Oxford NOT JUST for the rich

[sieglinde]

I was fascinated by this. Oxford is in fact only 12th in this list of unis for the rich, measured by the number of students with student loans.

Unis which are often seen as Sturdier and More Sensible - Nottingham, Glasgow, Manchester - actually have a higher proportion of rich students.

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/8882007/Universities-with-the-richest-students-or-parents.html?image=11

There aren't enough applicants from state schools when you consider grades achieved, but that doesn't really explain why Oxford is ranked 12th for percentage of students not taking up loans. If there were more state school applicants and admissions you would expect more people to take loans not less. Unless private school parents have used up all their money so their children need the loans more than middle class state applicants - muses (Oxford does have the highest number of admissions to private school children of anywhere I think). Or maybe Oxford's generous bursary scheme does attract more poorer students than the other 11 places - certainly the cost of living in London would deter many and St Andrews/Edinburgh also v expensive. Manchester seems odd though.

I do wonder, as someone else said up the thread, if international applicants are counted in this and also think the Scottish universities will be skewed upwards as their loans (for Scottish students) are so much smaller there will be many more families who can afford not to take them.

Me, I said it. The ranking according to numbers taking student loans is just daft.

ellisbell, discussion has moved on a lot, but I'll try to respond.

Yes, actually I do keep in touch with some candidates not admitted, though they are obviously a self-selecting sample in that I don't chase them. Some of them - again from all sectors - want to reapply in the following year. Some of them go elsewhere and keep in touch.

Also FWIW, I currently have a brilliant graduate, ex-Durham, who was rejected by another college as an undergraduate. Also FWIW, I have SEVERAL tenured colleagues who were rejected by Oxford as undergraduates. So of course I know that not all clever/able/determined people end up here.

We should also talk about how much harder our students work than those elsewhere, though.

I can also only speak from my own experience, but your account above of how that grey area in the middle plays out at admissions doesn't match my experience at all. Typically we - all the admissions tutors - pick over every aspect of the application all over again. Not all those from either advantaged or disadvantaged backgrounds can get an offer because there are many many more of them than places for them, and this means of course that we often turn down very well-qualified people from all sectors.

It would be stupid to say we never make mistakes - we're human - but I don't think our mistakes follow any particular pattern of the kind you might imply. What I can say is that we sweat blood to admit people on academic merit as we see and find it.

I did not myself go to an independent school and neither did my subject colleagues, and FWIW neither of them has a cut-glass BBC voice.

In top US schools, admissions are conducted by professional administrators and not by academics, leading to a system which overtly favours donors and alums. If you get heard, ellisbell, it will probably go that way here too, and while the dons are not perfect, I think a tickbox system would be a lot more liable to corruption. At my college we've turned down many a millionaire's scion. This is actually made EASIER if the college is rich.

Maybe Manchester and similar places have more students living at home and so not needing loans. It's much easier to be a home student in a huge city like Manchester or Glasgow than a small place like Oxford.

Also, Manchester has a high proportion of well-heeled students. Many from very similar backgrounds to their Oxbridge siblings.

What people often don't seem to take into account is that Oxford is one of the cheapest universities to attend, because
a) bursaries are far higher than elsewhere - for people starting in 2011 it was £3225 per year (for those with a household income under £25k; amounts taper down as income goes up), whereas Manchester's was £1250. Nowadays, it's £4300 in the first year, £3300 in subsequent years, and with fees of £3500 in the first year and £6000 in subsequent years (for those with a household income of £16k or less, again, it tapers with income).

b) Oxford subsidises accommodation, so it's actually cheaper than at other universities, despite being substantially nicer.

sorry seiglinde but I really don't understand what point you are trying to make or how you can say that a system that admits a higher percentage of disadvantaged students can be said to favour donors and alums. The leading American universities are even richer than Oxford and Cambridge, they can afford to give extremely generous bursaries and they have a far better financial position if they wish to turn down millionaire's sons. For international students interviews are not by professional administrators, I don't know what they do for home applicants. The Oxford system starts, I believe, with some sort of computer sift, perhaps you'd like to say something about how that works.

Harvard took Laura Spence when Oxford turned her down, she went to Cambridge before becoming a gp. The Sutton Trust is quite right to encourage disadvantaged young people to look abroad.

What I am questioning is whether oxbridge academics are, in general, capable of recognising academic merit in the more disadvantaged undergraduate applicant. The evidence suggests they don't, although it's poor evidence since those with the detail don't make it available. Although oxbridge may have improved a little under pressure there still seems to be little understanding of how much harder a student from a disadvantaged background has to work to get to the interview stage or why they may not present as well when they get there.

When you start to publish the percentage of home students who are able to claim maximum financial support and how that compares to other universities/ the national figures we shall be able to see if Oxford is the home of the rich. It should not be difficult to do.

Ellis, I'm starting to wonder why I bother, because you really do seem determined to misunderstand.

The Ivy League schools have a points system for admissions in which it counts in an applicant's favour that he or she has parents or in some cases grandparents who went to the school in the past. Oxford and Cambridge have no system of this kind.

However, the Ivy League schools also have much larger endowments, which means they can offer far more financial support.

Hence the two issues are quite separate. since we are unlikely to be able to match their financial position anytime soon, then in the short term what you say is true in terms ONLY of the likelihood of getting aid. The Ivy League admin people also greatly rate sporting prowess and extracurriculars, which tend to favour the privileged too. If you have to get a job because you no longer get EMA, that won't impress them as much as being in the rowing team. Why don't you ask about the average background of Princeton students?

I really am not going to discuss Laura Spence again. You know full well that she applied to an incredibly oversubscribed course at one of Oxford's prettiest and most visible colleges, and you also know that in the same year the same course and college turned away lots of paper-qualified applicants FROM ALL SECTORS. And they did the same in every one of the TWELVE YEARS since that case because we JUST DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PLACES for everyone who wants one.

Since most people at Oxford are in fact form the maintained sector, I wonder why you think Oxbridge academics can't recognise academic merit in people from the maintained sector's disadvantaged sectors, as the Sutton trust report showed only last week.

What we absolutely struggle with is attracting applicants from those sectors, and in this you, eliis, are part of the problem, not part of a solution.

What detail, exactly, would convince you?

Sorry, all. My clause about the Sutton Trust mysteriously escaped to the wrong paragraph. It actually pertains to the fact that most teachers in the maintained sector don't advise their brightest students to apply to Oxbridge.

That fact that ellis is still trotting out the 12-year-old case of Laura Spence suggests that she may be short of fresh material. Why, I wonder, does she WANT it to be true that the ancient universities can't recognise merit across all sectors?

Random fennel it's always been the case that Glasgow university has had a high
Proportion of students living at home so that would definitely skew the figures.

ellis I expect that you're likely to avoid answering this question, but what precisely is the 'evidence' that you claim suggests that Oxford academics are not capable of recognising academic merit in disadvantaged students? And it seems to me that only a complete numbty would have trouble understanding that it might be harder for a disadvantaged student to perform well in the HAT, MAT, PAT or whatever and to present as well at interview.

Like sieglinde, I also don't get where you're coming from, other than being slightly disaffected yourself on behalf of the students you hoped would get in. But two swallows don't make a summer and all that. Oxford as an institution and tutors such as sieglinde are, as she says, sweating blood and tears to get the best students in and to attract more applicants from the state sector which for the moment is the single most critical thing. Playing the rich card is not helpful to that.

Wherever ellis is coming from, she has clearly gone back there.

sieglinde -- thanks for this thread; it's very interesting to hear your perspective. A couple of Oxbridge admission questions I've been wondering about:

1. People say some Oxbridge colleges have a bias towards state school candidates, others towards independent. Is there any truth in this?

1. Cambridge provide statistics showing a correlation between A/AS level results and getting a first, whereas GCSE results aren't statistically correlated (except for Maths degrees). In the light of this, I'd be interested to hear Oxford's reasoning in taking GCSE scores into account for admissions. :)

sieglinde - Do you think Oxbridge picks up all the students most able to profit from an Osbridge education? Or should Oxbridge ideally be bigger?

Betelgeuse spot on about the rich kids not necessarily be advantaged. It always amazes me when I go to rich people's houses that there do not seem to be any proper books about. I wonder how many the kid Beckhams have? I seem to recall Victoria Beckham once saying hse had never read a book all teh way through, not even the one she 'wrote' herself' . I came from a poor home - we had books piled everyhere and haunted the library, so count myself as having a privileged upbringing, depsite there being no money ( we qualified for free school meals, but my parents would not claim them)

@ Umeboshi:

1. Some of the colleges which traditionally have a 'posh' reputation are the ones which have been making the most strenuous attempts to attract state school applicants. The more 'progressive' colleges have plenty of state school applicants applying to them as it is.
2. There is a clear correlation between students getting straight A*s at GCSE and achieving Distinctions and Firsts, not just in Maths.

Yellowtip -- here is the research undertaken by Cambridge:

www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/admissions/research/docs/prefective_effectiveness_of_metrics_in_admission.pdf

"It should be strongly stressed that, for all subjects other than Mathematics, AS UMS is overwhelmingly the best indicator in these models. Where other factors are listed, they contribute to producing the highest predictive validity, but only at the margins. In other words, were AS the only factor included, the model would predict almost as effectively; only marginal improvement is brought by the inclusion of additional factors."

[emphasis in the original]

Well presumably it's a case of each to their own then Umeboshi. If Oxford prefers other evidence than the Cambridge research at least for the moment, it will have good reason.

Three and a bit years to go and we in the LM household can add a bit of anecdotal evidence to that argument. My son got all A*s at GCSE. His AS results were good but on one module he got a high B rather than an A - the others were all As, but in the 80s, not the 90s. He has a conditional offer from Oxford and one of the reasons he applied there rather than Cambridge was because he thought his AS results might not have been good enough for Cambridge. Oxford has never even seen his AS marks.

If he goes to Oxford, I have to say I will be amazed if he gets a First. He's very bright and he works hard (and effectively - he doesn't just put the hours in, he makes them count - not a gift he inherited from his mother, I may say) but I don't think he has that blazing intellect that I tend to associate with people who get Firsts at Oxford or Cambridge.

To add to LM - this is very very out of date (20 + years ago). But when I applied I felt Oxford were interested in how you would get on in the subject you were applying for, whereas Cambridge wanted you be an all round high flyer (which I most definitely was not). I applied in the days of the entrance exam so it was fairly easy to demonstrate ability in my chosen subject (and one other) and meant I didn't have to show how bloody awful I was at physics . Applying to Cambridge I would not have been able to hide my dreadful physics!

Of course this was many years ago, but my experience was that Oxford was interested in my interest in my subject area above everything else.

If that is still broadly true it might explain some of the differences.

Agreed, the important point is how many of those students are living at home. dd is living at home next year specifically so she doesn't have to take the maintenance loan on top of the fee loan. We are far from rich.

Just to correct what I wrote earlier: the research was looking at performance in Tripos Part I exams, not firsts; and there was a certain correlation with GCSEs but that correlation was not determined to be "good".

I have no doubt both Oxford and Cambridge do a good job with admissions; I'm just interested in hearing more about the thinking behind their respective methods. :)

I went to Oxford, first from my school to go there, first in my family to get a degree.

I wasn't rich.

I was bloody clever, though.

DS1 has recently received a letter from the Oxford College he has an offer from, saying that he needs to be prepared to pay £1500 per (8 week) term for his accommodation. This does not include food, and there are other bills on top (phone and electricity come to mind, but I haven't got the letter to hand, so can't swear to it).

If Oxbridge is currently not only for the rich, it bloody soon is going to be.

Not true OneHand. Between the SFE grant and the Oxford Opportunity Bursary, a student from the least well off background can cover his or her estimated living costs in Oxford without recourse to a loan (estimated cost for 2012/13 is £7,600). The OOB scheme is exceptionally generous and makes Oxford probably the cheapest UK university to attend (apart from Cambridge, which has a similar scheme).

And as far as better off students go, Oxford is no more expensive than anywhere else. The cost of many Halls around the country are in exactly the same bracket as the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, there's nothing in it.

Agree on costs, Yellowtip. virtually all colleges also have significant hardship funds which an be used ot plug short-term gaps, as well as the arrangements you describe.

Umeboshi - great name! - your question now.

I think the problem of increasing student numbers is the obvious one. If we take - say half as many more u/gs, then we will also need to hire more staff, build more buildings (which there is really not much room or indeed money for) and the risk is a dilution of what Oxford offers - the tutorial system, where I know pretty exactly the strengths and weaknesses of every single student...

My college in my subject admits 8 u/gs a year. I could extend that to 10 without diluting the quality of the admitted candidates, and in some years I do... there is a system called a pool place application in individual colleges (not to be confused with the Cambridge Pooling system...). Very occasionally we actually admit fewer than 8 because we don't have 8 people who we think will benefit from the course.

Now GCSES. They are only one part of the preinterview profile. It's perfectly possible for people with quite moderate GCSEs to be shortlisted, and possible for people with 12 A* not to get a place. This is not the norm, however, and really anyone with even a fairly strong profile should apply.