@CleverKnot You're right about the photocopiers.
@MargaretThursday Good point about costs. I lived in for four years and bought nearly all my books second hand. Plus the libraries were so good that we could borrow lots of books that someone at another university would have needed to buy.
@Carleslireis Welfare teas and therapy puppies! That cuddly, woke Oxford sounds like something out of a comedy sketch, when I think how uptight and deliberately intimidating it used to be. I'm very glad though! There were women's officers in the JCR in my day too, but it was a total popularity contest for the "cool girl" types, plus it was the "ladette" era, so they didn't do a great deal beyond presumably bigging themselves up on their CV. I think you're right that cracking down on problem drinking (now thankfully waning anyway) is key to combatting rape culture. I don't know how the college would have dealt with rape allegations had those allegations ever been made officially, but among the students it was bragged and joked about - and if you objected to this, you were a prude. I'm not exactly from a sheltered background nor raised to be a feminist, and I found the rape culture shocking. Even post Me Too, there's no way I'd let my DDs go there (not that either of them are academic).
@yanak8 I suspect your friend who had a bad interview probably made the right decision, even if not necessarily for the right reason. If you're not studying for a very marketable degree it's probably not worth the investment of time and money, let alone the considerable stress and hassle.
Re Heath and his student freebies, in the 90s my college would have paid half the cost for me to visit Italy and/or Greece in the long vacation, but I would have had to come up with the rest myself, plus my parents forced me to work full time in all the holidays, so it wasn't an option. I sometimes wonder how the likes of Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde would have turned out if they'd had to work in a convenience store for three quid an hour instead of going on the Grand Tour!
@carduelis I get that too! They ask where I went to university, and when I say I went to Oxford, they say accusingly "You mean Brookes!" Then there are the neggy loser types who say things like "I can't BELIEVE you went to OXFORD and you don't even know [insert random fact about prog rock or whatever boring thing they're obsessed with]. My XDH was like this. In both cases, it's insecurity that causes the need to belittle people who they think are better than them in some way. It's why I generally don't tell people IRL, except except in certain kinds of gig work (supply teaching, museums) where questions about colleagues' qualifications are par for the course.
And Classics is most definitely the pinnacle of intellectual achievement, although I rather got lost in the foothills myself ;)
@AvanGelist Classics applicants had a one in three chance of getting in overall. There was often some positive discrimination in favour of state school applicants (as in my case) although in some colleges it worked the other way round. Entirely the luck of the draw if you didn't have any guidance about which college to apply to. This type of unknown unknown is a good example of why people who don't get in shouldn't take it personally, although social media must have reduced the unknown factors considerably.
Whoever said I was discriminating against old Etonians (the poor darlings) by referring to them as nasty and arrogant - well, all the ones I've knowingly met certainly have been. And I think they're all doing perfectly well for themselves with or without my approval!