UK College Applications Will Soon Be Anonymous — but Is It a Good Thing?

As if the struggle to be accepted into university wasn't hard enough, if you happen to have a name that has particular connotations, you could find your application making it onto the "no" pile before they've even glanced at your exam results. Prime Minister David Cameron wrote in The Guardian this week that the UK will make all university applications anonymous by 2017 to help combat this.

This stems from a much larger issue, spurred on by a conversation he had with a young black woman who told him she changed her name on her CV (résumé) to something more "white-sounding" in order to get job interviews. It's hard to believe that such obvious discrimination still exists in the 21st century, but it's impossible to ignore it when you hear things like that. To help level the playing field, the government has signed up a group of large corporations (among them the civil service, the BBC, and the NHS) who have agreed to make graduate job applications "name blind." But more interestingly, they have also persuaded UCAS, the body that handles all university and further education applications in the UK, to do the same.

But is this a good thing? If it means more minority students get the university places they deserve, then yes. But what happens when these people arrive for interviews? Removing names on a form doesn't solve the bigger problems: racism, discrimination, or at the very least, unconscious bias. Though some British universities offer places to students based solely on grades, the most sought-after courses will undoubtedly want to meet them in person. So even if there are no names on the application form, will that minority student stand a chance once they're sat in front of the board? Cameron's piece goes on to divulge that some research shows that top universities make offers to 55 percent of white applicants, but to only 23 percent of black ones. Asking universities to ignore irrelevant personal details is a stepping stone, but it doesn't solve the larger issue; that we as a nation still discriminate on a huge level, even if we're not conscious we're doing it.

If names of students are to be removed from UCAS forms, I would go even further and suggest that the government should also remove the names of their schools too. How many students, even if their name is not shown, will find themselves rejected because they attend a state school in an undesirable area? If we want to level the playing field, we should strive to judge students solely on the things they can control: their accomplishments, their ambition, and their competence. Not their name, their skin colour, their religion, or anything to do with their upbringing.

It saddens me that we are still only making baby steps toward tackling this problem in Britain, but every step forward is good and should be applauded. Even before they fill out that UCAS form, prospective students from all walks of life are put off higher education for so many reasons: growing tuition fees, lack of graduate jobs, lack of support from their families, schools, and friends. Anything we can do to encourage them to further their education in the hopes of improving their future is good. But let's not pretend for a second that removing names off a form solves any kind of problem with discrimination. What it does do is force the people in charge of admissions to think twice a little more often, and that, for now, will have to do!

Gemma Cartwright is editor of POPSUGAR UK.