Which Oxbridge Courses / Colleges take most state school students?

[KingscoteStaff]

Is the state school/independent school split very different on different courses? Is it very different at different colleges?

Is this data available for last years offers/places?

Is it available for this year's offers?

Ah, OK then. I still can't imagine what skills they would lack in comparison to other humanities graduates. But graduates aren't a homogeneous group anyway, obviously, and their abilities differ.

Just checked Cambridge stats and 58% of MML acceptances were from state schools. Modern languages at Oxbridge really isn't dominated by independent school students. It seems obtuse not to listen to someone who is actually teaching there now (openday) and continue to repeat misleading assumptions. From my son's school none of the successful MFL candidates I know in recent years have been native speakers and I can't believe all 58% of the state school offers are either. My experience of MFL graduates is very different from MariaNovella's too. Maybe i recruited the handful of good ones!

Excellent post, openday! (The long one, a few posts back). I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to have someone on here who is actually working at the coal face and can dispel misconceptions. You sound absolutely lovely, and I hope my DD comes across equally lovely tutors when she starts (grades permitting, of course) in September.

Thank you for being so patient and providing so much info.

Thanks ontopofthesunset, that's reassuring to hear.

It's hard not to get defensive when people are talking about something that is so close to you! But I should say that I'm just one MFL tutor and that my views should not be taken as representative of my institution. My perspectives are based on my own experience and aren't guaranteed to be completely flawless or objective.

to you cinnamontoast! Thank you for the kind words, and I'm delighted your DD is coming here.

Ontopofthesunset it would be obtuse if I hadn't included a caveat, which I did, and also if I was talking completely through a hat, which I'm not. My DSs gf is a finalist in a college with several native speakers in her MFL cohort. It must be the exception, clearly. My other DC have said the same about lots of native speakers among their friends and acquaintances, and they are/ were at the coalface too, just a more lowly part of the workforce, obviously with a different perception to the boss - as so often is the case. That's why I was curious about numbers, although admittedly these can be hard to divine.

I like the suitcase scandal Maria .

Thanks for the extension of the coalface metaphor, goodbyestranger! Always happy to see a metaphor work hard for a living.

I know openday is only one tutor but she was giving reassurances that actually pure language fluency is not what is looked for and is not enough - so being a native speaker is not as much of an advantage as it might appear - Oxford and Cambridge are looking for students with good ability to understand and analyze grammar and very good ability to critically analyze literature.

I was also pointing out that the majority of MFL/MML students in both Oxford and Cambridge are in fact from state schools despite all the dire warnings in this thread about MFL teaching etc. So lots of schools must be doing it well enough.

The thread seemed to be off putting rather than encouraging. The more non native speakers who take up MFL the less significant any distortion from native speakers will be. Good linguists who like literature shouldn't be discouraged.

And their job prospects are fine. I know linguists who are bankers, lawyers, broadcasters, psychotherapists, advertising executives, writers, consultants, small business owners, diplomats, accountants, literary agents, charity workers and, of course, even teachers.

As someone who is definitely not a natural linguist but who has learned to speak 4 foreign languages as an adult, I agree completely with open day and sunset. (2x Institute of Linguists Higher and 1x Intermediate plus a fourth which was, once, equally fluent) I have read many newspapers, conducted meetings and listened to plenty of speeches, but never read any literature in a language other than English, and know no more about the linguistics behind them than I know about English language/linguistics.

I encouraged DC to learn to speak languages, and tried to give them as much exposure as possible. I thought GCSE was awful and prepared them for nothing. Interestingly DD, who was never going to take language A levels, found she seemed more able to converse with French and German people that others with the A level. My assumption is that studying a language at University is very different from speaking a language, and having it as a mother tongue is not a great advantage.

One point though. At DCs private school they normally took four A levels and potential humanities students were encouraged to keep up a language as it was considered ‘useful’. Which meant the option for, say, history and German, was kept open. I don’t know if the proportion of private school pupils taking joint degrees is higher, simply because 4 A levels are more usual, so more room to keep up a language.

Ontopofthesunset I'll leave it to the marketing people to do the encouraging. I'm merely repeating observations which seem to be mutually corroborated, so assumed there was some merit in them. Tant pis if that's not to your liking. The fact is, it reflects a coalface perception and so it would really interest me to know what the reality is, in average percentage terms, year on year. I'm not clear that the state/ independent statistics can tell us much about native speakers. Also, the lamentable state of MFL in the independent sector has been a cause for concern among educationalists for years. I know this at the school level but recall being at my eldest's graduation at Wadham, idling by a nicely built stone wall and trying to work out how much it would cost me to get my name on it as a donor, when I struck up a conversation with a charming MFL tutor on exactly that point (MFL, not whether I'll ever afford to have my name up in lights). He was supremely downbeat about MFL in the state sector - absolutely miserable about it.

cinnamontoast it's my pleasure :)

Well, it's not that your observations are not to my liking, I just think they are no more (and indeed no less) relevant than my own coalface observations, which are different from yours, and openday's coalface observations, which are also different.

And for my part I don't want to leave it to marketing people. As a linguist myself, I'm just very keen to encourage people who love the study of languages to pursue it, not to be put off by anecdata on the internet.

Yes and I'd like my youngest daughter not to be deterred from applying to Oxford for MFL, but the fact is that having listened to what her siblings have to say, she has been, and that's a shame because she really does seem to be very good and she really does seem to love languages.

I'm not actually clear what your coalface observations are Ontopofthesunset (quite a posse vying to be at the the coalface tonight!). Do you mean the Cambridge statistics you read on the internet. That's quite a broad interpretation of coalface....

being a native speaker is not as much of an advantage as it might appear - Oxford and Cambridge are looking for students with good ability to understand and analyze grammar and very good ability to critically analyze literature

Grammar is particularly poorly taught in England, be that in English or in MFL. A native speaker of French, German or Italian (say), who has been educated in their own national school system, will have a far more secure grasp of grammar than an English child educated in the English system. Many native speakers of MFL living in the UK will have also had mother tongue standard teaching of grammar of their native language. Parents with high aspirations for their DC are all too aware of how critical this is to mastery of their language.

Literary analysis does not exist in a cultural void.

All the students I know studying MFL are my coalface observations.

Oh ok that wasn't clear. So you're a teacher of MFL?

.As a linguist myself, I'm just very keen to encourage people who love the study of languages to pursue it.*

I share your sentiments. I speak four MFL and studied Latin once upon a time. I use my language skills every day. But I am reluctant to encourage someone to study MFL at university in the UK unless it is with the intention of becoming an academic. The opportunity costs of a MFL degree are high and there are much better ways of learning a language.

No, like you, goodbye, I am a parent and friend of students and, as you suggest you are, I am actively involved in education. I know lots of university students and A level students and am particularly interested in MFL.

Learning the language is only part of a languages degree. You then do lots of other analytical and critical study.

You then do lots of other analytical and critical study.

Which is done far better on other humanities courses, IMO.

The really interesting thing about learning another language is acquiring sufficient skill to decode the culture and make in depth cultural analyses. This cannot be done in the ivory tower of a British university.

Fair enough. And are you at the Oxford coalface or at the Cambridge coalface or indeed any other random coalface? To clarify, I'm firmly at the Oxford coalface, albeit vicariously. If you can be firm and vicarious at the same time. Arguably you can but equally arguably you can't.

Good heavens, it’s so busy at the coal face it feels like Grimethorpe Colliery on here. Goodbye, you are convincingly firm yet vicarious, I would say.

I’m sorry to see the study of Modern Languages being criticised by some. I studied French on a heavily literature-based course and there was no less rigour in the approach to literature than there was for my friends doing English. I have friends who studied languages who ended up in really good jobs in publishing, journalism, academia, international aid, the diplomatic service - and, of course, translation and interpretation. The ‘ivory tower’ approach enhanced their career prospects and their understanding of language and culture, I would say.

The ‘ivory tower’ approach enhanced their... their understanding of language and culture.

What an extraordinary assertion. I know an awful lot of people who speak several languages and rather a lot of people who have studied literature, be that on MFL or mother tongue courses. I have never yet come across anyone with a meaningful understanding of language and culture who had not spent years living “as a native” in another language/culture. I have, however, encountered some bizarre ideas about how people from other cultures “aren’t quite right” from the ivory tower brigade.

The really interesting thing about learning another language is acquiring sufficient skill to decode the culture and make in depth cultural analyses.
I would have thought the ability to read and analyse great literature in the original language is stimulating enough. Even if it does n’t become a generic analysis of differences between culture.

Or the ability to access historical or political sources by being able to translate them before analysis.

Openday to open MFL courses to students from schools with poor grammar teaching you probably need to adapt a Classics degree approach and have a different course / extra year for basically what is ‘ab initio’ even if it is a traditional European MFL. Grammar and MFL languages do not have a solid teaching foundation in the UK so a DC without any access to native speaking will continue to exclude MFLs as degree options.

It’s really not an ‘extraordinary assertion’, Maria. I’m simply making the point that they got a lot out of their education. For all the languages you speak, you don’t seem to have learned to speak English without a degree of hostility.

I would have thought the ability to read and analyse great literature in the original language is stimulating enough.

I think my even my grandmother, who lived in another era entirely and who reread Proust in French for pleasure in her 80s, would have disagreed quite strongly with this! She certainly knew, because she engineered experiences for her own children and grandchildren to do so, that the point of language learning was to live another culture from the inside and to gain another perspective on humanity.