Pupils from all ethnic minorities are “significantly” more likely to go to university than their White British counterparts, a study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has revealed.

The study, which examined data from pupils who sat their GCSEs between 2003 and 2008, also disclosed that these differences in participation in higher education are even higher for ethnic minorities who speak English as a second language, and for those who live in London.

According to the study’s authors, Claire Crawford and Ellen Greaves, this gap has been increasing: among pupils who sat their GCSEs in 2008, all those from ethnic minorities are now significantly more likely to attend university than their White British peers.

The IFS report also revealed participation in higher education has increased more rapidly for ethnic minority pupils than for White British ones. It also highlights participation differences between different ethnic groups: for example, Chinese pupils are almost 40 percentage points more likely to attend university than their White British counterparts.

These discrepancies remained after the study’s authors had taken into account certain socio-economic factors and issues such as prior attainment, including relevant discrepancies for Black African pupils, who are almost 35 percentage points more likely to attend university than their otherwise-identical White British peers.

Such “unexplained differences” in university attendance increased during the time period covered by the report, with the difference in the likelihood of Chinese pupils going to university rising from 10 percentage points above their equivalent White British peers in 2003 to 24 points in 2008.

Once these socio-economic factors had been accounted for, the gap in progression to university between White British pupils and certain ethnic minorities increased even further. The study’s authors discovered that this is true of Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils, and claim that this occurs because these groups “tend to have lower prior attainment and other characteristics associated with lower probability of participation (such as being from a more deprived background)”, meaning the gaps in university attendance increase once their backgrounds have been factored in.

The university attendance rate for Chinese pupils in the lowest socio-economic group showed 66 per cent of them going on to higher education, making them over 10 percentage points more likely to go to university than White British pupils from the highest socio-economic group.

The fact that stark differences in participation rates remain even after contextual factors have been accounted for leads the study’s authors to posit that “there must be other factors that are more common amongst ethnic minority families than amongst White British families which are positively associated with…participation”.

Although they state they cannot examine what these factors may be with the data at their disposal, they suggest: “It seems plausible that aspirations and expectations might play a role.”

Other research, however, suggests the same may not be true for students at elite higher education institutions. Earlier this year, Varsity reported Cambridge Professor Diane Reay’s criticism of the Oxbridge admissions process as “institutionally racist” compared with the higher education sector more broadly.

In her report for the Runnymede Trust, a race-relations thinktank, Reay, Professor of Education at Cambridge, called for “radical action” to tackle admissions discrepancies and said the admissions process needed to be brought “into the twenty-first century”.