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?

disquisitiones, however as a Scottish poster suggested upthread, her DC will probably choose a local University ranked in the top 10 in the UK, rather than Oxbridge where the course might be ranked in the top 10 in the world. The same applies to London applicants and I assume those in the North West and elsewhere. You still invest in an education, but you possibly don't invest in the cost of getting away from home and the chance to go to, perhaps, a better University/department.

A friend who has a child in a well performing state school is exasperated by the outreach and emphasis on Oxbridge. First very few are at quite that level, and also most want to stay in London. Aspirations need to be raised, but she feels more work should be done to pursuade kids to try for Imperial, UCL or Kings rather than Southbank or London Met. Oxbridge is too remote.

The days when middle class people could afford three servants must be at least three generations ago! My mother's mother, born in the early 1900s, was employed as a nursemaid when she left school. My mother's father was a gardener for a succession of private families but this was already a dying profession when he retired in the early 70s. As others have said, the halcyon days for social mobility in the UK were the immediate post-war period when wages went up, there was near full employment (albeit achieved by making it difficult for married women to work full-time), free education from 5 to 15, far better secondary education for the most able than we'd ever had before, expanding university sector, grants, the NHS, reasonable welfare provision and much higher taxation on incomes than we have now.

In an era where we are sending such a big percentage of our kids to university it makes sense for people to consider staying at home and studying at their local universities, provided that they are at the right level. So, for example, if I lived next to a university such as Bristol, I would encourage my children to consider going there instead of to similar level universities to save money. (On the other hand, currently decreasing the overall debt does not affect the actual payments - it just affects the amount of time taken to clear the debt so arguably people shouldn't worry about taking maximum loans.)

If I lived in Scotland I would absolutely encourage my DC to consider going to places such as Edinburgh rather than to Oxbridge, given the difference in costs. I don't think the difference in courses is that big.

However I certainly agree that going for the local low tier university instead of world leading universities is a big problem which needs to be tackled much more. I don't think this issue is remotely comparable to choosing Edinburgh or Bristol over Oxbridge, as all four are highly respected universities.

The halcyon days for social mobility in the UK were the immediate post-war period

Female participation in HE dropped in the post-war period relative to the interwar period.

On the other hand, currently decreasing the overall debt does not affect the actual payments - it just affects the amount of time taken to clear the debt so arguably people shouldn't worry about taking maximum loans.

What? Surely once you have cleared your student loan, that frees up cashflow to pay for your mortgage/childcare/pension.

Did female participation in HE decrease generally post war, or just female university entrants? Droves of girls were shunted off into teacher training, which were non degree courses until sometime around the early 70s.

A good number of those girls could easily have worked at degree level. But it wasn't expected - 2 (later 3) years teacher training - get engaged at the end of your first year, get married the year you left, teach for two years, have your first child...... that was the path mapped out for you.

Higher Education = university. There may well have been more women being trained in Further Education - my mother did a three year FE course to train as an Occupational Therapist which would now be a degree course.

My grandmothers and great aunts all went to university. My mother and aunts didn't.

Of course it is better not to have to pay back a loan at all, or to be able to pay it back faster. That's why I would suggest my children consider living at home (if appropriate) saving £15k+ on accommodation, perhaps not needing to take maintenance loans at all.

But in 20 years time the costs of paying back that £15k of "extra" loans will be very small compared to the costs of mortgages, pensions, childcare. If by taking the extra £15k loan they can get a degree at a place they prefer, get a better job, then it would be worth it.

disquisitiones, I agree. However it has interesting implications for the UK. It means we would be more in line with other countires where going to your local University is the normal pattern. But also means that by continuing to build social ties in your local area you are less likely to want to move when you graduate. So Scots stay in Scotland, Londoners stay in London and others remain in the North East or North West.

This might benefit regional universities as they will have access to students who might, at one point, have gone to Oxbridge. But would also add to growing regional differences. It used to be that I was one of the very few I knew who actually came from London. Perhaps this will be less the case in the future.

At the same time you have an increasing internationalisation of education. So it is not surprising that the majority of DS' University friends are from either the home counties or Asia.

I know plenty of French people of my generation who had hefty student loans (contrary to much popular belief, quite a lot of high-end French HE is very expensive and has been for a long time) and they were a real burden to repay, even though those students had been at excellent, top-rated institutions. So I'm wary of a cavalier attitude to loan repayment and I hope that the loan repayment scheme will in fact encourage students to stay at home and reduce living costs, all other things being equal (which they are often, of course, not).

I was taxi-ing ds and his friend yesterday and they were discussing the fact that a great many of their fellow year 13-ers are intending to go to the local (Russell Group) university. Maybe the course might be slightly better in a university 200 miles away, maybe the city would be more fun, but I think they are different in their mindset from how I was 30 years ago when the idea was to get as far away from home as possible and drink the union bar dry. Staying at home is in most cases more free and easy than it used to be. And "The Young Ones" experience doesn't seem to appeal any more! We all used to try to out-brag each other about how dismal - nay, disgusting - our student houses were.

I went to Cambridge.

You don't have to go back to college for lunch! You can if you like, but equally you can go to any of the millions of sandwich shops and cafes nearer the site... All my blocks in college were self-catering too - not sure where she gets this one from. It was as flexible as anywhere else, IIRC.

Downsides for me were the somewhat archaic course in comparison to more modern versions offered at other universities, and the constant pressure pressure pressure on you all the time. And agree about the tourist thing - drove me mad.

It's not for everyone - my brother could have gone on the grounds of grades, but found it a bit too stuffy on his trips to visit me.

I think if more students are to stay at home - which I agree is likely, and makes sense for many people - then universities will have to change quite a bit, in terms of organization and of expectation.

At the moment, commuting students miss out on evening events which are designed to enhance the degree experience (visiting speakers etc), and of course unless you actually already live in a university city, you're going to be at the mercies of public transport. Despite saving on accommodation costs, commuting students tend to be much more resistant to the idea of spending, say, the hours between the end of seminar at 11am and the beginning of a lecture at 5, on campus! Or, on the other hand, to coming in every day for one session, rather than having them all conveniently arranged on the same day so that they can stay at home for the other 4.

As things stand at the moment, for those reasons and also for social ones, I wouldn't recommend commuting and living at home unless absolutely necessary - but I can imagine that universities might well adapt to this over the coming years.

I think we might soon see a split between universities that are mostly populated by local students living at home, and those whose students still largely live away.

The two types will have a very different complexion and, if we're not careful will become a two tier system, based not on quality of course/standard of student but on parental wealth.

When I went 15% of people went to university only. It was seen as important to live away so you made that break from home, had independence, learned to manage on a very tight budget, learned to look after yourself, make new friends etc and those things hold true today. It made us vey different from those who didn't leave home. When my father was dying and had a team of 12 different local NE carers who came in on a shift system (it cost hme £130k in his last year and he died jsut as he exhausted his life savings oni t) those ladies, some were nurses, others not, salt of the earth kind people could not understand how our parents could have wanted and encouraged us to mvoe away to university and in adult life as they all lived a mile from mother in the NE of England. It felt lamost a cruel wickedness to them that we siblings lal lived away as if we did not love our parents (even though any of us would willingly have had our father move in with us of course). It was cultural and class difference and in part caused by them never having gone away to unviersity whereas my parents both did - well my mother went away to teacher training college but that was similar to university, left home, independent at the end of your teens etc.

I think that's definitely true - but I also think it's already happened/happening, and I think the TEF/REF thing will give it a more formalized basis.

Saying that, every time I leave the house at the moment a new block of top-of-the-range student accommodation seems to have sprung up nearby - so there must still be a fairly massive market for it!

Seek, in London a lot of that new accommodation very expensive and aimed almost entirely at overseas students. Also, certainly in London there does not seem to be a huge difference between commuting and other students, except in the first year where Hall will make a difference to some. Not to DS who lived in a huge Intercollegiate Hall which was like a prison block and where he met no one. Instead he met plenty through the Department, through societies and through sport. The big advantage is that he has been able to keep up with school friends, including those taking a gap year and those at other London Universities, plus visits from those studying elsewhere.

The same issues must also be true of places like Warwick where all bar the first year live off campus. I remember the campus tour guide saying that the library was open 24 hours in part to give students somewhere to crash when they could not be bothered to get the bus back to Coventry or Leamington.

My experience of working in a university where there is a large proportion of living-at-home students, is that the the EC activities had little importance in the lives of those students and consequently were of a much lower calibre.

Which is a huge shame because for 9k a year, I think you should get a rounded experience, not only for enjoyment, cultural enrichment etc, but also to help massively with later job seeking.

Needs - yes, can see that London would be much easier for a commuting student! (I think my dd may be about to move into the huge intercollegiate hall you describe though... ).

It's true about extra activities - if turnout is consistently rubbish, the budget you can spend on speakers is going to be smaller. And yes, it's a colossal shame that so many treat their education as a transactional affair that 'happens to them' in allotted seminar hours and nowhere else.

Shegot, DS is finding that at a good institution with a lot of post graduate/research activity there is a lot going on subject wise. If you look for it. Many students are very focussed on simply getting the first, a couple of summer internships and a good job at the end. Oddly, and despite the MN orthodoxy, he is finding that coming from a privatge school is an advantage. Already encouraged to write papers for school societies and attend talks across London, he has had no problem engaging in what his college have to offer. And plenty of opportunities to act as Research Assistant for post-grads etc. I suspect the quality of the teaching and research will remain the most important factor.

Effectively we seem to becoming closer to the French and US systems wwhere most go to local and cheaper Universities, whilst a minority go to more expensive "better" Institutions, to some extent becoming a self-perpetuating elite. Unless you are lucky enough to have somewhere good on your doorstep and confident enough to apply. Allowing better institutions to charge more will only exacerbate the problem.

The other issue will be delivery of lectures virtually. When I was at the LSE in 2010 this was already happening on some of my (postgrad) courses. So you didn't have to leave your home at all, and could just watch from the comfort of your bedroom. Likewise all the journal articles were available from the virtual library, so no need to go to the campus for that either.

Needmore my DS will most likely choose a Scottish Uni not only because there are three in the UK top ten for his chosen subject, but because they are amongst the preferred courses for the industry he wants to go into. The Oxford course is general for 2 years and the Cambridge course is general for the first year and so neither appeal to him. But it is because the courses he is looking at are so well regarded by potential employers that he really isn't limiting himself by not considering Oxbridge (and he would have the grades to consider applying).

He won't be staying at home either - the three Uni's he is interested in are all 2 or 3 hours away by car or train - so saving on accommodation costs are not a factor, and we always planned to pay fees so the fact that his fees would be paid for in Scotland is a bonus rather than a necessity.

Very interesting turn this thread has taken! I used to work as the administrator on an MSc which appealed/was valuable to people working in a very niche field. It would not have been possible to do it as a distance learning MSc as we had it set up - had we managed to sort out the technical/ethical problems around recording all the seminars, maybe in theory, as you could have done virtually all the required reading without setting foot in the university, but I strongly suspect that a lot of the value of the MSc for at least some of the students was meeting people from other organisations and comparing notes over coffee, lunch etc which is the bit you couldn't get sitting at your PC in your own home or office.

There was another MSc at the same place which had the technological stuff cracked and some of their students did indeed treat it as a distance learning programme. I don't know if anybody tracked how those students did, both academically and professionally, as a result of rarely if ever coming to the campus in person. It did seem to me they were missing out but on the other hand they may have been experience less funding stress by taking on enough paid work to avoid borrowing to pay for the MSc.

SeekEvery -- that was not at all my experience of university days in Dublin, where the majority of students were commuters either living in digs or living at home. Nobody in their right mind would choose their dingy digs or being home with mammy, drinking tea and listening to Gaybo on the radio, over life on the UCD Belfield campus, day or night. Don't underestimate the pull of campus bars and cafeterias.

My observation is that what makes the biggest difference to campus life is the percentage of students who have to work during the academic year in order to make ends meet while at university. In my student days in Dublin most students either made their summer earnings last all year, or enjoyed their parents' financial support or had a county grant that often covered both tuition, lodging (for students whose homes were outside of Dublin) and sometimes offered a little money for commuting and small expenses.

Technology also makes a huge difference.