Why are there more places for classics than computer science at Oxford?

[delicatedonkey]

Came across this quote from Rachel Reeves in today’s Times, “There are many more places at Oxbridge to study classics than there are to study computer science, and the number of children applying for computer science [means] it’s very hard to get in. Whereas if you apply for classics, there’s a much higher chance. We should be expanding the courses that businesses say that they need people to have the skills in.” Why in the 21st Century, with technology and AI becoming increasingly important, is this the case? It is absolutely imperative that a breadth of humanities subjects should continue to be taught but there does appear to be a real imbalance here in terms of places available and offer rates.

UK QS and the Times rankings are a joke. CS courses here are not near the standards of CMU, UCB, MIT etc.

In the US you can apply to unrealistic choices as it doesnt take up 1/5 of universities you apply to. If in this country you could apply to unlimited choices, and both Cambridge and Oxford, you could guarantee acceptance rates would be lower. Therefore I dont think its as easy to say that It would be much harder to get into MIT than Oxford leading by acceptance rates alone.

This isn’t affected by how many universities one applies to

Er... yes, of course it is, so that's a valid point.
A U.K. student won't be apply to dozens of US ones though. And then there's funding...

@ErrolTheDragon ofc Imperial is elite - has tougher acceptance rates for many courses than at Oxbridge - and world-leading research, but it doesn’t offer humanities subjects so wasn’t relevant to the point about balance that RR was making.

There are 43 places for Comp Sci and 100 for Classics but realistically that’s across 3 different courses (Latin, Greek and dual language)

but it doesn’t offer humanities subjects so wasn’t relevant to the point about balance that RR was making.

If she was thinking of balance only in term of Oxbridge rather than the whole uni sector or just the most elite ones then she's being idiotic.

@DEI2025 thats worrying then if that is the case. I have no idea. What can we do to improve it? Isn’t this a critical area for our further economy? Surely requiring more focus and investment?

For UK applicants, it is much harder to get into MIT than Oxbridge. Same for the applicants out side US.

Ironically, and rationally I’m sure RR MUST know this, those Classics undergraduates are subsidising all the hugely expensive STEM degrees. Without huge numbers of cheap undergraduates, universities can’t afford to teach STEM. (The “we need to raise university fees urgently” conversation is a whole different thread!)

Besides, other less vaunted universities are facing having to cut subjects from their Classics offering. Isn’t Cardiff being forced to drop Latin and Greek? Bet they’re not dropping CS.

Apart from all that, education cuts have removed Classics from almost all state schools and have forced it almost entirely into the private sector, which is terrible.

I had no idea at the time how lucky I was to go to a state school that offered Latin, and to be able to study it at a small, low ranking university with absolutely no concept that it might be endangered until many years later.

I generally think well of RR but I didn’t like her remark. I thought it was divisive, implicitly separating out those posh Tories who do Classics at Oxford whilst sipping champagne from progressive, hardworking MC who are prepared to roll up their sleeves and do the work the country needs.

As @WetWednes says above, this is a false dichotomy and furthermore it perpetuates old stereotypes. RR herself is an Oxford PPE graduate - another posh stereotype of a degree (I am not knocking its worth, any more than I would knock Classics) - and although I am not British I don’t believe that’s a UC accent I hear, so she especially should know better.

It wasn’t her best line

My own “anecdata” on this is that I know 3 people who got a first in CompSci from Cambridge in the late 90s / early 00s. Two appeared in “Richest 30 under 30” lists. I can’t find the other on any rich lists so sadly not gazillionaire (what a failure! 😂) but seems to be the CTO of a pretty large company in America so is presumably living significantly above the breadline. None are working as academics.

The two people I know who got 1sts in Classics are now both academics. They look like they are doing really well but are not going to be appearing in any rich lists soon. 😂

why would anyone go to Oxford for Computer Sciences?! They are not at the top of the tables for it.

Maybe they're sticking to what they know - classics

But Oxford CS are top of the table - no 1 in The Times World Ranking 2024 of CS Departments, that is. No league table is perfect but this is a fairly holistic and about as good as any

I agree with @poetryandwine but I have to say, and I know this is a little left field, but as an example of Oxford's slow progress into the 21st century, it wasn't until 2022 that the School of Oriental Studies was renamed as Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
And the word "Oriental" was on the general "don't use" list culturally for quite some time before that.

Is it?

SOAS hasn't changed its name.

Probably quite hard to rebrand somewhere known by its initials.
I reckon that rather than losing 'oriental', 'occidental' should be used more. For no other reason than they're more interesting words.

It's silly to suggest that Oxford should be offering more vocational courses. That's not what it's about. If you want to become an expert in AI you'd be better studying maths anyway.

The bigger issue is that subjects like Classics are typically the preserve of private school kids. My state school didn't even offer Latin let alone Ancient Greek.

My DD was lucky to go to a state school offering Latin, and she did Greek from scratch at Oxford. There is also an option to do both Latin and Greek from scratch, presumably recognising that plenty of students aren’t offered it at school.

SOAS is a good example of also not catching up to modern usage to avoid imperialist racist terms. However, they can probably get away with this abbreviated version as a far less noticeable use of the word.

SOAS is just called SOAS now (not an acronym) because of the oriental word.

And yep there are state school students who study Classics but it's not the norm. Just googled it and in the years 2012-2019 (latest data I could find) 67% of Oxford Classics students were privately educated.

Software Engineering jobs, computer science, data engineering, modelling, machine learning, AI research, these kinds of jobs pay very well in the industry, with excellent perks and extras, time off, flexibility etc.

The people who would be qualified to start on the track of teaching these subjects at top universities would be so well paid and treated in industry that most universities cannot attract them into the role.

I don’t necessarily disagree, but why?

Personally I prefer C to O and would not put UCB in the same class as CMU, MIT and Stanford.

QS is silly. No league table is perfect but The Times’ criteria aren’t bad

I had no idea at the time how lucky I was to go to a state school that offered Latin, and to be able to study it at a small, low ranking university with absolutely no concept that it might be endangered until many years later.

And lack of Latin scholars has an impact on other areas of study and research. A vast proportion of the historical records of Britain and Europe were written in Latin, at least up to the Reformation, if not later. If no-one can read Latin, no-one can do any research using these records. And that has a knock-on effect on books on medieval history, and teaching of the subject, if there's no new or up to date research.

A good few years ago a local archive office I knew of wanted to recruit an archivist who knew Latin, to deal with the Latin records in its collections. They couldn't find anyone.

I was just going to post something pithy about the fact that Classics at Oxford and Cambridge is particularly elitist as the favoured (or 'helpful') A levels for applicants are Latin, Ancient Greek, Classical Civilisation, Ancient History or a modern language which obviously disadvantages applicants from state school, however, having looked at the split between private and state schooled students in the three year period 2021-23 its now 125 state school and 144 public school. That's a massive increase from previous years. Hopefully Cambridges classics cohort is becoming a little more balanced too.

It's still massively favours privately schooled applicants.