If the lure of a salary is great, but you still want to study, all is not lost. Institutions are realising that students can benefit from exposure to the world outside. Stephen Pritchard examines the options for higher-degree students

After three or four years as an undergraduate, the idea of spending another 12 months in lectures and seminars might not be the most attractive option. Instead, they suggested that cultural and other factors might operate to the disadvantage of certain groups of candidates. “If a minority candidate at the interview stage expects to find bias or prejudice, he or she might alter their `normal’ behaviour in all sorts of ways during the selection process. As a result, some of them might trip up,” said Mr Kwiatkowski.He said that the data, which was presented to a conference of the British Psychological Society earlier this month, would now be examined more closely. It begs a number of important questions: what goes on in the minds of minority ethnic group applicants and their interviewers when they confront each other? And what is it that goes well for a black or Asian candidate in a first interview but badly at the final assessment stage?Interviewers were changed all along the line, according to Mr Kwiatkowski.

Pre-selection is conducted by one set of people, the interview by another – heads of department, line managers and the like – and the third, the final assessment, by yet another group of trained assessors.”As far as assessment centres are concerned, we have very little to go on. “These companies represented the very best employers to co-operate with our study They were all `blue chip’ companies. Can you imagine what the worst employers might have turned out to be?”Both Mr Kwiatkowski and Ms Scott ruled out deliberate direct discrimination. There was also evidence of mature applicants faring worse than those who went straight from school to university. Since many minority ethnic men and women tend to enter higher education later in life, first going to work, and perhaps bringing up a family before deciding on a university or college course, their chances of being selected were further reduced.”It was quite clear that some employers had targeted Oxbridge and the Russell Group (`Ivy League’) universities rather than the `new’ universities,” said Mr Kwiatkowski, who is a senior lecturer in psychology at UEL. Overall, white applicants had 1.7 times more chance of being offered the job for which they applied than ethnic applicants “Of course, we were surprised,” said Mr Kwiatkowski.

Indians fared better than Bangladeshis, and Chinese graduates generally performed better than whites.Another puzzling finding of this exhaustive piece of research, believed to be the first of its kind undertaken in Britain, was that selectors tended to take less notice of the class of degree obtained by applicants than of their O-level, GCSE and A-level grades. The first time, white candidates had almost six times more chance of succeeding than their black counterparts. The second time, this was reduced to a 2:1 chance and the third, it plummeted to an “adverse impact ratio” of only 0.8.When the researchers took a close look at the minority groups themselves, they found that candidates of Afro-Caribbean origin came bottom of the pile, being only half as likely to succeed in the pre-selection stage as those of Indian origin. This in itself was also surprising, for if there was any thought of racial discrimination lingering in anyone’s mind, it would have been expected to be at this stage. But the pre-selection and the final assessment stages proved the toughest of the obstacles for minority groups.Only one firm, which dealt with 10,300 candidates, decided to repeat the procedures three times, with each re-evaluation showing significant improvements in the treatment of minority groups. They included two large manufacturing companies, two of the big banks, two retail organisations, two finance firms and a large transport group.The researchers fully expected to produce a “best practice” study.