In an effort to prevent racial bias, university applications in the U.K. will be "name blind" starting in 2017, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian. In his op-ed, Cameron argued that anonymized applications prevent reviewers from being influenced by the ethnic or religious background an applicant’s name might imply.
"Some research has shown that top universities make offers to 55 percent of white applicants, but only to 23 percent of black ones," Cameron wrote. "The reasons are complex, but unconscious bias is clearly a risk. So we have agreed with UCAS [the centralized application processing service] that it will make its applications name blind, too, from 2017."
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/10/27/prevent-bias-british-applications-be-name-blind