Is Doxbridge a thing?

[mids2019]

Oxford and Cambridge both outside top 3 in uni rankings for first time https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15114137/Oxford-Cambridge-outside-three-prestigious-university-rankings-time-London-School-Economics-first.html?ito=native_share_article-top

I think the DM was trying to make a point about social inclusion but given the Times is a reputable university of guide is this a beginning of a shift where Oxbridge aren't undisputed in their dominance?

Durham is a really good university and in 2025 is it that Oxford and Cambridge have competitors?

That was to SmellingSal.

What I haven't seen acknowledged on this thread is the absolute insane difference between success rates and qualifications for different subjects. I've got one applying for each of Oxford and Cambridge this year and I've been sucked into that particularly rabbit hole of stats.

Those getting in for computer science, maths, engineering, medicine etc almost invariably have 3, usually 4, A stars. The offer rate for CS is under 10% and every single last one of those kids will have a stars in double maths etc.

On the other hand, getting an offer for modern languages is nearly a given. At Cambridge they make offers to almost 70% of applicants - apparently you're near guaranteed an offer if you're a state educated boy with the right predictions - it says on the site that it's two applicants per place but in terms of offers (as opposed to acceptances) it's far higher. Of course you then have to get the grades (A star AA) so it's not like it's easy, in fact around a quarter of those with offers don't go for whatever reason.

The harder STEM courses also require additional tests. Someone up thread said all but four courses at Cambridge require a test - I don't think that's true. All the humanities don't.

The super clever, often non-white, kids from state schools or less advantaged backgrounds are not applying for classics or music, they're all applying for these hard courses. It also makes a difference to the success rates for individual colleges - a lot of stem courses and they'll look more competitive.

@Muu9whilst the outcome for alk medical students is becoming a doctor, those who have gone to Oxbridge or London medical schools are more likely to do pass their post graduate exams first time and start private practice. Make of that what you will

Selection bias? Oxbridge working their students harder? The Oxbridge interviews doing their job of separating some of the smartest from the rest?

Yes my son achieved 4 A Stars, A star EPQ in related subject, fantastic TMUA grade, awards and real passion for computing was rejected after interview stage, the offer rate for the college he applied for was 7%. He's quiet but very personable and explains stuff so well. Non selective state school. He got 4 other great offers though, but again we knew for Computing there was a chance he could come away with no offers as.so competitive. I suspect most of the other 93 % of rejections were also to incredibly talented computer scientists who will thrive elsewhere as well.

Exactly @Mapletreelane and I expect that had your son decided to turn his v clever brain to Anglo-Saxon or a foreign language, he'd have probably smashed it. But, quite rightly, he's far better off doing the subject he loves at one of the many other great universities.

The more the Oxbridge hegemony is diluted, which it is by kids like your son flourishing elsewhere, the better.

If you go into the weeds of the admissions stats, the majority of humanities students don't have three A stars. Now of course it's obviously the case that A levels aren't an exact proxy for intelligence, but this idea that everyone's got 9s and A stars is really not true and that the spread of able students is far wider than is sometimes perceived.

I went, years ago, and it was a truism that most normal people arrived with massive imposter syndrome because the far cleverer kid they were at school with had been rejected. Then they met some of their fellow students... they really weren't all towering intellects.

I heard this Times Uni ranking being discussed on LBC radio and the woman who compiled it was saying that Oxford and Cambridge are still obviously more of an elite brand in the U.K. and internationally, but the reason Durham, LSE and St Andrews are above them in this table is that they scored better for student satisfaction.

I was amazed because some years ago, LSE was notorious for poor student satisfaction at undergrad level. It's a mainly postgrad institution anyway, with something like 80% overseas students, living all over the place. Students felt like staff were unsupportive and there was not much of a social hub at the main uni site. It's the reason my DS and his friends didn't go there!

Maybe LSE has worked really hard to combat their poor student satisfaction reputation? Sounds like it's working?

In the Complete Uni Guide, Cambridge is no. 1, and Oxford No. 2.

In the QS Global Uni Rankings, it's only ever Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and UCL that feature in the top 10, alongside Harvard, Stanford, MIT and ETH Zurich.

In these international rankings, LSE comes quite low (about 50th), Durham lower than that and St Andrews is about 100. Edinburgh and Manchester do better than LSE in the QS Global Uni Rankings.

The other thing is that St Andrews is tiny compared to UCL or Oxbridge and LSE is also small at undergrad level, relatively speaking. So in rare cases of students getting in to Oxford and not St Andrews, it's more likely to be a matter if quotas and limited places rather than anything else. It's the same with Edinburgh, which has quotas for Scottish students, internationals, etc.

The other variable here is overseas students who are again clustered in hard subjects and who bring in both additional money and help maintain the international reputation.

Throw in a preference amongst many super bright students for Cambridge's broader NatSci approach over Oxford subject approach, and Cambridge's very mathematical economics course over Oxford's PPE or E&M (actually two very different sets of applicants) and there are some real pinch points.

School advice over a decade ago was that the competition for economics at Cambridge/LSE/UCL and Warwick was intense. (Imperial is now added to the mix.) DS was good enough so he should apply to all four, accept whichever place he was offered and have a gap year as a fall back. He was only offered LSE whilst a classmate was rejected by all four but got Cambridge on reapplication. Yes there will be some dazzling stars but for many it will be performance on the day.

We are very lucky to have access to a number of outstanding Universities with strong international reputations.

LSE have been working hard at their student satisfaction. In the past they were not helped by students seeing it as a badge of honour to ensure they remained at the bottom of the table, but equally they have just emerged from a huge building programme. DS spent his four years on a building site, but now they have a cluster of lovely new buildings centred around a pedestrian area and student centre giving it a real campus feel. They are also working on getting Houghton Street pedestrianised, with a couple more buildings to come.

Kings is equally impressive effectively taking over the newly pedestrianised section of the Strand.

LSE were doing tours during London Open House weekend. Worth looking out for.

One thing that seems to hit student satisfaction is if the course is demanding, and both LSE and Imperial push their students hard from day one. I suspect student satisfaction would be very different if the questions were asked 10 years after graduations when career opportunities and a level of nostalgia had set in. At a, many decades, LSE reunion we were asked for memories. Top of the list was Passfield Hall food, followed by the paternoster lift in Claremarket. Utterly awful but somehow over time it had become a fond memory.

The ability to think independently rather than pass a levels

My daughter found a table of students accepted by Polar quintile. Only LSE and Durham had a double figure advantage for those from the most deprived, and also had double digit disadvantage for those from the most privileged.
Which seems to indicate they are getting something right.

and also had double digit disadvantage for those from the most privileged.

What is their definition of the ‘most privileged?’

Life isn’t about everything being equal. There are lots of kids who fail GCSEs and don’t sit A level - should they get to go the Oxbridge too in order to be fair?

Elitism has become a dirty word but we should aim to have universities that represent the elite at research - that research brings jobs and money to the uk. It in order to develop ideas and discoveries at the fastest pace you need to have the best minds in the subject bouncing ideas off each other.

Just 5 private schools, Eton, Westminster etc plus the Cambridge Sixth Form College take up more places at Cambridge than 22,000 state schools. Hardly evidence of prioritising state pupils!

I think you may have your numbers a bit wrong here. If not, I would appreciate seeing a source for this claim. This is what I have seen which is somewhat different:

The eight schools with the highest number of Oxbridge acceptances had 1310 between them over a three-year period, while 2894 schools and colleges with two or fewer acceptances had just 1220 acceptances between them.

www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/AccesstoAdvantage-2018.pdf

So this is a comparison between the most and least successful schools not a comparison between the top dogs and everyone else (many comprehensive schools and 6th form colleges do send several pupils to Oxbridge each year).

Didn’t a Cambridge professor leave relatively recently because he felt the standard of students was slipping? Isn’t that why Cambridge stopped their ‘positive discrimination’ entry criteria? You can’t lower entrance criteria (via xyz means), and expect the same elite output. Probably why they are not as top of the leagues as they used to be. Expect further push back in future, when money / research is affected.

Hardly surprising five private secondary schools have more offers than all state primary schools though is it?

Sounds like bollocks to me. An Oxbridge professor quitting because of the caliber of the undergraduates is like me switching apartments because the leaving my job because the front door got squeaky. Sure, it's a minor hassle I need to deal with to do my job that just got a little bit more annoying, but it's hardly something to quit your job over. Far more likely he made it up to cover the actual, potentially more embarrassing, reason he quit (or rather, was strongly encouraged to quit).

Edit: it's a classics professor. Why is it always the classics professors?

Or maybe he felt the same ethos that pushed ‘positive’ discrimination was more broadly a problem in his department?

Perhaps because some of the old school Classics tutors are very against teaching state school students who have to learn the classical languages in the first year of uni, because of Latin and Greek having been taken off the state school offering almost universally. It then takes quite extraordinary ability for one of those students to be able to compete on the same footing as the students who arrive from the private sector already able to read history and literature in the original.

There's a lot of grumbling in the right-wing press about lowering standards and it always comes back to classics because hardly anyone does them or wants to do them any more. Young(ish) fogey Harry Mount was wailing in The Spectator that he'd studied Greek and Latin since he was seven so obviously would be superior to the comp oiks who started when they got to uni, Which isn't quite true, he might have more reading behind him but they still might be more talented classicists. In any case, I doubt any professor who quit Oxbridge to go to ie Durham or even - say _ Harvard would find a bunch of Jacob Rees Moggs who'd read all of Thucydides in the orginal. Some subjects just don't get the uptake.

Cross post with Chocolatetriflefortwo.

Arguably, for the above reason, there is more of a gulf in Classics. Not necessarily because of innate potential; purely because of the handicap for state school students of arriving with no prior exposure to Latin and Greek.

Jacob Rees Mogg read History not Classics. A better example would be Boris Johnson who was a Classics undergrad. Unfortunately, despite his towering intellect and immensely privileged Eton education, he only managed a 2.1.

And who has just removed Latin from the state school curriculum? As it was starting to get traction, and interest.