Looking for the helpful Cambridge admissions tutor who posted a while age..

[seeker]

......if you're around, could I ask a couple of questions, please?

'Pampered poppet'? I very very wish. :(

I apologise for getting heated, and allowing myself to be angry.

I've lived in Cambridge for quite a long time, so I do know quite a lot of people who were students there -- including my own husband. I also encounter students in the city centre all the time. When I said that students here are pampered, I meant the lives of luxury they live here compared to students at many other universities, including the one that I teach at where the majority of students are working full time and studying in the evening.

It takes great grit and determination to see a degree through under those circumstances, and it hacks me off to hear constantly about how only the creme de la creme would be able to cope with the pressure at Oxbridge -- when plenty of students in the world beyond cope with extreme levels of pressure and achieve amazing things.

I'm sure the standard of students is uniformly high at Oxbridge. Most of them have come there having been intensively educated with the aim of getting them there. And I'm sure they get a good education. Whether they get the best education, whether Oxbridge has a monopoly on brilliance, that's open to question.

It does seem to me that it reproduces all the inequalities of selective education where intake basically equals output, and those who are lucky enough to get in are given a wealth of resources and experience quite unavailable elsewhere.

And there's a world outside Oxbridge, with some amazing people in it. It's really frustrating to see that denigrated because people are obsessed with Oxbridge being the best.

niminy I think you should be less angry because I think you're falling for a stereotype. New universities do not have a monopoly of disadvantage. Off the top of my head I can think of one current student who was the one who discovered his father's body, the father having committed suicide very violently, one student whose parents have both died very recently of cancer, several students with bipolar parents which has triggered seriously dysfunctional relationships, a student with a severely autistic brother, a student whose father died of cancer in his first year, many many students struggling with depression or eating disorders or the aftermath and at least five students who come from a background of long term and serious DV. The list could go on and on. Of all those students only two are affluent, the rest are not. You do such students a disservice by labelling them 'pampered poppets' since the reality couldn't be further from the truth.

I agree that crème de la crème is an idiotic term. Bloody annoying.

She says it so beautifully though. :) Hence nobody has ever used the term except in irony since.

You have both misunderstood me, I think. I originally took issue with the idea that firsts from Oxbridge are harder earned than from other places. I haven't expressed myself very well, but what I was wanting to say was not that there are not disadvantaged students there, but that students at Oxbridge have a comparatively easy ride.

The facilities they enjoy are extraordinary, they have (for the most part) subsidised housing near to where they study, their directors of studies are on tap with pastoral support. They may indeed have personal problems (I know that many do). They may have to work hard (I also know that many don't). But they do not have to do this while living in the sort of circumstances that many students at other universities have to. They do not, for example, have to work full time and go to classes in the evening, and juggle their work with the legitimate demands of their family and employer, manage their commute and (until recent changes) pay all their fees upfront, as students do in the university (which, I would like to stress, is not a new university) where I work.

I do know whereof I speak. I really do. But, as I said in my last post, I shouldn't have got cross, and written intemperately. And I wouldn't want to say that somebody who wants to go to Oxbridge shouldn't go there. I'm merely trying to say that there are other places out there, some better than Oxbridge. In the case of a person who wants to study philosophy, those would be St Andrews and UCL.

(To add to my second paragraph: someone who gets any kind of degree under those circumstances has my deepest admiration; those who get a first do so because they are brilliant, and determined, and hard working. Their firsts are not more easily earned than those at Oxbridge.)

niminy yours views are clearly coloured by a minority of students whose circumstances are out of the norm.

Comparing young students of the normal age group recently out of school and single, then I think you'd find it hard to prove that Oxford and Cambridge have more pampered poppets than Bristol, Durham, Exeter or St. Andrews (alphabetical not poppet order).

Also, I used the term hard won in terms of intellectual merit, not difficulty of individual circumstance, obviously.

Harriet: can that really be true? AFAIK Oxford and Cambridge hang onto the supervision system, which is incredibly expensive to run, because it give the student more contact time. One one-hour supervision per fortnight per paper on a one-to-basis does not add up to less contact time than one and a half or two hours per week per course shared with up to 25 other students (seminar sizes varying enormously between institutions, subjects and individual modules). Certainly there is more time in class in the second case, but there is a great deal less individual attention. Also we should remember that the supervision system is financed by subcontracting a great deal if it to poorly paid graduate students. You may go to a college with a famous name, but that is no guarantee that you'll ever be taught by them -- or that you'll be taught by them for a paper that covers their field of expertise.

I am still sceptical about the standards at Oxbridge being so much higher than anywhere else, partly because I believe in value added. Having an intake full of AAA students may mean simply that nothing much happens to them in the course of their degree, intellectually speaking. They go in able to get good exam results, they get more good exam results, and then they leave again.

St Andrews? Hmm-don't get me started!

what's wrong with St Andrews?

Too small, too posh, too isolated, too inward looking. You can't do your shopping in Willie Lows or buy a poke of chips or a fudge doughnut without bumping into the person you owe an essay to. Still not sure whether the second part of the twentieth century happened or whether it was a figment of someone's imagination...

True. But both Oxord and Cambridge have railway stations and you can be in London in an hour. And both have populations of rather more than 18,000!
The entire town of St Andrews has the atmosphere of an Oxbridge college.
[mindful of any literal minded readers- I exaggerate for comic effect]

I know you're right- but at least you theoretically could could get out if you wanted to! Once the nights draw in in St Andrews.....[shudder] In my day the last bus back was something like 5.00.

Even Harriet felt the need to escape.....

niminy 'value added' is a flawed measure. It's the same with highly selective schools. The higher the entry level the less scope for the seemingly much more impressive value added displayed by other institutions.

My DC must be incredibly fortunate then. Each one of them has been taught individually by academics who are very definitely leaders in the field (I have to take the medic's word for this; the other subjects I'm certain about). And only the History one has had to go to other colleges much. As it happens her college tutor is also the authority on her special subject, so that worked. Speaking as a mother here (so better placed than anyone to detect value added) I see enormous value added intellectually which has to do with far more than simply growing up.

Last bus back from where seeker? .

Durham is small but not as small as St. A. Much more accessible to bright lights if you feel that way inclined though not a lot do, or not often. It's cosy enough and pretty for sure but doesn't in any way resemble Oxford or Cambridge.