Cambridge University discriminates against children from private schools.

[Marchesman]

MN threads persist in claiming that Oxford and Cambridge Universities do not discriminate against private schools. Now two "academics" have written a half-baked book that argues for further reductions in the number of Oxbridge students from private schools (to 10% of the intake).

In 2023 at Cambridge 19.9% of students from comprehensive schools obtained first class degrees (23.5% from grammar schools) compared with 28.6% from private schools - evidence of unequivocal discrimination against the latter at the point of entry.

Cambridge's own analysis shows that British state-educated students already significantly underperform relative to foreign and privately educated British students. If more of the latter are excluded, the inevitable outcome will be that at these universities the best students are foreign, while the best British pupils decamp to US universities.

Is this really what the Left wants? If so why?

Finland has 5.5m and the UK about 70m people.
Finland 8% foreign born population. UK 16%.

It has many fewer people per km than the UK and it is more a country of people where more people are like each other than the UK. I don't think we can really suggest the UK becomes a finland very easily although I would certainly support a return to the original UK welfare state where I used to get child benefit, a personal tax allowance etc etc and where my doctor uncle got a council house in the 1940s because we all paid in and all took (as long as you worked very hard).

Absolutely. It is telling you to read his research and check the references.

I am about a million £s down after school fees, but my privilege couldn't be better. Thanks for asking.

Good for you. It sounds like you’re content with your choices. As am I.

Hope you enjoyed the von Stumm and Plomin paper.

I am not sure what your point is. My children went to a state primary and they spent years and years doing grammar for the SATs exam. That is definitely one of the rules they covered. In fact most primary school children these days could write a PhD when they come leave since the SPAG grammar paper is so extensive. I found when they transitioned from state primary to private secondary they were further ahead than then private primary children because of all the SATs prep. That aside, if you got into a Russell group university, you should not need to have a professional proof reader.

I agree with this.

My third dc went to state until year 9. They were streets ahead of their prep school educated siblings when it came to grammar! Made their lessons super boring at the time but means they can write a very good essay now.

I think what @Kosenrufugirl is suggesting is that the reason a Cambridge first is now 40% more likely to be a student from private school than state school is that the private student can afford to pay for someone to proofread, whereas she couldn't afford to. Implying unfair advantage, undertone of cheating.

I'm not really sure where to start with that!

Perhaps to suggest that most students don't get proofreading - or cheat. And that you attributing your grade to your inability to pay for cheating says more about you than about private students.

Or perhaps (more analytically) I should point out that the Cambridge study OP links to shows school type as an independent variable. Ie wealthier students aren't getting better grades - it's students from private schools. So the difference isn't due to ability to pay for cheating.

Of course you could say that the difference between equally wealthy students from state vs private schools would be explained by the private school students making worse moral choices - but I hope you can see that this would be completely insubstantiated, invented prejudice... and again would say more about you than about private schools.

Or maybe I should simply point out that someone proofreading your essays isn't going to be what makes the difference in getting a first from Cambridge.

I think I'll stick with just saying that's complete nonsense @Kosenrufugirl . Take responsibility for your own success - through your own work - and stop making excuses and blaming other people.

Really, should bar Finland students from UK private schools.

Disgusted that Finland has this great system. Yet privileged still choose UK private education.

Could you please share why you made different choices for your kids? Given that you're saying "siblings" I assumed one of your DC went to state primary and the rest to private prep? Also do I get it wrong that grammars start in Year 7? I'm a bit confused

How many Finnish students take advantage of our private school system? It must be quite prevelant for you to be concerned.

Any is too many if Finland is best education and equal society in the world….
or
just because there is “no private education” in Finland, doesn’t mean there isn’t Finnish demand for UK private education.

Finland has under-class and elites.

Indeed - it’s just a roll call of a bunch of discredited neo-liberal ideas.

This is desperate stuff. You are suggesting the presence of even one Finnish student as a UK private school invalidates some argument you don’t like. Lol.

Lots of parents proofread for their children - for free. My sister's PhD was a FT job for both my parents for a few heady weeks before submission, and that was a generation ago. Private vs. state is a very imprecise measure of privilege.

I am never too worried about Oxbridge and these kinds of issues. If Oxbridge starts producing students who aren't want employers want then employers will recruit from other universities next tier down Durham, Bristol, LSE etc. The free market works pretty well.

On proof reading very rarely one of my children has asked me to read something but I never looked at single bit of GCSE course work ever for any of them so not really heavily involved in their studies (and I paid 5 sets of private day school fees).

Agreed. But the issue is not that high attaining children from private schools will or will not be thwarted. ICL for example is ahead of Oxford and Cambridge this year in one significant world ranking so far, so employers may already be using other proxies for ability.

The problem seems to be that like VAT on fees, it is part of an attempt to deter people from using the private sector.

www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings

Social engineering, with the intention of levelling down education. It's crazy that anyone thinks this is a good idea.

I think that how much harm is done will depend on whether the think tanks mentioned upthread are successful in forcing all UK universities to behave this way (perhaps using government funding incentives) or whether it remains self-sabotage by just a few universities.

Private parents have already shown a very strong preference for the education provided by private school over state - enough to be willing to pay at least £140k in total fees. I think that in many cases, that preference is strong enough to outweigh a preference for a better chance at Oxbridge (Oxbridge is always a gamble anyway) rather than one of the other excellent universities. It certainly is for me.

If all the excellent UK universities were put out of reach, that would be a different calculation. By the time you get to 6th form, a lot of the character development is done. And there are some great state sixth forms, especially if your DC is doing STEM subjects. I'm honestly not sure which way I would jump.

Also, parental preference may be offset by parents giving their children a say in choosing their 6th form education. 15 year old children naturally have less understanding about the personal and intellectual development the parents are seeking from private education. They're more immediately focused on their next step, so hearing that they will have less chance at their preferred University if they stay private could well sway them.

Anecdotally there is some movement from DD's school to state for 6th form specifically to avoid University entrance bias. We'll see whether/how the landscape has changed by the time DD gets to that stage.

By 'preference' , I'm talking in the economics sense - ie what choices I make.

Academics, and writers, claim that there are two tiers to UK education, the upper private, the lower state, driven by a difference in financial resources, and this is the principle cause of educational inequality (whatever that is). This is supported by a conspicuous citation bias in the educational (and popular) literature, and therefore almost certainly a publication bias, and the names that crop up repeatedly have made successful academic careers out of it.

But the "science" behind it is so poor it is hard to know where to start. Is the worst thing about it the fact that the difference in outcomes between the equally financially resourced top and bottom performing comprehensives, is greater than the difference between state and private? Is it that whenever these people list the unequal outcomes between state and private they never take into account that children are unequal? Is it that they make statements based on previous work that when you read it does not support (and often frankly disagrees with) the message that they want to put out? (Does anyone ever read the references when they are reading a piece of educational "research"?) Is it that they entirely avoid referencing areas of research that are relevant to their theses if they are problematic?

One can only hope that proper academics at proper universities recognise this as the rubbish that it is; I am optimistic that they do. Geoff Parks who was responsible for undergraduate admissions at Cambridge did (he is a prof in nuclear engineering) it is possible that his successor did not. If their policy has changed it could I suppose be due to a change of regime, I have no idea how long the admissions post is for. What is your reason for thinking that they have dropped the state school target?

Can you say all that in one simple sentence written for a non-academic audience?

@Marchesman

What would really help is two researches:

• Snapshot cognitive abilities test for a very large cohort at a relatively young age, e.g. Y3, before VR/NVR kicks in at some schools.
• Longer term cohort study over a number of years, starting e.g. in Reception and until graduation or, even better, first 5-10 years of employment. Again, large cohort.

The first is very cheap and easy to run and would give you any slicing and dicing by parental level of income (again, I keep on stressing on income, not wealth), level of education, region, type of school, whatever else. If there is any statistically significant difference in CATS between state and private school kids there there is your answer.

The second one if much more difficult and expensive, but would give you insights in required points of intervention and would either bust the myth or confirm bias about networks/type of school etc.

The issue is that both can potentially lead to some very uncomfortable / politically unacceptable outcomes hence I don't think they will ever be conducted.

I think you are absolutely right about research not being done for ideological reasons, although there are exceptions.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641149/

This paper looks at attainment, although it has significant (discussed) limitations.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303346599_A_comparison_of_academic_achievement_in_independent_and_state_schools

And this, for later outcomes and the effect of networks (despite its misleading abstract).
"Who gets the Top Jobs? The role of family background and networks in recent graduates’ access to high status professions" Macmillan Tyler Vignoles

I think it is worth reading, and you should be able to find it if you dig around. On networks they say:

"When conditioning on a range of background characteristics and potential mechanisms for access to top occupations, networks are orthogonal to socio-economic status; the use of networks is not the main driver of these large gaps in accessing the top jobs by family background"

Very interesting, thank you for sharing.

This research only proves what we empirically discussed here - that there is an element of hereditary intelligence, proven by IQ difference at the age of 2. Then IQ develops based on environmental factors such as parents cultural capital (it's biological process, formation of brain synapses) which results in significant difference in IQ of different SES by age of 16. Research says it's 18 points difference - it's huge.

I'm glad they didn't take type of schooling into account.

This won't be published widely though for the reasons I mentioned above.

Type of school …. or quality of school? Great state school … not great private school, Home school.
High SES in great state school, and the low SES child at same school.
One child had great teachers 5 years in a row, another has poor performers…

It's an interesting read @Fishgish , suggest you spend a few min on it

On environment and social mobility:

"Our results bear on the extensive debate about social mobility, which has largely ignored the fact that parents and their offspring are genetically related. Indeed, the correlation between parent and offspring SES is used as an index of intergenerational social mobility because it is assumed that SES advantages are transmitted environmentally from parent to offspring. For this reason, lower parent–offspring correlations are thought to indicate social mobility."

Whereas in fact -

Equal opportunity will result in relatively greater genetic influence, as reflected in greater parent–offspring correlations: As environmental differences diminish, variation that remains between children in their outcomes will be due to a greater extent to their genetic differences. In other words, heritability can be viewed as an index of meritocratic social mobility."

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907681/?report=printable