Are top private schools getting fewer oxbridge offers?

[Ijustwanttoask]

Just read in the papers about the drop in Oxbridge offers to Eton in the last few years. Is there a same trend for other big name public schools and top London day schools too?

In the past years, these schools generally happily announce the numbers of Oxbridge offers they get around this time of the year but I haven't seen much for 2021.

* Title edited by MNHQ by request* **

@mids2019 the foundation course hasn't even launched yet so has nothing to do with the existing trends.

There is no need for positive bias in what's been happening to date. Oxbridge have only extended outreach. More of the best state students are now applying which is why Oxbridge has almost 70% state pupils compared to 55% 5 years prior. The application numbers are up 25% I think since the outreach began. The outcome is still less than the 75% share of top grades state students attain but I suspect we'll be there pretty soon. I'm not sure why any private schools would suspect positive bias when the numbers are so clear that there are more than enough capable state students without any need for it.

We'll have to wait to see how the pupils on the foundation course get on. It is a trial and in 4 years time they'll show it has been a huge success and expand it or the wrong approach and rethink it. I think they'll do great personally. Oxbridge is tough but considerably less difficult than living in care or being a refugee after all...

@Foxhasbigsocks most of the top indies have bursaries for up to 100% of the fees. None of them as far as I know are 100% needs blind as the bursary funds are limited. A well funded bursary fund at most top schools only allows for about 10% of pupils to be on financial support.

I think Latymer Upper is trying to raise funds to get to 25%. Alleyns is raising money to try to achieve 20%. Eton set a target to become needs blind about 10 years ago but abandoned it. You need a really massive bursary fund endowment to really be needs.

My dds have been at a school that has 100% bursaries, but my impression has always been that not very many are awarded at most private schools.

mids2019

3Bs I think is the minimum grade requirement so they'll probably a number of pupils with 1A 2Bs and 2As 1Bs being accepted into the foundation course. Also remember they are picking the students with the most academic potential who can withstand the rigours of an Oxbridge education not just any student from a deprived background with 3Bs.

@Foxhasbigsocks

My dds have been at a school that has 100% bursaries, but my impression has always been that not very many are awarded at most private schools.

I make you right. Not many Indies are able to raise the funds required to give 100% bursaries. Some are able to provide partial bursaries whilst others simply have Emergency funds for students whose Parents for one reason or another become unable to pay the fees.

@SouthLondonMommy
You have raised many good points all through this thread and most of them I firmly agree with but unfortunately you are one of the few parent able to see the bigger picture. We all know the advantages these Schools confer hence why we still rush to have our wards enrolled even with the yearly fee hike and Oxbridge fiasco

Good discussion.

Seems aeons away Briseshead Revisited any way.

Will be an interesting and a little more egalitarian future it seems.

Possibly medicine next for the same outreach treatment? Should the medical profession have more even share of independent v state pupils?

Any way a discussion for another thread...

@foxhasbigsocks Having looked up the two I had in mind, I will have to fall on my sword and admit that St Paul's and Eton don't yet have 100% needs blind admission - mea culpa etc. and you were quite right to pull me up on it!

They are working towards this, though, to the extent that Eton has took on £45m debt to help it fund scholarships in 2015.

Similarly, the admissions process itself is blind at St Paul's but they can't absolutely guarantee the conditional offer will be honoured if the bursary fund is too low to grant all financial aid that would be needed for all.

I stand by my comments about the self-selecting aspect of very academic entrance exams, though. I think it would be very interesting to compare the results of grammar schools which also academically select in the first instance, but I expect they are thinner on the ground than private schools these days.

I have a "friend " who is an admissions officer for the law school of a Russell group university that had (maybe still does) a positive discrimination in favour of state school applications especially from deprived areas.

Anyway one year they had a private school applicant who missed out on offer. The student then decided to take another year and redo their A levels but this time at a deprived state school (apparently didn't turn up much and was mostly home schooled).

The outcome was that they then got accepted on the law course at said university. I guess the lesson being that there will always be some people trying to game the rules.

The School you attended up to GCSE Level is what determines whether an individual qualifies for an Contextual offer or not not the school you took your A LEVELS at. I am sure they'll be a few that will slip through the crack as not system is infallible but the overwhelming majority that gets it are those who qualify.

Still on the subject of Contextual offers, it only applies to comprehensives in the most deprived areas in the country not middle class areas. In addition each school and individual pupil are looked at on their own merit.

Maybe a bit off topic but....

Give an the intense competition for Oxbridge applications and with increased outreach and more excellent candidates coming forward should re application be allowed?

Does the ability to reapply to Oxbridge favour those that the resources to support candidates from certain backgrounds? Are private schools more willing to continue to support re applicants in some way?

Once upon a time not too many decades ago, young people from private school would often do 7th term Oxbridge entry (so after they'd done their A and AS Levels) rather than the 4th term applications submitted by those in the state sector. That extra year's maturity must have made quite a difference (plus having virtually a whole term in which to focus on the process)? It possibly also meant that very many fewer would have taken a 'second bite at the (academic) cherry', no?

Well given that private schools can prep and support reapplicants more successfully and the wealthier do have more resource to do additional super curricular activity, additional A levels etc during the year is this something to look at?

Why not given that there are more than enough suitable applicants each year from all sectors each year say one application and that's it; harsh but fair?

Also have post A level applications as part of our system and in the 21st Century given the intensity of debate have a centralized oxbridge admissions system and random allocation to colleges. This would prevent the need for scrutiny of private/state ratios at differing colleges. I suppose you need to look at the curriculum as well....

Lot to consider

@mids2019 I think that's a very fair solution. No-one gets two bites at the 11+ these days, although of course for private/public schools there are different entry points, increasingly with ones at both 11 and 13. Hmm, there's a recurring theme here isn't there?

@NewModelArmyMayhem18

Your probably less nervous at second interview as you know what to expect.

It just feels like reapplicants are taking places from children who may not have that opportunity to reapply.

I certainly felt I couldn't reapply as from a working class background my parents would have expected me to get a job.....also aid think working class kids often have a greater motivation to fly the nest.

I think this shift will have a big affect on academically elite private schools.

I would expect parents not to be so interested in sending their children to these schools anymore. Why pay for something when you think it won’t help your child and may put them at a disadvantage.

As for the children already in these schools when the wind changed, well, there is a lot more interest in elite US universities. Of course a lot of people who study abroad stay abroad. So we could be trading our elite for elite who come from other countries to study at Oxbridge.

There could also be a levelling between Oxbridge and the Russel group universities, if it turns out Oxbridge isn’t so good at contextualised offers.

Finally, there are already rumblings about businesses not just recruiting from Oxbridge but being more diverse and socially inclusive. So once state school pupils have finally stormed the citadel it may already be devalued.

If you think this will have any meaningful effect on the quantity and quality of students these elite institutions are able to attract, then I have a bridge to sell to you.

Once again Oxbridge does not give out Contextual offers. They have an overabundance of quality students from the state sector getting As and A*s at A Levels to choose from.

@Empressofthemundane
I think you d raise valid points.

I think the prevailing wind on this thread may be egalitarian but I do think we will have displacement of the elite to the US and maybe China.

Interestingly 25% of Oxbridge undergraduates come from abroad (with the largest proportion from China.....noteworthy when we consider our delicate international relations)

So yes there is a trading of global elite with our elite schools paying a lot more interest in prestigious US universities.

Elite private schools already describe Oxbridge as just 2 universities amongst leading universities and you could argue there maybe a chipping away of the prestige.

I put forward some arguments that foundation courses at Oxbridge where in essence entrance can be gained with 3B s for extremely disadvantaged pupils may lead to a questioning of the absolute rigour of an Oxbridge degree as if an undergraduate with 3B s (or maybe a bit above) has the inherent capability of getting a 1st at Cambridge (3B s gets you into Hull) what does this day about the challenge of the degree?

Elij is quite right that there are more than enough state school pupils with the A levels to get into Oxbridge (look at the stats of the number of pupils getting
As and A stars) so the direction of travel is obvious as stated by a number posters on this thread. (One could even argue in this day and age a A A A offer is a form of contexulation)

Possibly in 5 years Durham, UCL, LSE will be mentioned as being on par with oxbridge. We will see and maybe this is the ultimate result of greater meritocracy. Pupils will think twice about Oxbridge if they don't necessarily feel there is a major advantage to having an Oxbridge degree.

There already has been a number of newspaper articles arguing elite professions and roles shouldn't be exclusively given to Oxbridge grads (another thread!).

Questions remain about whether the state/private spotlight will shone on Durham so the debate continues.....

I don’t understand your point @mids2019 about the BBB

It doesn’t say anything about how difficult OXbridge coursework is. The kids got BBB because of poor and disrupted education not because of lack of ability. That’s the whole point... They would be AAA students under normal circumstances.

@mids2019 you seem to think Alevels are proxy iq tests. You let performance at A-level is heavily influenced by the quality of teaching you receive not just your raw intelligence and effort.

The foundation year fills in the gaps in your education so you are fully up to speed

@LondonGirl83

In reality it will eh difficult to discern to what extent poor teaching or relative lack of ability had an the acquisition of 3Bs.

I suppose there would be a wide range of children that could say that their relatively poor grades were due to poor education but how objectively do you assess this? Again does a 'good standard ' A level have inherent worth if we have to view it in context? Do we need to state our A levels as A(Eton) or A(Waterloo Road)?

I think you raise some profound questions about qualifications actually e.g. Should university entrance be based on an iq test of we have so little faith in the objectivity of A levels? Are A levels themselves skewed to allow better performance by the middle classes?

IQ tests aren’t objective either! Sounds would vote no!

As I say, I think ultimately the tracking for the BBB students will mirror the pattern seen whereby more state school entrants at Oxbridge get firsts. They will do slightly better than the control entry pool.

I suppose one question with the idea of the foundation course is that you may have a candidate that has faced educational disruption with BBB A level grades who may have the potential to have gained A A A grades with out the disruption. You then have to have a means of determining of this is the case. Quite obviously you can't have another exam so the assessment would have to be done presumably through other means e.g.interview and the candidate may give a performance commensurate with their current A levels (due to educational disruption) and the whole thing becomes very subjective and you need a great deal of faith in the assessment team.

If course in order to ensure such candidates have a chance to come out with a reasonable degree you can calibrate university examinations such that a 2:1 would roughly align with BBB ability at A level and I suspect this will happen.

I suppose a bigger question would then be is a degree from Cambridge necessarily better than other institutions? One could argue that students entering Durham and Cambridge for example have fairly similar A levels grades (mixtures of A and A star grades) and so the university examination standards would be roughly similar.

I remember an old black adder sketch comparing Cambridge , Oxford, and Hull universities which was a little disparaging to Hull graduates and it just seems out dated now. An English degree from Hull would have an entrance tariff similar to that to enter a Cambridge foundation course and presumably the examinations similar in difficulty.

I think that given the number of pupils getting A grades now it seems like Oxbridge will become two of a number of similar institutions which take in A grade pupils. The ongoing reputation may be Russell group universities with nice buildings and funny sounding names for things.

I think overall the situation is going to be more meritocratic but a number of leading universities in the country will gain similar reputations. More leading employers will cast their net wider than Oxbridge and you will have the elites in the profession, government and the media will be taken from a number of universities.

It remains to be seen whether those from elite private schools continue to take these positions having bypassed oxbridge.

@mids2019 I can safely assure you that hell will freeze over before the Oxbridge exams are made easier to try to accommodate certain undergraduate groups. They won’t do it because they won’t want to. The exam setting is incredibly rigorous and in my own subject is and always has been set according to the key questions du jour in the eyes of the faculty.

They also won’t need to - the data from the first cohort of these students will show that they will achieve very highly, much as the first women to get high flying careers had to have been stellar to get where they were. I think it’s only if you know how difficult it is to get good A level grades in some of these schools and in the home environments in question. that you can imagine how able, resilient and determined these pupils will have been even to get BBB.

I think you might find it really interesting to read Low Born by Kerry Hudson - one person’s beautifully written story of growing up in real poverty.

I can recall two people from my year at school who were never regarded as being super bright at all and their school results would confirm that (they were middle-ranking all through secondary school). They were two of five who got into Oxbridge from a cohort of circa 100. This made me think that the selection process is a more finely tuned instrument for determining potential to thrive in the environment than just going on grades alone.