Take a gap year and reapply to Oxbridge?

[tyngedyriaith]

DD has been rejected from Cambridge. People with far worse grades have gotten in. She's disappointed. She mentioned retrying next year if she exceeds the standard offer?

Is it worth it considering Welsh fees are going up next year?

Why is it absurd?

It's absurd because it assumes that admissions procedures at a linked set of elite institutions are now exclusively run by people with the intellect and emotional maturity of Donald Trump.

On the contrary, it highlights the very longstanding links between certain schools, universities and even employers that maintained privilege and were based on an unwritten contract of mutual self-preservation. This contract has now been definitively broken, in full view of the public.

Anecdotal and all that , but my " rejected after interview at Oxbridge " child has done more than thrive in a highly academic field at a Russell group uni. won prizes through undergrad and MA ( including the humanities prize i.e. Highest results in the humanities dept )and is now doing a fully funded PhD. You don't get funded in humanities /arts post grad work unless you are bloody good at your subject. She's also having a whale of a time!

I tell you the above, not to boast, though I'm a very proud mum, but to point out that Oxbridge is not always the right place and, other institutions are as good / better even for very academic kids. In retrospect my dc wasn't right for them, not " not good enough " but " not the right fit".

What anna says.

bob, it's ridiculous to think admissions tutors would sit there plotting to discriminate against children on the vague assumption their parents might be pro-Brexit/they might grow up to be Tories.

In retrospect my dc wasn't right for them, not " not good enough " but " not the right fit".

YY, and this matters!

That was not my point at all, LRD.

What exactly was your point, then?

The one I made: that historic institutional loyalties have broken down. This is not a hypothesis about individuals but about institutions and politics.

If you are you will be aware that for most universities the density of 'world class researchers is not the same compared to Oxbridge, otherwise the research impact of all those places would be near comparable.

But if you are working in a world leading group outside Oxbridge it is almost completely irrelevant to you that e.g. the neighbouring department is not so good. In reality most PhD researchers are not affected by how good or bad the research in other areas of the university is.

It's also ridiculous to claim that the density of world class researchers is lower in all departments outside Oxbridge. It would be very hard to argue that Imperial physics has a lower density of top reserachers than Oxbridge physics, for example. (In actual fact I could name scientific areas in which the Oxbridge departments are not top two for density of world class researchers, by any measure you choose to use.)

(And BTW I am not outside Oxbridge. I did myself do undergraduate, PhD etc at Oxbridge.)

Um ... I think you'll find Oxbridge haven't had 'institutional loyalties' to Eton for a few decades and more. Moreover, the majority of people doing admissions will have no memory of the time when they did have any kind of 'loyalties'.

Even if one is tempted by outlandish conspiracy theories, my suspicion is that many of those who have been able to fund an expensive independent education for their children will have been Remain voters.

Votes to Remain were generally high in the affluent South-East and among those who do business internationally.

So Etonian parents may well have voted Remain in higher proportions to those in a state school in, say, Chelmsford or Sunderland.

But this is a weird - almost surreal - diversion from the main thread.

LRD - oh please... the politics play out at a higher level than in the past - your housemaster at SPS no longer places you at an Oxbridge college as he did 30 years ago - but they are very much still at play.

Good placard on one of the marches: 'Pussy Grabs Back'. Does that get us back from the surreal, in a gritty enough way?

Bobo how do you know? Just curious.

This is so funny I can't decide whether it's satire or ignorance.

No, of course it doesn't work like that. I have been an admissions interviewer and I promise you no one handed me a secret file full of details about which Eton students I should accept and how I should falsify my paperwork to cover up deeply dodgy institutional politics.

Because I worked for a major donor. Seen it all

I'm sorry, but I don't believe you. Either you were lied to, or you worked at some level where you didn't see the real picture, and let your imagination run free.

Honestly, if you understood the admissions system, you would see that there is just no way they'd be secretly plotting to let in Eton students for political reasons. It would be impossible to manage without requiring all admissions interviewers to be complicit - and I think somehow, we're not!

Bobo someone in our village who is a major major donor to a very posh college, endowed a chair and all that and had kids at Eton never ever got a son into Oxbridge.

One of my own DC was at a particular college when the DC of the person who'd renovated the library didn't get an offer.

I'm sure I could draw up a more extensive list if required. You're talking bollocks again Bobo :)

Obviously they're very nice to donors though - they have to be. But that doesn't include dishing out offers to undeserving DC. Equally - no reason why a deserving DC of a donor shouldn't get a place.

User I said
-for most universities the density of 'world class researchers-

BTW I am not outside Oxbridge. I did myself do undergraduate, PhD etc at Oxbridge
But in this case it is more important where you took up your senior position (assuming that you are an academic) as there would be an incentive to promoting that department to attract good students.

In most university departments the highest density of research calibre plus funding is at Oxbridge. These two universities attract most excellent academics at some point in their postgraduate career.

I am absolutely certain that your village neighbour is not in the donor league I am talking about, goodbyestranger.

YY, good.

One of the things about Oxbridge interviews as a system is that it requires a lot of people to be involved. Hundreds of interviewers, certainly. To skew the system in any meaningful way, you would have to nobble the majority of those and make sure they kept quiet about being biased. And while some of those people are paid-up Oxbridge career academics, a lot of them know they'll be in Oxbridge now and Keele or York or Liverpool next year, so it's really unlikely they have vested interests in long-term nefarious politics.

'your village neighbour'?

Is that intended for a put down?

God forbid you ever discover Lord Sainsbury lives in a village, eh?

Am I supposed to be impressed by Lord Sainsbury, LRD?