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?

I've definitely seen the lack of encouragement to branch out of the very-limited known world (luckily it has not affected me personally).

Class was/is the biggest determinant of who went/goes to grammar school, not IQ.

Even more so the case for Higher Education before 1962, as grants only became mandatory then.

Agree with Abraid, that is certainly true of some of my NE England relatives and you see that a lot in the TV series where young adults look at moving abroad and there's a "but what's to become of me, me me" type response from older relatives.
Very few high achievers live in the town they grew up in. I want my kids to feel the world is their oyster, not one small corner of Scotland.

I'd like to hear from other families with first hand experience of the 90% of the population that attends non selective state schools and what choices at University their kids made

That's us then. My son was considering Cambridge but realistically hasn't done quite well enough in AS levels, so now his choices will be be from the following: Bristol, Exeter, Liverpool, Birmingham, Royal Holloway, Reading. I know loads of families like us, never been anywhere near a private school.

I think you do have to be realistic. My son's AS levels weren't that bad: AABB, but his GCSE grades, 4s and 6as, weren't stellar for someone from his selective school (sorry). Plenty of his friends with far more As didn't get offers from Oxbridge. He wanted to apply but his form teacher, very kindly, explained that he would not be competing on a level pitch with his results, and would be doing a lot of extra work when he could be using the time on his A2s.

He is happily off to a northern RG university. I am glad he didn't put himself through it all when chances of succeeding were slim. He is a bright boy but I don't think he has quite intellectual firepower to have flourished at Oxbridge.

My daughter, 9A*s, possibly 10, if a remark goes her way, is now expressing mild interest in Oxbridge, but for bloody medicine, and again, I do not think she has quite that streak of raw brilliance and talent they require now. She is bright and focussed and I think she would be better going somewhere more clinically oriented. What would I know, though? I think she has done well because she is very focused, determined and organized and at GCSE that takes you a long way. That is a different kind of thing from being able to work at Oxbridge standards, where you have a short period of time to master topics.

I went to Oxford myself and it was lovely, but could be very intimidating if you didn't pick a topic up quickly enough, as happened to me at times in my first year. There are other universities where you can have a fantastic time and emerge with a solid degree that will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life.

Not non-selective school experience, though.

I'm not sure that class was always in all areas the biggest determinant on who passed the 11+. My parents were from pretty poor areas of the NE and both passed because they both had a very high IQ and I don't think that can be down to family at all.

The moving away issue such as from the North is interesting. My parents saw it as good for personal development that we leave when we went to university to find indepedence etc. When my late father was ill his local NE carers did find it hard to grasp that our parents were absolutely delighted we moved - my siblings first to Oxbridge and me elsewhere to university and then we all settled elsewhere. My parents were very supportive of that. They themselves moved a good few miles from their parents too and did not see them that often due to distance. That was hard for the NE working class carers to understand who thought we must be wicked children because we did not live next door to our elderly sick parent (who of course we would have had to live with us in an instant had he wanted that). It was just a class/cultural difference.

You've just completely contradicted yourself janetblyton.

I know that you like to believe that people get where they do because of their intelligence/brightness/IQ but that's simply not true (in the main, always a few exceptions that prove the rule etc).

Numerous studies showed the link between occupation/income of parents and who 'got into' grammar school. Ditto now and the tiny number of children in receipt of FSM and grammar school entry.

As I said previously, it always surprises me when people who believe themselves to be intelligent fail to grasp the basics of social inequality.

In what sense? I said my own parents passed the 11+ because they were bright and in those days the 11+ was nothing to do with tutoring in the NE anyway. That was a very different world from the very very few areas of England which still have grammar schools where coaching is the norm. there have been no grammar schools since about 1970 in the NE.

Abraid2 I don't think Cambridge care about GCSEs

Because you say that your parents/you are class-wise and culturally different from the 'NE carers' (are they really an homogenous group?), but attribute passing the 11+ to IQ rather than class/cultural difference.

It doesn't logistically stand up.

Christina my direct grant peers at school were most definitely not selected on class grounds. Think high rise inner city council flat, going home to cook supper of pigs heart for younger siblings while single mum mother was at work. That particular friend wasn't unique or even unrepresentative, even though direct grant pupils were by definition the highest scorers in the 11+. I'd say definitely IQ not class determined the outcome, from my own experience of the old 11+.

PS The friends university choice was emphatically determined by finance, or 'class'. She chose Imperial over everything else so that she could continue to look after the siblings. I think she'd have preferred Classics at Oxford but went sideways into chemistry instead, to accommodate the family. She was an absolute powerhouse - just raw IQ. And as I say, not alone.

Maybe not alone, but definitely not the norm.

Of course a few 'bright but poor' children got lucky. in 1960, my father from an extremely poor wc background (one parent doing multiple cleaning jobs to keep a roof over heads)was playing truant fishing on the day of the 11+. It was life changing to him that the Head Master stuck his neck out and fiddled the results, meaning that he went to Grammar School.

Does this mean that all 'bright but poor' children got a grammar school education? Or that all 'bit thick but rich' children went to the secondary modern? Absolutely not.

He couldn't go to university, of course, because grants weren't mandatory before 1962, so it was financially out of the question despite stellar 'A' levels.

But that's just to do with IQ of course, not opportunity.

Back to the title of the thread, I also got stellar exam results from a 'crap comprehensive' and technical college, but didn't apply to Oxbridge.

Mainly because I didn't actually know it existed, and given that a handful of people in my school year out of several hundred stayed on after 16, I don't think anyone else I knew did either.

I passed the 11+ in 1977 and my parents decided to send me to Tonbridge Girls Grammar rather than take up a direct grant place to the senior school of my private prep. This decision was based on academic results and the fact that one of my cousins was at the very highly rated grammar school.

Most of the girls in my class lived in council houses, had free school meals and uniform grants. Not some kind of MC ghetto at all.

He couldn't go to university, of course, because grants weren't mandatory before 1962, so it was financially out of the question despite stellar 'A' levels.

Not "of course": students from poor backgrounds got scholarships to go to university in that period. Somebody with stellar A levels could have gotten county or university scholarships - albeit there were not necessarily enough scholarships to go around and many qualified students did not apply for them.

The view amongst Oxbridge academics who are 60+ is that there were proportionally more students from poorer backgrounds before the abolition of grammars - when schools become comprehensives in the 70s the number of applicants from state schools in poorer areas dropped off sharply. I have never looked at the data to see if it upholds this view, but it is certainly one I have heard from my older colleagues over the years.

When did you find out christina?

It would seem that even The Telegraph doesn't support the meritocracy argument.

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timwigmore/100220161/grammar-schools-and-the-myth-of-social-mobility/

Exactly. Going to university from a wc background was absolutely alien, as was asking for 'handouts' like scholarships. It's very different applying for a mandatory grant.

About Oxbridge? Well, I heard of it as a 'thing' sometime when I was at university, I suppose and realised what it was/meant much later. Would have had absolutely no idea about application process when I was in education.

Which I can only imagine is true of most students from 'crap schools' despite their IQ?

Yes I agree with disquisitions about university education in that period, not purely on the basis of my own father's case (no money at all - even the suitcase was sold and the proceeds spent) but on those of a number of his colleagues in later life, who were not in the least well off but were just extremely clever grammar school boys.

Also christina, you're muddling Janet's account, merging generations etc. It isn't Janet whose logic is flawed (I assume you mean logic, not logistic).

Bobo one thing about direct grant was the very, very broad range of pupils in a particular school. It was exceptionally healthy.

Christina what allows you to know it was alien? Clearly it wasn't. Have you read much about Oxbridge in that period - biographies or fiction even?

Molio - I don't think there was much social mixing at the senior school that was the alternative to grammar for me - there were only two direct grant places per year and one was allocated as a "scholarship" to be chosen by the headmistress of the prep to her preferred pupil candidate .

The grammar school was very mixed on intake but outcome was pretty much determined by family background: my cousins, who unlike me stayed the course, all went to Oxbridge... Like their parents. Other former classmates ended up as shp assistants... Like their parents.

Janet's argument is muddled. She says that her parents passed the 11+ because they had high IQ. She goes on to say that moved away because of class/cultural differences to those who didn't. But disagrees that these class/cultural differences were factors in them passing the 11+, going to Higher Education etc.

Unless she's suggesting that those who didn't move away like the 'NE carers' have low IQ, which I'm sure she isn't.

Um, he said that that's how he saw it, as did his peers?

Not suggesting that he's representative of the entire post-war wc of course.

Looking back in my own family, almost all of my working class relatives passed the 11+ in the post war years and went to grammars. Attending grammar schools led to significant differences between them and their families - those who went to grammars, got white collar jobs afterwards and effectively became middle class, lived very different lives to their working class relatives. My impression was that they were on different wavelengths to the relatives who failed the 11+ mainly because they were brighter, had different interests etc etc, and that this happened long before they left school, even when they were still living in working class neighbourhoods.

So I don't see how Janet's argument is in this case muddled.

Okay. Happy to agree to disagree.