Cambridge University.

[oneteen]

ttps://news.sky.com/story/cambridge-university-aims-to-ditch-most-unequal-title-with-admissions-overhaul-11656787

@eccles

I think those are the Oxford criteria.

The Cambridge criteria are here:

www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/adjustment

and my reading of them suggests that a postcode in a deprived area could tick three of the five boxes - and that is what is needed to be considered.

I am certainly not supporting anyone considering this - but when you see the lengths that people go to to get their DC into certain schools it seems highly likely that some will adopt the same approach to Cambridge admissions.

We're not inner city, far from it. A small town in N Wales.

DD qualifies because she goes to state maintainted school, which is a school that has fewer than 5 people going to Cambridge... in fact I think one pupil has every gone there from her 6th form college.

What the other criteria she fits is, I don't know.

I read today that the lowest income per capita is in - ta da - Bexhill on Sea. Followed by somewhere near Boston in Lincolnshire, I think. And somewhere in Devon. Not the places you'd immediately think of as being "deprived".

Mullofkintire - yes, you were talking about someone trying to game getting an interview in the first place. Afaik while oxford uses those contextual markers, Cambridge doesn't. The Cambridge thing you linked to is indeed the main topic of this thread, but something different- criteria for being allowed adjustment.

Not the places you'd immediately think of as being "deprived".

If you'd ever lived somewhere like that, you might. I nearly mentioned 'coastal schools' upthread...

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-34647827

Well count yourselves lucky if dc don’t go to Cambridge - just watched Cheat on ITV - their students are well dodgy!

But at least the murder rate is much lower than Oxford.

I've not seen Cheat, is it any good? Googling to try to find out turned up a delightfully acerbic commentary mobile.twitter.com/ThatNeilMartin/status/1105215027961839619?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

It’s ok. The husband is the one from ‘humans’ and I still haven’t forgiven him for cheating on Katherine Parkinson from the IT Crowd. Cambridge looks lovely but very quiet. Where did the queues for punts, tourists and traffic go??

Oh joy to be told that your child is disadvantaged in their education - at least by Cambridge standards.

They're not saying that. Going to a school that gets lower than average results/sends few students to university (which are measures of possible educational disadvantage) is only part of it.

There are lots of students who, through no fault of their own, had a harder time. You might have one student who spent his entire school career being taken on expensive trips that supported him in his academic interests, maybe being tutored, being told 'no, don't worry about a Saturday job, here's your pocket money, let me drive you to the theatre now'. That's not comparable to another who is perhaps required to care for a parent or sibling, or who knows she has to do a Saturday job because otherwise there won't be the money, or whose parents can't (and shouldn't be expected to) take her round every theatre in the country to see Shakespeare because that's her great enthusiasm right now.

No one is saying that parents have done something wrong, or put their children at a disadvantage. But it should be possible to recognise why some students had more hard work to do.

SarahAndQuack - there’s a certain sort of cognitive dissonance around “disadvantage” for some applicants/students. They might tick Cambridge’s boxes for disadvantage while not, actually, being disadvantaged at all.

It's not 'cognitive dissonance'. It's more simply, that the objective metrics which can be applied en masse are somewhat crude. If someone can devise better metrics I'm sure Oxbridge and other universities with low participation from disadvantaged groups would love to hear!

The students experience it as cognitive dissonance. They grow up thinking they are middle class and reasonably advantaged but get treated as disadvantaged at university.

A child I know has had this email. They are not a LAC and go to an extremely well thought of grammar school in a small to medium sized town that yes, has suffered in the economic downturn, but is nowhere near the poverty levels of some places. It has nice parts and not so nice parts like many places. They live in one of the perfectly nice parts and actually went to primary in a small very sought after village school just outside the town. The school sends at least two pupils to Oxbridge every year and two years ago they sent six. I know people who applied and were turned down after interview whose studies have been much more impacted than this child's but by circumstances that aren't being considered by Cambridge during this adjustment period. Obviously somehow on paper they meet the criteria but in real life they have had many advantages. I am actually in favour of positive discrimination but in this case it feels a bit of a blunt tool. I appreciate they have to set parameters and I do hope they have a way of sifting through the applications on results day to get the most deserving candidates.

YY, maria, but to be honest, that is true of so very many people!

I agree with eccles that the metrics are crude.

I went to Cambridge having felt comfortably middle-class all my life, having gone to a private secondary school, having two parents with PhDs, and having had my privilege drummed into me. And I still encountered people who treated me as if I were disadvantaged.

One does.

The reason being that, sadly, in this world there are always people who do not realise that their enormous level of privilege is anything but their due.

Likewise, my partner - who is the first in her family to go to university, who went to a school with very little history of sending students to university, who grew up with very little money, etc. etc. - is also, persistently, shocked and hurt when people do not assume she is middle class.

The problem isn't primarily how people feel and what they want to identify as, IMO. You can't do much about that. What you can do is to see if there's a way to give students who had a rough time another chance. It may not work perfectly, but it is better than nothing.

Just to jump in, even though I have no personal stake in this process. I live in Just About Managingsville in Dullshire and my DS's school IS on various contextual offer lists. So, it really is not all inner city.

SarahandQuack - the student I spoke to about this recently seemed to think it was convenient for her university to have her marked out as disadvantaged. She is far easier to “help” out of disadvantage than most.

Well, I suppose that is possible. But, I did Cambridge admissions for different colleges, quite recently. The people who make these decisions are not actually responsible for the media profile of the college. They're not the people who're approached for soundbites about the number of 'disadvantaged' students admitted. And they are - in my experience - actually keen to level the playing field for the sake of being fairer.

I mean, it's not like there are missives from on high telling you 'admit student K, she ticks the boxes but only by accident'.

I can't see the point of admitting a student who'd be 'easier' to help out, just for that reason.

(Though, again, I should say I have seen students who think they are not disadvantaged, who are battling huge things. Students with serious health issues, or with major family difficulties, who are so courageous and ambitious they just don't take into account that they are dealing with more than most.)

Well obviously I have no idea what is/was going on at the university - I just know that this person was quite distressed at one point at being treated as needing special attention because she had some sort of “disadvantaged” label attached to her somewhere that didn’t tally with her own self perception (or, tbh, any kind of reality).

Coming from a North Wales comprehensive, but having a difficult exam period due to illness, I was always greatful for the extra consideration my "disadvantage" happened to afford me. I think one can be too sensitive. If it means you get your place then, brill. The amount of rude public school boys to put you in your place when you get there far outweighs any cognitive dissonance about middle class entitlement you might experience at entry.

Ds is there, at a "posh old" college, and he has never mentioned any rude public schoolboys. Everyone I've met there has been, well, normal . It was different in the past but nowadays most of the students seem to work like Trojans and are not particularly fussed on alcohol.

Anyone seen today's news about the cheating celebrities re Ivy League colleges for their dcs? One of the cheats was pretending to have a disability/disadvantage. I think it will get more common here. As it is I was to find that at local leafy school about 20% of the pupils "needed" extra time. At nearby totally crap bottom of the heap school, only 2 pupils out of entire school year. Go figure.

And one of ds's friends had extra time because of a visual impairment. Ds was a bit taken aback as he hadn't realised that his friend had a problem (apart from wearing glasses). Ds was even more taken aback when the friend had his diagnosis revoked after A Level so he could learn to drive. (Btw the mother is awful - just the type to find a way to cheat...)

The cheating celebrities thing is awful but I’m not terribly surprised. People who work in college admissions are often pretty badly paid, yet the stakes involved in getting into high status universities are huge. In those circumstances there is plenty of opportunity for bribery and corruption.

Irma - my DD is at one of the least posh, newest colleges but has made friends from a variety, and the lab groups mix them up too. Her experience is very much in line with your DS's. As far as I can gather, the only manifestation of class divide is that they mildly rib one lad via the use of the 'petty troubles of the landed gentry' card when playing Cards Against Humanity.

Re cheating - there seem to be quite a lot of checks and balances in the U.K. systems nowadays, not sure they're so easily gamed. And Cambridge is (wisely, imo) not doing contextual offers in the sense of reduced grades.

UK university admissions are harder to game than US admissions because external factors (public examination results) weigh so heavily in admissions criteria. Not that English examinations are immune from cheating, as teacher/examination question provider conflicts of interest have demonstrated.

Yes, maria, but that is very common, isn't it? Surely most people, when they go out into the world (be it university or something else) do find that their self-perceptions shift.

I am not quite sure what the issue is here?

As I say, my DP (who was 'disadvantaged' by any metric - really) was shocked to find she wasn't considered 'middle class'. One of her explanations was that she had been brought up to think that 'working class' meant your parents were in certain occupations, and her parents were on benefits and didn't work, so that didn't apply, and so it seemed quite obvious to her they must therefore be middle class. Another was that, because 'disadvantaged' people never went to university, if she'd got in, that must mean she'd never been disadvantaged.

A student may find their sense of self/identity is challenged for all sorts of reasons. It may not be a pleasant process, and it may end with that student recognising that the people around them have weird hang-ups. But, realistically, it is not a sensible reason to stop trying to level the playing field.