures should look at “potential” of certain students.

Other schemes have been hugely successful in closing the admission gap for black and ethnic minority British applicants to graduate study, he said. “We’ve reduced that offer gap from about 20 per cent and really narrowed it down to 10 per cent,” explained Gavaghan on the  that reviewed postgraduate admissions, which was run with the University of Cambridge.

Oxford’s new strategy was significant because bespoke practices on graduate access would now be embedded across the university, although interventions may differ according to subject. “We’re trying to find the best applicants regardless of background but it’s often difficult to ask academics to drive this work forward while doing all the other things they normally do,” he said. “That’s why funding these posts within Oxford’s divisions is important as it will help people understand their local data and the kind of thing you can do to broaden access,” he said.

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Providing the necessary resources to improve graduate access in the form of postgraduate scholarships would, however, remain a major difficulty, said Gavaghan. “If you want someone to do a DPhil at Oxford it will cost £120,000 to £140,000, so that barrier is still huge,” he said.

“We have raised more than £8 million this year for this and the college system helps us too, which is a structure that most universities don’t have,” he continued.

Nonetheless, it was vital that universities did not solely focus on undergraduate access at the expense of postgraduates given “a graduate degree is increasingly a passport to the professions – including academia. If we want to diversify the professions, then we need to diversify PhDs,” said Gavaghan.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com