There are threads like this every year.
What surprises me is that those concerned about high percentages of privately educated kids are often those from pretty advantaged families themselves. Like most uni applicants, they might not be privately educated,but often their families value education and have given their kids lots of advantages such as access to hobbies, which gives them far more in common with the privately educated than they seem to imagined. It’s rarely those from genuinely disadvantaged backgrounds who seek worried about somewhere having 40% privately educated rather than 25% educated private’s that write these threads. It’s the genuinely disadvantaged who face the very real risk of feeling like being ‘fish out of water’ at uni, because they are exposed to a vast majority with a very different background and cultural experience. It’s not those who grew up in decent if not posh areas and whose parents thought about their education and read to them and helped them access extra curriculars and see going to work as the norm who will find it odd, I Ben if they do meet some people who had considerably more than the norm.
I conclude that adults as well as teens are full of self doubt and concern about feeling ‘lesser’ and somehow it gets manifested in the concerns about private school numbers. Parents don’t like the idea of their kid being with too many people who have had something different to themselves , and it makes themselves feel more comfortable to know their child will be with people ‘like them’ or what they perceive will be ‘like them’. Sometimes it’s a self-defence mechanism and indirect way of discouraging children from taking a risk in applying to top institutions, because they might not really meet the standards to get in. Rather than say this, it can be easier to say not applying is to avoid the ‘snobs’. Because what are the differences between privately educated kids and the usual middle class majority at uni? The differences are not as big as imagined. Most have gone to little-known private schools and live in nice middle class places and have had holidays and extra curriculars - maybe a bit grander than the non-privately educated, but often not v different. And yes, some have had wildly different lives of luxury which are hard to imagine, but they’re pretty few, in the same way those from wildly disadvantaged backgrounds are also sadly few…but people don’t seem to fear having to mix with them.
Teens are naturally quite black and white in how they view things and people. They have limited life experience and must have lived in a very limited range of places and mostly or exclusively known people like them. When they go the scary week that is Freshers, they need to meet people and chat and find things in common. It is entirely normal for people who’ve spent most of their lives in school to chat about where people are from, what course they do etc. If you meet people from a place you know a bit or know people there, they might ask which school to try and find some connections or people in common. Usually just in that first week. The fact some students might not feel they know anyone anywhere else, or overhear such a conversation, doesn’t mean those people don’t want to meet anyone else. If someone overhears someone speak about having a pony, doesn’t mean they are an impossible person to be friends either because they don’t have a pony, in the same way that hearing someone does another hobby you’ve never heard of, doesn’t mean they can’t find things in common. Deciding in advance that certain hobbies or ‘markers’ mean people should be avoided, or whole unis avoided is just daft. And it’s sadder still when parents feed that perception.
As parents I feel we need to help our kids have self-worth - to know they get a place at uni because they earn their right to be there - that they are capable, but also to know they are interesting and funny and worth knowing….and at uni there will be lots of other people with those characteristics too - and what an opportunity to spend time with people ehuu oh be lived in different places and had different experiences, but are all there are able young people studying and living together.
Not everyone can access the most selective unis and there are all kinds of reasons why people might choose one uni over another. But not considering somewhere which is a real top place for your course, because of stats which the press live to publish to stir division and a sense of difference, seems such a shame and something as parents we need to be keen to challenge rather than support.