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.

Thinking more about this, my DD had a group of very able friends; I'm talking As and A*s across the board at A level). Only one of them has gone south to university. The others have chosen Leeds, Newcastle, Durham, Manchester and the like. The one that has gone south to London was one of the handful of students at college who was not white and has joked about that being a factor.

Maybe on some level, northerners are just rejecting the south. We here so many stories about how expensive and frantic it is to live there.

hear

Neither ds nor any of his friends put a London university on their UCAS forms - and we are in the south. Ds liked the look of the course at UCL but wouldn't touch London with a barge pole. The word is that when you live out the accessible accommodation is in zone 4, there is little in the way of student life and that a large proportion of the non-foreign students are from London and can live at home.

I was discussing this with a mother I met at dropping off and she said she lived in a shared house in West Hampstead when she was at ucl in the 80s. Apparently this would be a complete pipe dream now for an ordinary student.

Anyway, what I am ramblingly trying to say is that London has priced itself out of the reach of normal middle-class students, even those living in the south of England. It's not just northerners who may be giving expensive places a swerve!

Both of my DCs gave UCL a miss because most of the accommodation is further away than our house.

Can we go back to a point someone made above? Why can't Oxford/Cambridge (or anywhere else) determine who gets in by holding a lottery for all applicants who get the required grades? I believe it's done this way in the Netherlands.

Interesting suggestion - I suppose because O and C want to recruit the 'best' - grades alone don't distinguish between candidates enough. Obviously all the difficulties identified here mean that they may not in fact recruit the best, but that is presumably the aim.

But I think your point is why do we have two universities for 'the very best' in the country - what is the advantage of that? An interesting question. Not sure I know the answer!

Basement. The problem is it would have to be a lottery of predicted grades and these are notoriously inaccurate, so I really don't see how this would help.

In fact last year Cambridge introduced their own entrance exam and that seems a far fairer way of assessing candidates.

Yes although Cambridge railed against being forced to do that Jeanne and wrote letters of exhortation to influential headteachers asking them to get behind Cambridge to put pressure on the govt to retain ASs. Cambridge has long since said it preferred to judge on the basis of very high ums in ASs as opposed to doing it Oxford's way of aptitude tests.

Another exam is a retrograde step.
AS results were clear, comparable, transparent.
But the eejits at the DfE had to be seen to change something.

The cost of living in London is a whole other thread
and the fact that at some Unis, the "living out" houses are a 15 minute walk from Campus/Key buildings and at others they are many miles away
-Oxbridge fare far better on that category than many more modern Universities

But the key point to getting super bright kids from all LEAs to apply is to make the application process as "familiar" as possible for their schools/teachers/parent/them

Hence why I have bugbears about

• the early cutoff
• the college first application
• the compulsory on site interviews (skype works for forriners, why not Brits)
• the extra exams

It is in the interests of top Unis to seek out hidden talent.
They should make more of an effort to think outside their box.

I believe it's done this way in the Netherlands.

No, not really.

The Netherlands has a three tier secondary school system (grammar plus two other tiers). Those who pass grammar school leaving exams are guaranteed places at universities i.e. universities do not use grades in offering places. This leads to mixed ability classes at university level and many consequent issues - including very high drop out rates after the first year in many subjects.

They do select for medicine and indeed this used to be done by lottery. This was madness as it did not select by aptitude at all. I believe that this system was changed.

The Netherlands also have prestige programmes within some universities i.e. you are (by law) admitted to the university on the basis of your school leaving certificate but you can only access some programmes after further selection (by grades and aptitude). Such selection is controversial amongst students but popular amongst academics, as it avoids mixed ability classes.

I think the issue starts well before the admission process kicks in.

I took my DS (white) and his girlfriend (BAME) to the Oxford open day in September, visiting around ten colleges during the day.

We were jumped on by eager students keen to engage with us and take us on tours. The opening line for most was 'what subject are you interested in?' but at nine out of ten colleges, this question was only addressed to my son. His girlfriend was invisible. It was distressing to witness and my chipping in with 'and she wants to study Maths' loudly, only made her more uncomfortable.

They were nice kids but they only thought to engage with people who looked and sounded like them. They probably had no idea how shocking their behaviour was. How poorly they treated this person and how completely they trampled on her dreams.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, my DS's girlfriend decided not to apply to Oxford as she didn't feel it was 'right for her' and didn't like the vibe.

It's a crying shame and far from good enough. And of course, she doesn't even feature on the admissions stats.

Sorry, I meant to say that my post was a more general issue regarding diversity and not just a London and SE versus the rest of the country observation. Sorry for the slight irrelevance.

Hi soapybox my DC have been involved with many rounds of Open Days and participation programmes at Oxford over the past nine years and no way no how would they - or their college peers - have directed questions only to your white DS. Your experience, while unfortunate, sounds decidedly odd.

I took my DS and DD both white to that Oxford open day for my DD to look and DS to accompany her and everywhere the assumption was it was my DS who was applying and my DD was ignored- so it may have been gender not race which was the issue

It's very possible its a gender thing when I go back people asked my husband what he read even though I went there he didn't. This year though we have our first female Master and she was very pro supporting women and no one asked him.

I have this many times at work as well where people assume I'm the secretary purely on the basis I'm female. Once had a guy start going mad saying I wanted to speak to the economist and its great isn't it they send just the secretary down. Pointed out I was the economist. Very glad I wasn't his secretary.

Oh well I have or have had several girl DC as well as several boy DC at Oxford and there's never been a problem. Perhaps we're just lucky.

Gender : oh yes
at the Buck House garden party, lots of people looked at DH wondering what he'd done to be there
in fact he was my plus one
nobody looked at me AT ALL
and yet my ticket was well deserved

Also, who is the older of your DS and DD user261 or rather what ages were they both when you took them?

When I worked in the City in the 80s I was completely happy to pour coffee etc at meetings and never had any problems with sexism. A few comments about nice outfit etc which I took in good part.

When I worked in the City in the 80s I was completely happy to pour coffee etc at meetings and never had any problems with sexism. A few comments about nice outfit etc which I took in good part.
But then when you did the prime budget presentation, did they all shut up and listen??

I work in one of the last bastions of overt sexism and the chaps are always freaked when I han the cup back and thank them for offering to fill it

and THEN I do the accounts presentation

I'm late to this thread, but I'm a (boggest of bog-standard) comp-educated lecturer at an Oxbridge college - have been doing this for nearly 20 years, so lots of experience.

1. in more than ten years of interviewing at my medium-sized college, in a reasonably big subject (one studied at all schools), I have only ever seen one black British applicant, despite tons of outreach and admissions work. We routinely have more Asian and far east Asian applicants, but often they are from wealthy international families rather than British ones.

1. the interview, far from being a way of us admitting in our own image, actually corrects for privilege. The honest truth is that private school applicants' school grades tend on the whole to be higher. At interview we weed a lot of these out (expensive teaching and coaching is easier than people think to spot), and yes, we do hold applicants from good schools to a higher standard - in general we are looking for reasons to advantage state school and working-class students than the other way around. We also have a huge amount of data available to us about each applicant's school/s, where they rank in the local LEA/national average, suggested adjustments to grades based on this, number of applicants/offers to Oxbridge from each school, postcode data showing the applicant's socio-economic background, and a spreadsheet ranking all our subject applicants across the university (not just for our college), using a variety of metrics and adjustments to flag up privilege and disadvantage. Most of my colleagues are themselves from state schools and are certainly not looking to reward social advantage (rather the reverse - don't underestimate the inverted snobbery of an academic who can't remotely afford to send his/her own children to Westminster - only joking )

1. sadly, getting three As (or even As) is no longer an indication that you are an amazing mind. The A-levels are not, for the most part, any longer congruent with university-level teaching in many subjects (that's not to say they are dumbed down as such - they are measuring different things than we are). You can teach someone to get a very good mark in an A-level mark scheme who isn't naturally suited to the discipline at the university level. And many independent schools get better results, not just because they teach to the test more efficiently, but also because they are often teaching beyond the required level for several years. That is to say that there are plenty of independent-school applicants who have good results but aren't up to the intellectual ability we want. But there are also plenty who are not naturally sparkling intellects but just that bit better purely because of good teaching (and, at some independents schools, a ferocious work ethic which I don't envy - some top independents really do churn out young people who will work every hour god sends just to master the material because that's how they have been trained up. Presumably by workaholic City parents who are preparing them for a life ahead of similar capitalist grind ). In the end, though, often a naturally talented student from a comp is just not getting the foundation to get them to the place where they could cope with the demands of the course compared to students who have had a lifetime of the best education that can be bought. And that's after* we do our best to correct for that.

The elephant in the room here is purely economic privilege. We live in a country where people accept private education as something quite normal, even if they themselves can't afford it. And we happily accept all sorts of other kinds of inequality from income to housing ownership. And then we want to get outraged about how globally elite academic institutions are finding it difficult to admit enough students from poorer backgrounds? Intelligence isn't plastic - it isn't just something that you have in a bucket and can put to work on anything if you choose at the age of 18. You grow it through training, teaching and development, and it needs material and knowledge to work on. Of bloody course people who have all the opportunities to buy the best of that end up doing better. We're looking for potential, absolutely, and we do find fantastic applicants all the time who have not been privileged, but have that natural affinity with the subject though natural luck, intuition or hard work, and we're also looking to do a bit of sneaky affirmative action where we can (though don't tell my admissions tutor ). But why are we surprised that if we let some people buy something better than the majority are getting, that they end up doing better? If we don't want this situation we need to abolish private education completely, and radically rethink our school system. Otherwise it's like getting on a thread about state of the art cancer care and wondering why people who have private health insurance might be skipping waiting lists compared to someone poor in an underfunded NHS trust in a deprived borough, and what a surprise, who would have thought it, what can we do about it ?

The answer is bloody obvious -- we need a total rethink of our social priorities and our school system, from primary school up. Leaving it until 17 and expecting a few university tutors to sort it out is just rubbish.

PS, no one gives a monkeys about the dinners and Latin here, or how you dress at interview, or any of that sort of rubbish, and probably haven't for nigh on 50 years now.

"sort from age 4"
the classic fall back of the "not me mate" Universities

tell you what
you find a way to pick the true cream of the 18 year olds

don't wait 14 years for "them" to magic the lapel badge

You've had 600 years to get it right after all

You can't "pick the true cream of the 18 year olds". Thinking that's possible is a fantasy. There might be plenty of naturally gifted kids in all sorts of circumstances, but give them 14 years of poor/mediocre schooling versus 14 years of the best and you can't easily make up that difference (and how would you know if you could, anyway?)

Sorry to burst the bubble, but there's no magic test to reveal who is the best. A very few kids have a sort of X-factor where you can tell they have a natural gift for the subject. Most don't - admissions is a complex process of judging a range of grades/tests/written work/interview answers against each other, and trying to see if you've got a good picture of the whole person. We normally have far more we could admit that places available, regardless of school background, so we're always turning way people we could have taken anyway. There isn't a magic way of making that decision on the borderline, either, and plenty of applicants get in on reapplication.

There's no magic bullet because intelligence isn't just some abstract quality that you have, it's a combination of knowledge and skill and natural talent, but just one of those things isn't going to get you far without the rest. The idea of the IQ test has given people the notion that intelligence is just a measurable scale. It isn't, it's a combination of all sorts of things - someone who is a gifted historian might be totally rubbish at economics, or decent but nothing special at biology. And one of the things that makes the difference is quality of schooling and teaching. If you've a natural talent for maths but your maths teaching was poor and your school unsupportive and your friends all thought maths was vile and your parents didn't see the point, then it isn't that likely at 17 to suddenly display such an amazing potential for maths to the level that you can get into Cambridge. We need a much better education system all the way through, so that it doesn't matter if you go to school in Winchester or Tower Hamlets, you can still develop natural academic (and non-academic) talent.

Also, I'm not sure whether to be flattered or not, but I personally am not quite 600 years old

When I got married my MD asked my husband if he gave me permission to carry on working. Sad thing was he wasn't joking.

Didn't have much issue actually at Cambridge other than the very first formal dinner when I was seated next to an engineering professor who made sexist and rude comments all night about where I lived. He did write me a letter of apology though and when I reported it they were furious with him. Was in a college which had only recently admitted women after a long campaign not to and some men decided to keep this campaign going after they had admitted women but that only affected socials after Cambridge. Has vastly improved now and a female Master and lots more women. Did also get asked at one of the socials if I used to run around naked when there though not sure if that's sexism or just perversion. It was my last of that type of social and since just been to the Family Day which are lovely.