The news that despite making up only 9% of overall applicants to the university admissions service Ucas, black students in the UK make up more than half of those flagged for possible fraud, has understandably outraged many. In other words, they were 21 times more likely to have their applications investigated than their white counterparts.

There is legitimate anger being directed towards Ucas from political figures, students, educators and communities across the country over this data, especially given its failure to explain the shocking racial disparity. But I believe we are only touching the surface of a deep-seated issue that has existed within our education system for a very long time – institutional racism.

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Ucas says it works to stop students from gaining an unfair advantage or acceptance into a higher education institution through false information. However, as when some in the higher education sector attempt to implement top-down solutions to issues such as the black attainment gap or the lack of career progression for black staff, this fails to get to the root of the problem.

Looking at disadvantages and discrimination from the point of a Ucas application, is – to a certain extent – addressing the issue when it is already too late. What happens during a process that potentially defines the rest of the applicant’s academic life is dependent on their wider education experiences, which begin at their point of entry into the British schooling system.

The fact that black pupils experience many more barriers to success within education institutions is no secret. They are undermined and overlooked in classrooms, face bias when tests are not anonymised, are overrepresented in exclusion rates within schools, and are forced to endure the trauma of a curriculum that omits the contributions and accomplishments of their ancestors from science, literature, and global history.

Then add socio-economic disadvantage, experiences of state violence at the hands of the police, as well as border agency and health services, racialised sexism, homophobia, ableism and xenophobia to the mix – not forgetting, of course, a continuing retention crisis and attainment gap that awaits them at university. All this serves as a constant reminder that despite being as academically capable – or even more so – than white students, there is the possibility that they will not receive top degree classifications on account of their skin colour.

It is also important to note that quantitative methods of data-gathering can often overlook the necessary nuances of each applicant’s experiences, particularly when it relates to oppressed groups within a structurally unequal system. It fails to tell the story, for example, of some black students who are perhaps unfamiliar with the application process because they are recent migrants to the country and received little to no guidance.

In addition, those whose schools have been academised, whose funding and support staff have been cut, whose class sizes have been made larger, whose teachers are overworked, underpaid and left unable to give the required attention and energy for each individual student in desperate need of it, will all find themselves deeply disadvantaged well before they sit down to fill in the application. And this is not just for the purpose of having the practical knowledge needed to fill in the online form but for much more than that: all these factors impact their academic development and support that would allow them to succeed without structural obstacles.

Moreover, all research points to the fact that the academic background of a child’s parents impacts their ability to achieve in academia. This then serves as an additional structural reproduction loop benefiting families who have done well in the education system and disadvantaging those who never made it university. Again, the intersecting race and class background of a student structures their academic lives in a way that makes the “colour blindness” of a Ucas application little more than a theoretical exercise.

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Elitism and white privilege are the very foundations of our universities, as shown by recent campaigns such as Why is my curriculum white?, #LiberateMyDegree, and Rhodes Must Fall, so it’s no surprise that their processes of entry reproduce a cycle of exclusion and exclusivity also. This does not, of course, mean that because of the structural nature of the problem we should give up on tearing apart these practices and redefine the purpose of our institutions and our reasons for seeking knowledge. It does mean that the conversation cannot remain at the surface of an admission form. Otherwise we corner ourselves into treating the physical manifestation of a long-term illness instead of treating it from the core. Doing so also allows institutions such as Ucas to simply point to its policy of training staff against unconscious biases, and its ticking of the right boxes, without recognising that the “neutrality” of their approach normalises the deep inequalities that shape the trajectories of students who reach their website.

Opposing the marketisation and privatisation of our education system, fighting for better pay and treatment of our staff as well as opposing the academisation of our schools, calling for state investment in schools and colleges and opposing all education cuts, decolonising the curriculum and providing better systems for tackling xenophobia and racism in our classrooms and campuses, would all go a long way to changing the real crisis that is failing black students in this country. This, however, does not fit in neatly on an online form. But then again, neither do the lives of the thousands of affected students.

• Malia Bouattia is a presenter for British Muslim TV’s #WomenLikeUs and was president of the National Union of Students from 2015-16