Oxbridge 'favours' students from London and South-East

[jeanne16]

Apparently 48% of students come from London and the South-East with Richmond being a particular hotspot. Should we be surprised by this and accuse the universities of bias? The way I see it is Richmond is full of extremely intelligent people who presumably have intelligent children. They then have the money and resources to support them in all sorts of ways, such as buying books, reading to them, private schooling and/or tutors when needed, sport and other activities.

I really don't see how this is the fault of the universities.

I am not sure how the Lammydata is sourced.
This link
public.tableau.com/views/UoO_UG_Admissions2/EthnicityandDisability?%3Aembed=y&%3Adisplay_count=yes&%3AshowTabs=y&%3AshowVizHome=no
gives the Oxford offer rate according to ethnicity
This link per course
public.tableau.com/views/UoO_UG_Admissions2/AcceptanceRate?%3Aembed=y&%3Adisplay_count=yes&%3AshowTabs=y&%3AshowVizHome=no

Talkin I am not sure which course you are referring to with 10 candidates per place but I would guess that includes candidates who will not firm or get the grades.

For LSE geography they had 314 applicants for 33 places in 2016 ie 9 applicants per place whereas Oxbridge is 3 applicants per place but LSE do not interview to give offers- how
Is that UK applicants? LSE probably takes 50-60% of its undergraduates from overseas.

LSE is a relatively small university with about half the number of UK undergraduates as Oxford or Cambridge - therefore Oxbridge would have to accept double the number of under-represented students to achieve the same percentage rise.

Interestingly, the report on LSE's contextual offer programme states that LSE do not make lower offers to under-represented groups - disadvantaged or under-represented ethnic minority students have to achieve the same A level grades as other applicants.

All the outreach programmes at LSE seem to be aimed at London/Greater London and their summer courses appear to be non-residential (unlike Oxbridge) - they obviously benefit from the massive sixth form population on their doorstep. Not to mention the extra funding for disadvantaged pupils that London schools have received compared to the rest of the country. Prospective LSE students probably also benefit from outreach programmes offered by other top-ranking London Universities as many students will only apply to London universities.

Is there any data on how many people who get offers accept them? My hunch is that most applicants who get an offer from Oxford or Cambridge will accept it as the firm offer and the great majority of those (with the exception of Maths at Cambridge because of the STEP issue) will meet the conditions and take up the place.

Medical schools, dentistry, veterinary science and one or two other courses can probably make similar assumptions but not many others. Most of them have to over-offer to be confident of filling their places. There isn't much individual attention given to applications in my experience of working in a university, and dropout rates would tend to confirm that.

I suspect mediocre children from Richmond have the hot housing and nurturing environment to do really well academically.

Richmond is in the catchment area for a number of highly selective schools - the Tiffin grammar schools, St Paul's, Hampton, Lady Eleanor Holles, on the coach route for King's College, Wimbledon etc. - I don't think mediocre really comes into it.

In my experience of two family members at oxbridge, post private school, the % of private school v state is a massive issue. We live in an area where those with money go private specifically to buy their way into the system and improve chances of getting to oxbridge when the network opportunities mean you are made for life. They pay huge amounts to tutor on top. I am not in a position to pay for private school so I doubt my very bright DC will ever make it as I can't pay massive fees to give give them that advantage.
That's not educational equality.

Dh tutors further maths at an east end school (v ethnic minority) and what he has found is that the students often say they need to stay in london due to family commitments, or they need to be able to earn money in termtime (generally banned at oxbridge)...so there are other reasons for them not applying that aren’t going to be solved by outreach programs or lower offers.

Generally these are students who he thinks would Thrive academically at oxbridge too :-(

There have been a number of Freedom of Information requests regarding Step results/acceptances at Cambridge for Maths - scoring 2s in Step appear to greatly reduce your chance of acceptance

You don't need Freedom of Information requests to learn this - Maths at Cambridge openly states that most candidates who get 2s in STEP will be rejected. This isn't a secret. .

I have a friend whose two sons went to Oxbridge from a northern state sixth form. Apart from having had the 'Oxbridge' experience I cannot see that it has done them any favours at all.

I think the STEP qualifications are quite good. I took them in English and History from a comprehensive without any coaching, and they didn't require particular knowledge over and above the syllabus, but they did stretch the syllabus. I actually enjoyed the exams - first time ever - and ended up with 2 Ss. I also scored in the top 5 in the country for both those A-levels. I'm not saying this to boast, but to preface this:

I got a scholarship at Cambridge but didn't go. I just felt it wasn't right for me. I was a working class, streetwise kid, who thought most middle class kids were childish and highly inexperienced. Cambridge seemed like an elitist hellhole where I simply would never belong. I'd had some experience of the wealthy through county music (free school music lessons to leading the local youth orchestra) and didn't really like the whiteness, the arrogance or the entitlement on display, or the lack of a sense of humour. The idea of being in a black tie ball with these folks made me guffaw with the incongruity of it all. The overwhelming feeling was: this was not my place, these were not my people.

Since then, I've realised that working class kids who do slog through Oxbridge are still hampered when they leave the course by a lack of connections that can be nepotistically leveraged, and by the fact that they don't occupy a particular habitus that screams "Hire me, I am just like you" to employers. I've done fine because I've chosen not to go down a very different path, but I've seen very bright working class friends struggle, in spite of first rate academics. My sister is incredibly gifted, but stuck in a totally bog standard NHS job where her top A-levels, starred first, and incredibly high MA distinction are wasted. It's often far more mediocre kids from the "right backgrounds" that get the opportunities.

Which makes me think that the entire system is just one of those middle class echo chambers that is really designed to ensure the continuing power of a certain class, pulling up the drawbridge after them. If a degree is a passport to higher earnings and a higher grade of job, then the most revolutionary contribution that universities could make towards recognising the existence of pervasive inequality in society would be to see their own place in that inequality, and to lower entrance grades for those from the working classes, who have attended state comprehensives and to build a truly meritocratic student body that reflects natural giftedness across all classes, not just in those who can afford a tutor.

whiskyowl
My sister is incredibly gifted, but stuck in a totally bog standard NHS job where her top A-levels, starred first, and incredibly high MA distinction are wasted.
It depends of course on what jobs your sister was rejected for/applied for - many gifted people prefer to hide away in jobs where no one will notice them.

whiskyowl, STEP is a maths aptitude test. It is very challenging and hard to prepare for. Are you thinking of the old S levels?

Also you don't make it clear when your sister graduated. If it was within the last five years she should have been aware of massive efforts by employers, especially public sector employers, to level the playing field for educationally disadvantaged students. DS has been applying for quite technical internships, and has found that he can expect to be interviewed alongside students from places like Westminster University or Oxford Brookes. Yes going to a well regarded University will help on the competency testing, but the rest is pretty open.

user918273645

You don't need Freedom of Information requests to learn this - Maths at Cambridge openly states that most candidates who get 2s in STEP will be rejected. This isn't a secret.

My link might be useful for LuluJakey1 though - I have heard the story about her dh's disappointed tutee before, on one of the other Education boards.

This is from the FAQ section for Maths at Cambridge:
www.maths.cam.ac.uk/undergraduate-admissions/other-useful-information

^Why do you give conditional offers based on STEP?
Answer: In the following, all numbers are approximate.
In the UK last year, 92,000 students took A-level mathematics of whom 16,400 were awarded A; and 14,000 took A-level Further Mathematics of whom 4,300 were awarded A. Together with
Oxford, we are looking for about 500 mathematicians, so clearly a conditional offer involving only As will not be sufficient. Instead, we (Cambridge) reduce our 1,300 applicants to about 500 via
the interview process and then we use STEP to select the required 250. It is encouraging that the latest data show that the correlation between STEP results and our university examination results is extremely high. Other reasons for using STEP are that it is the same examination for all applicants (whereas what is required for an A may differ between different A-level examination boards); and it ensures that everyone who starts our course in October has the necessary technical skills to undertake our course. Help to prepare for STEP is available from maths.org/step.^

needsmore - Yes, sorry, S-levels. Posting too early before coffee, despite having had ample previous experience suggesting this is NOT A GOOD IDEA IN MY CASE! Apologies.

And yes, my sister graduated well over 10 years ago now, so she wouldn't have benefited, unfortunately. I hope you're right that things are changing. It's about time!

clavinova - yes, that's an interesting remark and I suspect may be true in many cases, especially when there is a sense of not being entitled to anything more.

"I hope you're right that things are changing. It's about time!"

Why?

Given that good Universities bend over backwards to support applications from strong students from disadvantaged backgrounds, is there a real need for employers to also work to ensure better diversity in their recruitment. At what stage should it simply be the best candidate gets the job.

I am not expecting a yes or no, not least because employers behave differently, but an observation that the pendulum is swinging and may not yet have hit an equilibrium.

Included in this is that:

1. Many of the top quantitative degrees have large numbers of Europeans, who though treated as home students, do not seem to be subject to the same contextualisation. (I am happy to be corrected.)

1. Contextualisation comes at a cost. DS, despite 5 Alevels including a predicted 4A*s, was rejected by Cambridge, Warwick, and UCL and was only accepted by LSE at the end of March. (It may have helped that he had regularly booked tickets for LSE public lectures.) He has done well, and indeed is being advised to apply for PhD programmes at top US Universities. He has so far not managed to achieve the internship he really wants (he has passed the assessment but was not offered a place), so is applying for overseas equivalents. Interestingly, on his highly rated Masters degree, despite the presence of a number of Europeans (Polish, French, Austrian, Italian, German and more) he is the only Brit out of 37.

He will be fine. Without knowing who landed the positions he was after, he cannot know why he did not. Much in the same way sas whiskyowl's sister cannot know why she did not get the jobs she wanted. I am relaxed as I have lived in a country which has had a long term positive discrimination programme (bumiputra), which though bringing benefits, has also led to both a sense of entitlement, at times verging on corruption, and an acknowledgement by those not benefiting that they have to work harder or seek opportunities abroad, or both. (In short the policy may have had the opposite effect to the one it was hoping for.)

It really depends on what the aim is. If the aim is to recruit the best applicants, whether at Oxbridge or in employment, by allowing for differences in background, this is fine. However I wonder whether the Lammys and others are actually hoping for some form of social engineering, which would have the more advantaged (or those whose parents prioritised education over other spending) in some way punished.

I will admit to feeling quite irritated when moaning to a Corbynista friend about the likelihood of DS ending up abroad. She was sympathetic, but pointed out that it was important that amends were made for Britian's colonial past. If it meant that in the short term DC like my son had a tough time this was a pity but it still needed to be done. I am not sure DS' Irish ancestors would have agreed!

but stuck in a totally bog standard NHS job where her top A-levels, starred first, and incredibly high MA distinction are wasted

All my O, A and S-levels were at the highest grade possible. I have an Oxbridge first (and a small cup somewhere to say it was the highest result in my college), and an Oxbridge PhD.

I am a primary school teacher (though I have had the conventional 'rapid trajectory through a multinational firm on graduate management scheme' career too) , and in no way regard my qualifications as 'wasted'. My family do 3rd sector / public sector / arts sector jobs, though we are all very academic, and it is those values that make me happy in my chosen profession.

cantkeep - Oh, I don't mean to suggest that such choices are not valid. Thank God for people like you! (My own career decisions have not been to chase money or follow that kind of trajectory, that's for sure!) My sister is, I think, unhappy where she is. Part of it is the job, part of it is that she seems to be surrounded by toxic idiots. I should have made that clearer.

needmore- I think you're thinking of this as some kind of hand-out to the poor. It's not, it's good for both social mobility and these firms because diversity has a value that goes beyond the individual. Particularly in some sectors of work, it actually matters that a range of different backgrounds are represented, because it helps the organisation to do what they do better. In the higher echelons of the public sector, for instance, I think some expensive mistakes that are obvious to anyone from a non-middle class background could be avoided if there were more representation from the classes who are actually the target of interventions - and not merely in focus groups.

I also don't think social engineering is punishing the well-off. It's rewarding those who haven't had those advantages and who have still done disproportionately well. That's just basic fairness.

whisky, fine. Its just that any policy has a cost...or perhaps unintended consequences. If you look at University destinations of academic private schools you will see that applications to American Universities have risen exponentially over the past decade. And my DC will not be the only ones who anticipate that, as individuals, they may need to look overseas to maximise their own opportunities.

The problem is that there are a relative small number of entry level jobs in most organisations, especially in the specialist area DS is interested in. It is hard to increase the diversity of an organisation without focusing efforts on recruitment. But this is back to the question effectively posed by Lammy. To what extent does diversity has a value that goes beyond the individual, and to what extent should organisations, including Oxbridge, take account of this.

needmore - sure, I agree. I think universities are now in a much more global market than they were even 10 years ago (let alone 20) - lots more wealthy kids the world over are coming here, lots of wealthy kids here are headed abroad.

Not just wealthy. One of the odder, and slightly patronising, assumptions is that BAME students automatically come from less affluent backgrounds. Many do, but so do working class white kids.

She was sympathetic, but pointed out that it was important that amends were made for Britian's colonial past.

So can we also discriminate against the descendants of African slave traders? What about students of German heritage whose grandfathers were Nazis? Russians who had grandparents benefiting from Stalin's regime?

Well, the BME kids coming to my institution from overseas are, on average, very wealthy indeed. Very few of the numerous Chinese students in the city are from the poorest classes in China!! Of course there are exceptions, too. DH recently did a charitable thing to raise money to enable some refugees to come and study in his department.

Terms like BME start making little sense when we are discussing a global marketplace of this kind. Put the focus back onto destinations of British schoolleavers and the picture is a bit different, though I agree entirely with you that there is a wealthy, middle class BME community as well as a working class access problem that stretches across races.

Or indeed the scions of third world despots.

Indeed, Need!

Abra1d - I believe the discrimination is positive, i.e. the other way, i.e. intended to help those communities that have suffered historically to redress those imbalances.

Needs example was, I think, of a very specific system in Malaysia, about which I know absolutely nothing at all apart from the fact that it's controversial.

Ooops, I just realised I misread your post