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.

Thamks train for spelling it out with such lucidity.

I always find Mumsnet odd. There are so many passionate defenders of buying every possible privilege and advantage - until that point where it appears the desired result may not be easily purchasable after all. At which point this becomes 'unfair' and solely the fault of one (or two) mean, nasty institutions.

Train great posts.

My curiosity stems in part from finding ourselves, public sector workers, living equidistant from what at the time were arguably the best and worst schools on the country with few other options for heathen, non 11+ passing children. We opted to pay, rather than commute, and in the event the Council were unable to find a place for my son anyway.

As a result I effectively worked two jobs and the children were used to see parents work hard and prioritise their education. Other parents, the sucessful ones you describe, will also work extremely hard, and expect their DC to do the same, have sky high aspirations, with them all treating education, the broader stuff not just grades, as a top priority. At school they received, from great, dedicated but normal teachers a lot about education being a privilege and a responsibility.

DS adapted quickly to a course largely populated by overseas students. His gf is now in her home country and gets three days leave a year. He and his friends seem to assume it is normal to do the same at University. DD in contrast, in a more traditional university but a sought after course, has been surprised at how some of her friends lack study skills. They think they are working hard, and indeed may spend all weekend studying for a test, so are baffled about how DD seems to fit a lot of other things in yet still get the required marks. DD does not understand either. Her friends at Oxbridge manage similar feats. (One is studying Chinese for fun but others manage high level sport, music etc alongside their degrees) It appears DD has learnt to work smart as much as work hard. Training, aspiration, expectation?

I make no particular boast for the raw material, but DCs schooling has developed their abilities and ambitions and appears to have them prepared to make the most of University.

Do you deny cancer treatment to some, because it is not affordable to everyone? Would you forgo a family holiday to pay for important cancer drugs not available on the NHS?

To add. Both mine enjoyed their schooling. They are enjoying University. They expect to enjoy education. Grades happen, they ate not the object.

I do have some questions about the particular kind of vision some parents have for their children on this thread. I am not knocking study. If you enjoy the subject and are well taught it can be rewarding in itself. Similarly artistic and sporting activity can be enriching. Certainly young people with these sorts of skills may find the transition to paid work easier and be better equipped to get work that blends a degree of challenge with paying them enough to live on.

However, I'd argue that there is a shadow side to all this. A significant proportion of young people may feel they are worthless if they do not excel - not just in one area but in all the areas (study, work, sport, voluntary activity friendship etc.) They may self-harm. They may abuse legal or illegal drugs. They may seek to over-control what they eat.

It's not bad to want 'the best' for your children. But our vision of 'the best' is heavily conditioned by the ferociously unequal and competitive society we live in. So maybe we need to start by questioning our own sense of what 'the best' really is...

Perhaps the issue at open days is that if an adult is there with two children, people make the assumption that one is there for the ride. Of course I am absolutely not defending the assumption that the ‘extra’ is the black and/or female student. When I took my daughter to Oxbridge open days 3 years ago, people were keen to engage with her, but of course it was obvious that she was the potential applicant.

I wanted to back up what Train said. My daughters were/are at an independent girls’ school with excellent academic results that usually has around 20 students go to Oxbridge each year. We were told that in order to stand a chance, the girls would have to outperform their school. The average GSCE results were 6 A* stars and 5 A grades.

It’s also worth mentioning something we were told at the Cambridge open day. For music, applicants have to send in examples of written work that had been marked by a teacher. It was made very clear that the reason for that was that as well as assessing the quality of the applicant, they were assessing the quality of the teacher. As part of the interview process there are lots of practical tests. If teachers hadn’t picked up on certain errors in the school work, that was taken into account when assessing the practical tests.

I really don't get why TalkinPeece is like a dog with a bone about this. How can you possibly have some kind of "intelligence test" at 18, previous performance blind? And AS Levels - well, they are (were) a hurdle to cross but shouldn't be the basis of an offer, well, not for Oxbridge and some others, anyway. Predicted grades? That would just be an arms race and unfair on any students unlucky enough to have honest teachers.

The Oxbridge academic experience is about diligence and more. But perhaps tutorials/supervisions are unfair on wimpy state school pupils and they should be abolished? Likewise those intimidating old buildings (see earlier post of TalkinPeece). Rip 'em down. How could a kid without a private school education possibly enjoy walking round a fusty old building?

It is simply ludicrous to have the idea that all Oxbridge colleges (including the old ones) are full of Bertie Woosters who undeservedly got in via paying for schooling. True, quite a few of the students have been to private school, but state-school pupils are not absent by any means.

Ds is not wandering round overawed by a bit of stonemasonry, resenting wearing a gown and I'm quite sure no one cares if he's used the wrong knife. Incidentally, at a society he's joined he's met a very friendly transgender student and also when I went there - gosh! There were girls as well as boys.

I am from a north west mill/mining town, big standard comp etc and ended up studying at a place with ancient and beautiful buildings where we had to wear gowns and dine etc. It was intimidating to begin with but I quickly became used to it.

I mean bog standard comp.

I’ve been to an oxbridge outreach event recently.

It was in an average school for the area with people from others schools allowed to attend.

I only found out about it by chance online.
Our school hadn’t told us about it.

About 20 pupils were present from several different schools (mostly the better ones in the area).

There was one disabled pupil, whose parent complained that the venue wasn’t actually accessible.

There were no black pupils but the area doesn’t have a high black population.

There were a couple of Asian dcs which does reflect the area.

The talk was very good and did turn my dc from being wary of applying to being very enthusiastic about it!

They had current students from nearby areas who talked about their experiences. They were very ‘middle class’ in the way they spoke though which isn’t representative of the area.

I think more of these, better publicised with more pupils there would definitely boost application numbers.

However most of those there were in their final year and the event was within a month of the deadline so far too last minute!

We need to be having these with pupils in GCSE/ nat 5 year to give them time to plan ahead and maybe visit the towns and colleges.

I always find Mumsnet odd. There are so many passionate defenders of buying every possible privilege and advantage - until that point where it appears the desired result may not be easily purchasable after all. At which point this becomes 'unfair' and solely the fault of one (or two) mean, nasty institutions.

Absolutely pertinent & astute comment FunderAnna, and thanks Train for your rationality and balance.

There are posters on this thread obsessed by Oxford & Cambridge as the only places of note. And also obsessed by the idea that university staff actively discriminate against some categories/groups/types of candidates.

And that university staff can re-right the deep social divisions caused by 14 years of educational disadvantage underpinned by socio-economic advantage.

Look, we want to teach the brightest, but that isn't always indicated by grades at A Level. The Sutton Trust's recent research suggests that students from poorly performing schools could be admitted with ABB, rather than AAA, and still do better than their AAA peers whose parents bought their educational advantage.

I don't want to teach young people who, by virtue of education & family circumstances, seem to think that they are born to run things. I want open & enquiring minds, not the arrogance sometimes displayed by their parents here on MN HE threads.

The Sutton Trust's recent research suggests that students from poorly performing schools could be admitted with ABB, rather than AAA, and still do better than their AAA peers whose parents bought their educational advantage.

This doesn't distinguish by subject. (One also has to read their report quite carefully because the effect is much more nuanced than this simple claim suggests.) The evidence in maths and related subjects is that A level grades do strongly affect degree outcome i.e. without strong foundations students cannot go on to do well at degree level.

Good point User918 - I'm in the arts/hums, so don't find the Sutton Trust's general point difficult to accommodate.

But I go back to Train's excellent post and repeat her words:
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?

Actually in an international context it is remarkable that the top UK universities do take a lot of kids from "ordinary" backgrounds. I think I said this further upthread: compare Oxbridge intake with that of Harvard, Caltech etc. The latter is far more biased towards the elite, despite Harvard's "needs blind" policy.

My DD's boyfriend came with us to some of the unis for visits, at all but one university they assumed that he was the prospective student and not her - "How nice of you to come along with your boyfriend, you'll miss him when he goes to university" was one response; so not only is she unlikely to be considered for that uni, she's unlike to go to uni at all.

Her withering put down was fantastic. She took great pleasure in informing them precisely why she would be turning down any offered place - which she later did.

I'm only on page 5 of the thread so the discussion has probably moved on but I would like to say that the majority of 'refuse to say' on ethnicity forms will be black people. When you're asked your race and you know that there is a lot of racial discrimination against you, why would you volunteer the info. White people tick the box without a second thought.

My second point is that my son has been very keen to apply to Cambridge and I have wholeheartedly been behind him. He's spent three days on a residential as part of an outreach thing they offered. We've recently been made to think it is a very achievable goal. But I must admit these lates stories have really put me off. I'm not having my son going to a place where he could be made to feel like he didn't belong there.the link somebody posted earlier with the Oxford kids talking about feeling like outsiders is really upsetting. Pretty gutting, really.

Wishful if you want to message me, my daughter is currently studying at Cambridge. Although Mumsnet can be useful at some times, for some things, I am not sure how helpful threads like these are for people who are weighing up current applications.

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.

@goodbyestranger how do you know this? Do you think the people ignoring the PP's friend were doing it on purpose? It's unconscious bias, that black people have to put up with all the time. Of course you would think as you do, coming from a position of white privilege. I'm sure you're horrified and that your kids would be.

It's a similar situation to when I'm buying a car FOR MYSELF and the idiot car salesman directs the chat to my boyfriend, who's not buying the bloody thing! He might not realise he's doing it and might not be doing it on purpose, but he's still doing it.

Thank you, funder. I will take you up on that.

My car analogy was referring to me being a woman btw, not black.

When I was in this situation in every single instance when I was with a middle-class friend, I would be ignored and the middle-class friend would sit happily chatting to the lecturer/tutor etc. I got a better degree than her but she was more comfortable in those situations than I was. It's not much fun though feeling like an outsider.

Indeed, Wishful.

She is privately educated and a highly suitable candidate but was put off by her experience and didn’t believe she would fit in.

Well done to Teddies for being the only college to acknowledge her existence!

As it happens I doubt it was entirely gender based, as my elder daughter was also with us and she had several interactions, although not as many as her brother, to be fair. She was only along for the ride though as she is already studying else where.

Perhaps women and those who are not WASP-types could see getting into Oxford or Cambridge (or Bristol, Durham, Edinburgh, Exeter, York, UCL, Imperial, LSE, or any other 'Top 10' universities) as an act of rebellion.

Learning the enemy's tools so as to defeat the enemy? Know thy enemy.

I always wonder this when I hear David Lammy speak. He sounds like the perfect stereotyped RP product of independent schooling and Oxbridge (I don't know his background, actually).

It's the attitude I try to instil in my students when I'm teaching canonical material/history: learn to know this stuff better than those who have brought up to believe it is theirs by birthright.

Dismantle their privilege by doing it better than them. It's very satisfying.

I think, HouseholdWords, you have beamed in from the 1920s. Women getting into Top Ten universities as an act of rebellion?!

Your poor students, whoever they are. You are really peddling them a load of twaddle. Telling kids they'd be out of place and in a minority: what better way to squash anyone's aspirations.

I think, HouseholdWords, you have beamed in from the 1920s. Women getting into Top Ten universities as an act of rebellion?!

In my research area the percentage of women in third and fourth year classes is less than 10%. (The subject as whole is 20% female at Cambridge but this drops off as they special to particular areas.)

Welcome to 2017.

On ds's course 7 out the 9 students are female. Welcome to 2017.