Oxbridge: Blatant social engineering - not admission according to potential.

[Marchesman]

Despite resistance from some tutors, Cambridge University’s Access and Participation Plan 2020-21 to 2024-25 includes a target to increase the proportion of UK state sector students that is entirely separate and independent of aims for POLAR4 quintiles 1 and 2. Formulating admissions targets for the University of Cambridge’s Access and Participation Plan (2020-21 to 2024-25) | Cambridge Admissions Office

The university's own research in 2011 had "found no statistically significant differences in performance by school type, and there was no evidence of the phenomenon observed at other UK universities of state sector students outperforming their privately educated peers" https://www.cao.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.cao.cam.ac.uk/files/ar_gp_school_performance.pdf Subsequent data shows that students from independent schools performed better in examinations than students from state schools by 2015/16, at a level that is highly statistically significant: https://www.informationhub.admin.cam.ac.uk/university-profile/ug-examination-results/archive

Therefore, APP 2020-21 to 2024-25 makes no attempt to justify the state school target on the basis of student performance. In fact the only justification given is: "We recognise that school type is not a characteristic used by the OfS or contained within its Access and Participation dataset; we recognise too that the state versus independent binary masks a range of educational experiences…[however] each of the under-represented groups identified within this Plan appear in far greater numbers in state maintained schools, as do students from low income households who are not identified by any of the measures currently available to us."

The result of this can be seen in https://www.cao.cam.ac.uk/files/attainment_outcomes.pdf

In final degree examinations: "The per cent mark remained lower for the three secondary school types: • Comprehensive (estimate = -0.70, SE = 0.19, t = -3.63, p< 0.001); • State grammar (estimate = -0.98, SE = 0.19, t = -5.22, p< 0.001); • State other (estimate = -0.87, SE = 0.20, t = -4.32, p< 0.001)" To put this into context, these are the figures for students with "cognitive or learning difficulties (estimate = -0.88, SE = 0.33, t = -2.67, p< 0.01)"

Regarding the acquisition of a First: "The probability of the outcome remained lower for the three secondary school types: • Comprehensive (coefficient = -0.20, SE = 0.06, z = -3.13, p< 0.01); • State grammar (coefficient = -0.30, SE = 0.06, z = -4.81, p< 0.001); • State other (coefficient = -0.24, SE = 0.07, z = -3.57, p< 0.001)"

Selection according to potential? Really?

@Marchesman - so, you are saying that you think Black and Asian ethnic minority groups have even less potential than state school students, then?…

@SoTedious
This is such bollocks - Cambridge know that state v private is not particularly meaningful, but they are targeting state as a way of reaching under-represented groups that they can't otherwise find.

Quite clearly they are not. Their SES target combined with outreach to encourage able applicants from SES groups who are detered from applying does that. 'State v private' is sufficiently 'meaningful' to Cambridge for them to want more of the former and fewer of the latter as a result of their admission process regardless of their performance regarding SES intake. Otherwise only the SES target would be necessary.

The stupidity of this blunt approach is evident from a closer look at the private sector where the proportion of pupils in the bottom two SES quintiles (10%) is equal to the proportion that Cambridge admit overall from the bottom quintiles - and bursary/scholarship pupils will almost certainly be overrepresented among Oxbridge applicants from private schools. If Cambridge really wants poor bright children regardless of where they went to school they should stop discriminating against private school pupils.

They could then perhaps only take those private school pupils who are on scholarships/ bursaries. That ensures they’re not “missing out“.

@Walkaround

No, they are similar.

Ethnic minority and state school pupils don’t have less potential - just less opportunities due to many reasons and prejudices - many displayed on this thread!

Are girls still underrepresented at Cambridge?

https://thetab.com/uk/cambridge/2021/02/03/female-students-make-up-a-minority-of-undergraduates-at-almost-all-cambridge-colleges-145789

Are they doing anything about that?
By girls I mean cisgirls. Just for clarification.

Blatant social engineering - not admission according to potential

For a very long time Oxbridge intake was heavily skewed towards privately educated DC from privileged backgrounds. The acceptance and perpetuation of that as the norm was effectively 'blatant social engineering'. Were you outraged then OP? Saying that private school DC are being discriminated against is just nonsense. Private education still confers significant advantage in the university application process. It's just that the previously ridiculous level of advantage has been slightly eroded. What's so unfair about contextualisation?

https://www.equality.admin.cam.ac.uk/files/equality_information_report_19_20.pdf

According to this, the BAME stats in UK undergrads look quite good to me? I am more worried about underrepresentation of women given that they actually do better at A level than men? What are they doing about this?

Ethnic minority and state school pupils don’t have less potential - just less opportunities due to many reasons and prejudices - many displayed on this thread!

Agree with this. Some of the backgrounds of my students are horrific. Getting up, ready and in on time ready to work is an achievement. Having access to decent laptop/ wifi.

On top of that working part time jobs around their timetable. Eg McDonalds check their timetable and plan shifts accordingly. But it could mean a student is working till midnight and then have a class at 9am the next day. It’s not sustainable.

And that’s just financial. Add abuse, family pressures, living in a hostel, fear of violence, disabilities, SEN.

Yet these students maintain a hope that they can achieve and be successful. Many need a lot of encouragement and support. Some do very well and even if they were offered a place at Oxford/ Cambridge then they are carrying all that stuff with them. It’s never a level playing field.

What do you mean by that, @Marchesman . It’s not what that report you linked for everyone said.

*They are targeting state as a way of reaching under-represented groups that they can't otherwise find.

@Marchesman
Quite clearly they are not.*

It's literally in your OP that that's why they are even considering school type. More state school students = more from the under-represented groups not identified by measures currently available.

If you are really arguing that if they want to encourage more poor people to apply, Cambridge should target private school students because 10% of them are poor, or even look equally at state and private schools, then that's a bit dim.

Do you have a link to the research showing that 10% of private school students are from the bottom two SES quintiles? I find that really hard to believe. In any case, someone is paying those fees - a lot of those DC will be funded by grandparents, so not exactly from backgrounds of disadvantage and deprivation.

.
In the most recent admission cycles, Cambridge accepted more females than males into undergraduate programmes

In both 2020 and 2021, more than 50% of accepted undergraduates were female. In 2020, the male:female ratio of accepted students was 48:52 and, in 2021, the male:female ratio of accepted students was 49:51.

If there is a gap in performance between private and state schools only opening up in the very recent past, does that not coincide with increased efforts to encourage people from less advantaged backgrounds? Or does @Marchesman think state school students of all backgrounds have always had “less potential” than privately educated peers, regardless of economic background, and it is only just recently, miraculously, showing up in statistics, and has nothing to do with the colossal disadvantages that some groups have to overcome in order to achieve compared to others?

*intelligence and attainment correlate strongly with SES ......

Two-thirds of the attainment advantage of independent school pupils is attributable to pupil characteristics not schooling. Put simply, on average they are brighter from the start, unpalatable as that may be to anyone with a bigoted turn of mind.*

The advantages of being given wealthy begin long before any baseline can be taken
How come grammar school students who are urely selected on their acade.ics, do worse than independently educated.
How can a pupil whose education is funded maybe10 x more than another child not be at a massive advantage.
Why would independent schooling even exist if it did not buy advantages that going to a state school would not?

@Marchesman just can’t tell the difference between privilege and potential. If their eldest child went to a comprehensive, maybe it’s because they want to pull up the ladder in an attempt to ensure their children don’t slip back down again?

The ( former?) VC of Cambridge, not so long ago, said that the category ‘ State educated ‘ can no longer be held to be representative of socio- economic status or class.
I truly cannot understand why anyone would argue with the current 70:30 (ish) intake of ‘State: Private educated’ entrants-although I’d like to see a higher percentage of students from households flagged by IMD measures and also stats that show the percentage of those in receipt of a full student loan.
I say this as a (lone) parent of one of the ‘mythical creatures/token bursary ‘ students that had a 100% scholarship/ bursary to attend private school from Yr7, from a region that has the lowest applicants/ entrants to ‘Oxbridge’ as well as performance in public examinations.

And an island owned by their mother. My heart bleeds.

When it gets to 93:7 ratio get back to us. With 7% of children going to state school that would be fair.

Except it is up to 20per cent independently educated at Sixth Form. So the gap is closing more and more.

It is good to see that the BAME admissions at undergrad home are so robust now (more than 25 per cent) and that girls admissions are up too. These policies do work but as the educational landscape keeps changing, they have to keep adapting. I remember reading that white working class boys are now the most educationally underprivileged so hopefully things will change for them too.

(I have never said my non-Oxbridge children aren't lucky to have me as a mother! for all kinds of reasons)

I’d rather you give what percentage of the 93% ‘state educated’ students that you’d expect to come from households on less than 25K? In the current 70:30 split at Oxbridge?

Did you read the piece or just the headline? It's a bit silly - as it says
the proportion of male to female students at the university as a whole is 51.1 per cent to 48.9 per cent.

Because there are 2 women's colleges, and one which was just women till very recently.

? @ErrolTheDragon - I read that article and this official report. Surely if there are 2 female colleges there should actually be more girls overall if the rest of the colleges were 50/50? https://www.equality.admin.cam.ac.uk/files/equality_information_report_19_20.pdf

why don’t you look at the stats and report back?! I was looking at undergrad home/U.K. stats for girls specifically and wondering why they were not applying to the same extent as boys when in actual fact, girls outperform boys at A-level. It sounds like this issue has now been addressed although potentially there are still a higher proportion of girls at other Russell group unis.

Surely if there are 2 female colleges there should actually be more girls overall if the rest of the colleges were 50/50?

There's no reason mixed sex colleges should be 50:50, what matters is the overall intake. You're maybe forgetting that there are open applications and pooled students. The existence of colleges with specific requirements - sex, or age for the mature students - obviously skew the ratios of who is left for the other colleges.

@ErrolTheDragon - you are not addressing the very specific point that girls outperform boys at A level in the U.K. yet were previously underrepresented at Cambridge at undergrad level, quite significantly compared to other Russell Group unis. I am assuming the underrepresentation was most stark in STEM subjects, that is exactly an example of the kind of issue they need to fix to make admissions fair. It would be the same if it were, for example, discovered that LGBT were underrepresented or BAME (latter two now not being underrepresented).

If it came to light, for example, that overseas fee paying students are going to be male heavy at undergrad level for cultural reasons and then U.K. girls lose out to keep an overall balance, personally I would be outraged.