White teenagers are significantly less likely to go to university than their peers from ethnic minority groups, even when they have the same qualifications at A level, research suggests.

The difference between races is most pronounced among men from deprived households and suggests the emergence of an underclass of white working-class men who risk being locked out of higher education and marginalised over jobs.

Bill Rammell, the Universities Minister, said that more was needed to be done to raise aspirations among white males and their families. It was a cause of great concern, he said, that so many boys seemed to be switched off from education.

“I think that culture plays a very important role. Part of what we have to do is to look across society and look among the ethnic minority groups where there is a very strong attachment to education and try to learn from that.”

He said that the key to tackling the gender divide was intervening earlier in children's school lives.

The Government commissioned the study, which is published by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, to examine the gender gap in higher education. It is feared that males are being left behind in the drive to educate more young people to degree level.

Women were in the minority at university up to 1992, but since then the balance has shifted in the opposite direction. Last year the proportion of young males studying for a degree fell from 37 per cent in 1999 to 35 per cent. Among women, the figure rose from 41 per cent in 1999 to 45 per cent.

The study concluded that gender differences at university could almost entirely be attributed to previous attainment - more girls go to university because they are more likely than boys to do well in GCSEs and A levels.

Where boys and girls have equal A-level scores they are equally likely to go to university.

With ethnic minority groups, the research found that previous attainment was not a factor. Even when they have the same A levels, white males were proportionally far less likely to go to university than males from ethnic minorities.

The study found that 23 per cent of white males intended to go to university, compared with 65 per cent of Chinese, 66 per cent of Indian and 43per cent of black African boys. The only minority groups in which males were less likely to attend university than whites were those classed as black Caribbean and black other.

When both class and gender were taken into account, white working-class men were eight and a half times less likely to go to university than black and Asian middle-class women.

Mr Rammell said that the Government was working on a number of projects, through its Aim Higher initiative, to raise the educational aspirations of boys and young men from all backgrounds.

Programmes involving successful male role models, particularly those run by many Premier League football clubs, had proved successful, he said. Examples include the Man2Man scheme operated by the University of Northampton, in which male undergraduate ambassadors visit schools and invite pupils to visit the university to look at stereotypically male courses such as engineering, motor sport, aviation and construction. The students also engage with pupils at sporting venues.

In Leicester undergraduates hold a football competition for schoolboys at the university to give them a taste of student life.