Getting into Varsity: Comparability, Convergence and Congruence ...

degrees find many doors slammed in their faces—and much of this has little or nothing to do with what people have actually studied. No wonder that overwhelming proportions of young children in any developed country now know that universities exist, and that they want to attend them, even if they have only the faintest idea of what that involves.

When one combines this selection function with the size of modern university sectors, it becomes inevitable that ranking within the sector will occur and that university entrance will increasingly focus upon which institution young people manage to enter—not just whether they enter at all. It is, in a sense, irrelevant whether the ‘top’ institutions are private or public, and it is fascinating, in these chapters, to see how different the answers can be from country to country. What is common is the emergence of a hierarchy. I think this is inevitable, and something else follows too: the need to rank applicants in quite a precise way when selecting them at the point of entry.

The editors argue, convincingly, that it is very important for curriculum-based exit qualifications to play a role in university entrance because that is what maintains their quality (and, I would add, gives universities an opportunity to influence the content of the school curriculum and its relevance to higher study). However, if students are to specialise at all, one very quickly encounters the problem that curriculum-based exit qualifications make it very hard to rank applicants on a single scale. Subjects and pathways at the upper secondary level vary in content, relevance to particular degrees, and perceived and actual academic difficulty. If universities treat supposedly ‘equivalent’ qualifications differently, they risk being taken to task by politicians; if politicians impose artificial equivalence, they bring the whole system into disrepute.

A relatively content-free entrance test cannot depoliticise the whole high-stakes affair that university entrance is and will remain, but it does help. For that reason, my own view is that we should expect and accept the use of both curriculum-based exit certificates and a measure that allows universities to place people on a single scale in at least one respect. It is interesting in this respect to look at the United States of