par with expenditure in a middle-income country like Argentina. bottom. cent of university students. THE BRITISH Education system has expanded from an elite system with a 5 per cent participation rate in 1960 to a medium-sized system (14 per cent participation rate) by the late | 980s, to a mass system with a participation rate of about one-third by 2000.
In recent years, that expansion came with no parallel increase in university income per student, creating worries about quality. In 1995, total spending on higher education was 0.7 per cent of GDP, under half the OECD average and, as a fraction of GDP, on a
Despite expansion, access remains very skewed: in 1999, 52 per cent of university entrants were from the top two socioeconomic groups, but only 9 per cent from the
Even worse, there was little improvement in the relative position of poorer families the fraction of students from the lowest socioeconomic group has remained at about I per cent since 1979, while that of the next lowest has increased slightly from 5 to 7 per