Despite having the right grades, my child is not applying to Oxbridge because ....

[TalkinPeace]

• she wants to live in self catered accommodation
• she does not like the small sizes of the colleges / social units
• having to go back to college for lunch while doing a lab based degree does not make sense
• the whole gown and formal dinner stuff smacks of coat tails rather than standing on own feet
• she does not fancy fighting through hordes of tourists while moving between buildings
• having a tutor picked by which college they are based in rather than their research specialism seems very odd to her

Also, for what she wants to do, the course at Oxford is not that well balanced
and Cambridge, despite having a fab course was not a place that felt like home when she visited for 2 days.

So she will be putting other Universities on her form and taking a great deal of stress out of this house.

For what its worth, those of her friends I've chatted to are also ruling out Oxbridge in favour of other Unis because of the first four points.

What are other people's reasons for ruling out Oxbridge, despite having the grades?

But, joni, they don't need to have access to a Latin teacher to read that you needn't have studied Latin/Greek at school to apply for Classics - do they?

If only, Talkin! I don't think it would suit her, unfortunately. However, she does have a very good plan which has a better chance of success - MA next year and if that goes well a Ph.D. to follow. Given she's just got a First (no stealth boasting here! I am bursting with pride and I don't care who knows it - she has had a long hard road to this, given she has Asperger's and suffers with anxiety) I think she should do well. Fingers crossed, anyway.

Link for those who might be interested:

Cambridge Classics: www.classics.cam.ac.uk/prospective

'NB You do NOT need to have studied Latin and/or Greek at school to be accepted onto the undergraduate course.'

Oxford Classics: www.classics.ox.ac.uk/undergrad.html

'We have courses to cater for all the different amounts of Classics done at school: if you haven't studied Latin, or haven't studied Greek, or haven't studied either, you can at Oxford.'

I imagine there might be a little resistance to offering Irish in UK schools. I might be wrong about this, but I suspect it doesn't have the cachet of Latin or Greek. At present Irish is only offered for A levels in NI, not elsewhere in the UK.

There are many graduates of Irish universities and indeed NI universities who might be well qualified to teach Irish at secondary level so it is sad that the idea would probably go up like the proverbial lead balloon. French isn't inflected to the same degree at all as Irish, so wouldn't offer the same challenge or benefits.

In answer to the OP

• Friend 1: Passionate about surfing. Didnt apply to Cambridge due to noticeable absence of sea. Now regrets it.
• Cousin: Medic. Didnt apply to cambridge due to (correctly perceived)pressure of "3 years in 2" pre-clinical course. Doesnt regret it.
• Friend 3:Worried about snobbery and everyone being from private school. Got in but didnt accept place. Sometimes regrets it, sometimes doesnt, in that she met her husband at the Uni she went to (good) but thinks she missed out careerwise by not going (arguably true but not provable).

You are never going to see your "minority report" and everyone has "what if?" thoughts at some pointin life. All you can do is make the choice based on solid reasons. i.e. dont be friend 1. When you're 30 are you really going to give a shit that you had to eat slightly substandard food for 24 weeks of your life? (assuming you pick a college where 2/3 yrs live out). Do you really need 1,400 people to find 5 or so close friends? Probably not, assuming you're fairly socially competent.

It's not about "everyone should apply to Oxbridge" but an acceptance that it's generally a life advantage and therefore if you dont take the opportunity, you want to base that on valid, longer term reasons, like course content, structure etc and not that you dont want to pay for a plate of baked beans you dont eat because that will seem so irrelevant a decade on. - Kind of like saying "I'm bummed I won an all expenses trip to the Maldives because it means i'll mix half price taco night at taco Bell"

I disagree about food: the ability to self-cater is massively important to some people.

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g
I am qualified as a teacher in a humanities subject. I now teach secondary Physics and Maths in state secondary because there is a massive shortage, and when schools find out I am willing to teach those subjects that is what they want me to teach. And yes often it is keeping a few pages ahead of the DC. That is the reality in many, many schools. The alternative is massive classes, or a cover supervisor and worksheets.
This school also lost their German teacher at Xmas and so is covering it with Spanish and French teachers who don't know German and so are also muddling through based on their wider knowledge of how languages work. This is stressful to them as they feel they are short-changing the DC, and this year it is not offered for GCSE, but there are still 2 Y11s to wash through the system, so it will stagger on till next summer for them.

Didn't apply to Cambridge due to noticeable absence of sea.

I didn't apply because I didn't want to be rejected. End of. And actually that's the story of my life - often settling for the substandard (or below my standard) because I thought "What if?" was better than "I tried and failed." I have very strong "not trying" genes, as my mother turned down the career opportunity of a lifetime because the train journey to the interview was too difficult. That opportunity may not have come to pass, but by ducking out at an early hurdle, she could always play the "I could have been..." card.

I am really trying with my dcs to buck this and I encourage them to try for things and not go into a complete decline if they are unsuccessful (as I would).

That being said, it sounds as if OP's dd is quite level-headed and, indeed, ds's genius friend didn't feel the love for Cambridge when he visited. If someone has genuine reasons for not liking a place, that's fine, but just make sure it isn't a fear of failure that's colouring their opinion.

The trouble with basing your university choices on catering in first year halls is that too often you don't get your first choice halls and are simply allocated one.

So OP's DD could choose some halls somewhere that look great for self catering, only to end up in catered halls with worse facilities than Cambridge!

Probably not best to get wedded to the food issue for the first year.

IME, when you apply for halls at university you get asked to choose between several criteria and then, at the end, you are asked what your no 1 criterion is. IME if you say SC, you get SC (might be expensive/far away/shared room or another thing you don't want though).

Well bobo your experience is not universal by any stretch.

There are currently many posts from MNers whose DC have not been given their choice of hall and allocated somewhere random .

Most universities don't have enough accommodation at the cheaper end, which tends to be SC.

So those cheaper places are oversubscribed.

MrsUltracrepidarian

It really isn't good enough for the children, though, is it? I know a really good teacher can probably have a crack at teaching anything, but for the most able and the ones with the potential to go on to degree level, they really do need a teacher who is not just a few pages ahead of them in the textbook. This was probably the single biggest reason we decided to send our son to an independent school. Most people don't have that option.

SheGot - maybe universities give fussy French bac candidates preferential treatment? Of the tens of candidates I've overseen over the past 5 years or so, they have all got their SC preference providing they put it as their overriding criterion.

Disappointment at being allocated accommodation that doesn't meet your preference often stems from applicants not understanding the underlying algorithms of the university's accommodation procedure. If you concentrate a bit (and understand what an algorithm is - not a given, tragically) the process is fairly transparent.

Tens of candidates every year.

I also disagree that SC is the cheaper option - it rarely is. Often catered accommodation is only £20 or so more per week than SC. It is really hard to SC for a single person for £20. SC accommodation is often rather a lot nicer and more expensive (and colonised by MC students because of it).

Incidentally - The Student Room always has plenty of threads divulging the accommodation allocation algorithms for each and every university. The information is there for anyone who has 20 minutes to trawl the threads.

That's a great link Jeanne Thanks for posting it. I always assumed a Classics degree would require a knowledge of Latin.
I would however say that there was no mention of subjects such as Classics at my comprehensive school. I hope things have changed now.

No worries. It's a general issue - people don't check requirements then feel sure Oxbridge (or other universities) must be 'excluding' them. I know some schools perpetuate the myths and so does the Chinese whispers effect. It's frustrating!

Self catering is an issue in this house because among the things going onto DD's PS brag pack is winning a national cookery competition a couple of years back
She loves to cook and bake and create and whoever gets to share a kitchen with her will end up fatter than they planned

I was in catered in my first year at Uni.
That hall has now gone fully SC because its nearly doubled in size.
Later I shared cooking with DH and our best friend so that we ate well right through finals (and cheaply)

SC is a big deal for my DSSs (neither of whom had ever been remotely interested in cooking between 0 and 18) because they want to eat dinner at 8pm and have steak and beans or chicken and salad not gloop at 6pm.

A little snapshot of post Cambridge life. I've just been emailed a survey by my old college (the survey for female alumni only). Best ever list of titles to choose from! EurIng isn't one of them though not that I've paid up to become one.

KeyserSophie I agree.

DD2 and her friends have a SC apartment on her (US) campus this year but she will have a meal plan too, mainly because buying groceries and cooking and cleaning up takes time out of their day that they probably can't fathom until they try it for a week, or however long it takes them to realise that pots and pans don't wash themselves.

(jonic, it's a reasonably well known fact that it's easier to get in to read classics at universities than some other subjects. I suspect one of my off spring who did it and is now a city lawyer got into her university to read it and might not have done had she applied to read law. There are fewer children from state schools applying for that subject and it is also the sort of subject that goes down with older men in the City who often recruit you too so win win on all fronts and a very interestingsubject in its own right. 2 of my children have read ancient history so far at university and both gave up latin before GCSE. Boris J read that subject too at university.)