…as a new government report reveals. Are they missing something? Thoughts from readers?
Sorry, in the *20* years since it was published.
2 responses to “The class system is alive and well at Oxbridge…”
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I don't have time to comment in detail because, ironically, I'm in the middle of doing Oxford admissions.
But in brief:
1) About 40% of Oxford places go to independent-school students. But we have a grade requirement (usually A*AA) and about 40% of the students country-wide with those grades or better also go to independent school students. I don't want to suggest that settles the issue – it's not absurd to suppose that we should require lower grades for people from certain backgrounds. But it's also relevant that our requirement is a floor intended to make sure people are strong enough to cope with the course (c.95% of people we make offers to get those grades) and the actual grades our students get are usually stronger – and the independent-school students on average get better grades than the state-school students, which reflects the fact that we do contextualise in our assessments.)
2) At least last time I looked (several years ago) independent-school and state-school students do about as well in Oxford finals on average, which suggests that we're not systematically taking weak but well-schooled students. (There are subject specific differences but in different directions. Note that I'm talking about Oxford specifically, not the Russell Group as a whole.)
3) One of the people interviewed for the Guardian story says “I do not think it is any coincidence that the richest colleges are the ones who seem minded to accept the richest applicants.” It's vacuously not a coincidence, because it's not true. St. John's (the richest college in Oxford) accepts one of the highest proportion of state school students. St. Peter's (one of the colleges "named and shamed" in the report) is one of the poorest colleges.
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I am a Fellow of St. Peter's college and, like David, I have just come off the back of admissions (38 1/2 hour interviews for places in PPE). One phenomenon worth noting is that students apply to a college, and the richer, more famous colleges, get far more applications per place than the younger, poorer, less fashionable ones like St. Peter's. What then happens is that the more famous and glamorous colleges have, in effect, 'first-choice' and then students whom they are unable to interview because of sheer numbers tend to be reallocated to colleges such as ours who tend to attract both fewer and weaker candidates. The best state school students thus get picked up by those colleges. A whole host of contextual data is taken into account in various different ways, but as David points out above, the floor level is pretty high. Despite a dedicated outreach officer it is still very difficult to persuade state school pupils to apply to the less glamorous colleges, and hence this strange phenomenon. Robinson, in Cambridge, is on 'named and shamed' list and suffers from a related, if slightly different, phenomenon.
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