Nadim wading into Oxbrdige entrance debate

[mids2019]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10793175/Thinktank-Oxbridge-discriminating-against-grammar-schools-unfairly-impact-black-pupils.html

DM article here so maybe a bit of bias and the article is a little confused.

I get the impression that our new education Secretary (who is a big fan of grammar schools) has started to notice the diversity policies explicitly stated by Oxbridge in its attempts to take in students from comprehensives/deprived backgrounds.

I noted his dislike of discrimination of any form and I am taking this as a warning to top universities not to engage in activity which may be perceived as positive discrimination.

I understand that if grammar schools seem to be a link to allowing ethnic minorities to gain Oxbrdige places this is a good thing however it would seem not many from grammar schools are truly deprived socially so the situation is complex.

Do you think the government should be involving itself with this vexed issue of leaving to HE leaders.

(I think Nadim's inbox maybe overflowing with a mail's from concerned grammar/independent school parents whose children may not have got their university of choice)

The 'top unis' can't just 'open more places' even with more money. They're in specific locations which can't be stretched beyond a certain point. Surely the solution - which is happening - is for the quality of other unis to continue to improve. Many of course are already excellent for many subjects; even when dd had her Cambridge offer she still had to think long and hard about accepting that vs Southampton or Manchester.

(I'm also not sure how many more ppe graduates the country really needs but that's a whole other topic!)

And the other thing that's needed is more funding for vocational courses, not necessarily full time uni places - there's too much snobbery and focus on places and courses which won't serve all dcs interests and talents well.

I agree that one if the problems is the lack of quality vocational training. There was also a lot to be said for local HE colleges and specialist teacher training and the polytechnics. Bundling everyone into the same ‘university ‘ bracket isn’t helpful because they serve different markets.

we need more sandwich courses and block release and more students living at home . The original expansion in the fifties and sixties which mimicked the Oxbridge model was specifically designed as a means of social engineering. The idea was to put a lot of clever young people together, and remove them from their working class routes. This is clearly completely outdated and makes university education incredibly expensive not because of the academic fees but the living costs. You do not need to live 500 miles away to do a degree at an ex college of HE and these new universities do not need to be all singing all dancing shadows of their older peers. Just look at what is happening at Wolverhampton and Roehampton , the financial model is not sustainable.

It also affects university towns in not altogether positive ways. When I went to Durham for example almost everyone lived in college for three years, the terraced houses in the town were occupied largely by real people doing real jobs. Now the university has expanded, almost all the houses are occupied by students , the rents are ridiculous. It’s all very well building more colleges for first years but where are they going to live in the second and third years. The town is now more like a theme park than a real working city.

Of course they can. Oxford absorbed at least 300 more undergraduates in 2020 when they were forced to. Though that's a drop in the bucket. As for opening up vocational places - yes they should do that too, but the fact remains, we have more young people aspiring to uni and a huge swathe of them to top uni's - Oxbridge and RG. Adding more vocational spaces is not really competing for this cohort's attendance. As for more PPE students - why not if that's what they want to study? How does anyone know what a DC makes of their degree? Should we also give up on Classics or sociology?

That’s interesting as the Oxbridge stats, when you break them down, say 2 groups are over-represented at the institutions in relation to their proportion in the typical students age group and that is those of Chinese and Indian origin. The group that is now under-represented are white students (slightly) and those of black African and black Afro-Caribbean backgrounds (significantly).

Lentils they were not absorbed without a great deal of knock on problems for existing students and applicants who followed. Serious cuts and compromises were made to accommodate those extra students.

Yes, the issues caused by that 'drop in the bucket' rather tend to prove the point of the difficulties of expansion.

Admissions stats for DD's Oxford course for 2021 entry detailed a vast increase in applications over time, and admitted they didn't have the capacity to accommodate proportionately increased numbers, or indeed any more entrants than they had 4 years ago. The department has a relatively large complement of lucrative overseas undergraduates, and I'm sure they'd admit more if they physically could.

many of them are smart and hardworking and being punished by their lazier peers, and not all of them are privileged and white at all.

They are all privileged in some way by attending a private school. That doesn't exclude other disadvantage, but attending private school is a huge advantage.

No-one is being 'punished'. Broadening access isn't 'punishing' people who previously would have had even more of an advantage than they still do.

The problem is that it ‘feels’ like that - and the group of people affected have very loud voices, much louder than the voices of the historically disadvantaged.

I don't feel my 5 children were punished in university entrance. Even those at the most academic private schools were not in the top 25% of the class (one lawyer daughter with mild dyslexia who has done incredibly well and works very hard was in the bottom of 5 sets of maths GCSE and still got an A) so did not bother to apply for Oxbridge either because they did a realistic assessment that they probably would not have got in or it felt like quite an effort with a low chance of getting in, even when it was suggested as an option by the school. My twins felt vindicated as 100% of those applying from their private school in their year to Oxbridge did not get a place anyway including one of their best friends, so that probably does show they were right not to bother to put in the effort.

Nor do I think any of the 5 had problems getting to the university they wanted due to more state school applicants (other than oldest son who missed his grades and even then that was probably lack of effort, so he got somewhere via clearing and is perfectly happy with his choices).

On the point above about post war efforts to help working class children, my parents both passed the 11+ just before WWII. My father cuold only afford a 3 year degree (as his father was almost 70 by then - 1940s) so read science first at Durham. After his degree grants came out so he was able then to apply for 5 years of medicine and my mother's teaching wages helped keep him as a student - he was going exams to age 30 - an expensive business.

However that grammar school system which we abolished in my native NE England in the 1970s but a few areas of the UK keep did as someone said above work on the basis you picked off a few of the brightest (my mother's Cert Ed might not seem very impressive but she knew so much about everying and I even found over 140 IQ mensa tests she did in her 50s so clearly she was clever is part of the reason we all did so well both because we have our parents' genes and because of our upbringing) who were then introduced at 11 into that different world of academic work (many of our family were things like coal miners and my mother's father was killed at the shipyard where he worked in an accident when she was a few months' old - her mother never remarried).

I thought the Sutton Trust found that comprehensives do no worse for children than grammar schools however so that change (no grammar schools) in theory has not removed a route out of poverty if Sutton Trust is correct.

It is certainly hard to compare privilege although people seem to like to say things like everyone white, everyone a biological male, everyone at a fee paying school has that element of privilege. May be we can do algorithms which help work it all out as I am sure the universities do eg if your parents beat your or your father left or they were drug addicts etc etc you get a minus point against the plus point of private school etc etc just as we might do down a posh comp and play up a losing comp with a child on FSM whose parents are travellers. I suppose that is exactly what the universities are trying to do including if your parents went to university rather than lazed around playing computer games all day then the child is regarded as advantaged because it had a harder working parent etc.

Natural IQ is still far and away the biggest determinant of how well a child will
perform in

Xenia your DC applied to university some while ago and none applied to either Oxford or Cambridge, so it's not really surprising that they didn't feel disadvantaged by their privileged education.

You also seem fairly chilled yourself. The more strident voices are the much less relaxed parents, who are clearly very very cross about the whole thing.

I know the school you speak of as I work in a primary that feeds into that grammar, and although many of the students are of Asian heritage, tutoring for the 11 plus n the Pakistani and Indian community is very prevalent in my experience, moreso than in the white community. Hence the high numbers of Asian children gaining places.

Re the increasing places: Oxbridge colleges have a defined amount of accommodation/ seats in the dining hall etc. it was a real squeeze to fit in the extra “pandemic”students. Also, unfortunately, some have not flourished.

Why is there always such a fuss about Oxbridge’s admissions? I never see people beating their breasts about the number of independent students at, say, St Andrews or even The Royal College of Music

There have been threads about policies at other universities - comes to mind this one about Edinburgh www.mumsnet.com/talk/scotsnet/4718290-non-deprived-scottish-students-barred-from-uni-places

Just laughing wryly at this thread being revived - wondering how many ed secs we have has since the thread was posted!

I think the issue of why we end up somewhere based on where we came from etc, nuture, nature etc will always be endlessly fascinating to people and how the state or religions try to make things fair (and university is one route through this).

Poverty of aspiration is the great leveller. Parents who talk about Oxbridge entrance, who present it as something to consider...that's absolutely crucial. As is having access to books, and the life of the mind, from early childhood.