Widening access and participation: Exploring discourses in academic writing from the USA and the UK

Abstract Widening access and participation feature prominently in higher education policy globally, and there are now significant academic communities engaged with implementing and interrogating initiatives aimed towards these goals. Despite an apparent global homogeneity in the use of this terminology, this study explores whether differing structural arrangements for higher education in different contexts might lead to subtly different meanings for the same terms. To investigate this question, this article analyses the discourses on expanding access to higher education in the Anglo-American world, focusing on the USA and the UK. While both countries have been at the forefront of higher education research on widening access, they exhibit starkly different systems concerning their structures, governance, and levels of youth participation. Using a discourse analysis of an exemplar academic text from each context, the article identifies key differences in how widening access to higher education is conceptualized across these two settings. Two structural features that are shown to significantly influence the discourses on widening access are the centralized admissions system in the UK (compared to the USA), and the theoretically open ‘system’ of access in the USA by virtue of the non-selective community college sector.