Addendum to: Cambridge University discriminates against children from private schools.

[Marchesman]

"From 2013 to 2023 the proportion of UK state-school admissions rose from 61 per cent to 73 per cent. This increase was made possible by undeniable discrimination against another group of students – those who, whether through a choice made by their parents or a scholarship won by their talents, attended fee-paying schools."

For an insider's perspective on Cambridge University's descent into mediocrity see: "Decline and fall: how university education became infantilised" D. Butterfield, Spectator 26th Oct..

This is spot on!
My cohort worked hard but we also had a lot of petty dramas as does any other cohort and the lofty debates were few and far between. We did have a few but most of the time we were too busy to really sit back and contemplate that sort of thing because we had the next essay to submit.
And Cambridge at least long realised they needed to do better on state schools admissions. Getting the brightest means you have to look everywhere not just those for whom Cambridge is offered as an option. My best friend came through on target schools in the early 90s where they did outreach to inner city comps.
My DS is applying to Oxbridge, I'll be happy if he gets in but if he doesn't because another kid deserved it more I'll be just as happy. He's a white middle class boy and he's going to be just fine, no matter what happens. That's, in part, what his private school education has given him... confidence, resilience as well as education. I never paid for it thinking it was a ticket to Oxbridge, I wanted my introvert boy to be better supported than the options I had at state. And that was all. I think some private school parents just seem pissed off that the unfair advantage it used to give you us gone, it's more level now. By no means level though

Ok, I've read the article and it sounds like a snowflake who couldn't cope and quit his job before having a big old entitled moan about it. Not very stiff upper lip or "no nonsense" of the poor poppet.

Good. Imo it doesn’t go far enough to reduce the privilege of a private education .

Just a further note on the crank who wrote the article. Found another one (also overlong and whining) where he complains that "inclusion equals exclusion", there are too many women in Humanities and won't somebody think of the men, and extols the wonders of Ralston College, a nutty private university in the US whose chancellor is Jordan Peterson. So no prizes for guessing where he'll end up. thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2024/hollowed-out-humanities/

i would like to address the issue of firsts. We all know men obtain more of them than women and I certainly don’t accept it’s because men are more intelligent than women. I think for that reason I’d be very very cautious about inferring that those firsts are in and of themselves exclusive indicators of talent. I am not saying stupid people get firsts at Oxford, but I am saying that a lot of people who are just as intelligent don’t and that using firsts as a benchmark is fraught with issues.

They state in the univariate analysis, and with respect to "good honours" (the least useful metric because of the very small number that fail to achieve a good honours degree): "There is likely to be an interaction with the results for the course of study factor, as science courses with lower probability of obtaining good honours have a higher proportion of students from state schools."

It is in the nature of a univariate analysis for there to be interactions. It is the job of the multivariate analysis to tease these out. In this case, as I said, school type was a highly significant determinant of attainment in its own right - independent of all of the other factors that were considered, subject choice, mental health problems etc etc .

In fact school type was as significant as ethnicity or mental health problems. They stressed the need to address the latter two issues but chose not to mention school type. It was only this year that the university quietly dropped its state school target.

Time will tell how this, the impact of career administrators, and other issues raised by Butterfield will affect its international standing. It is mildly interesting that Imperial beats it and Oxford this year in the QS ranking, because one thing is for sure, an aspiration to be simultaneously world leading and inclusive is deranged.

I think ‘inclusive’ is perhaps the wrong word. ‘Acknowledging that excellence may not exist only where we have traditionally looked for it, and may not be exactly in our current image’ is perhaps closer to the mark.

It is not, after all, so very long since the University was convinced that looking for excellence amongst female students and admitting them in fair numbers would bring civilisation as they knew it crashing about their feet. It did not do so.

I think the Spectator guy is still under that impression, tbh, but that's a fair comparison.

I matriculated not that long after men at Magdalene carried coffins to mark the “death of the college” (letting women in).

My grandmother didn’t receive her degree until she was a married mother of 3 as women were not allowed to receive degrees when she took her finals.

Not sure if it has been mentioned already but don't forget the access arrangements available in exams to private school kids. Their parents can buy the best doctor's reports. SENCOs are scared of the parents and will grant rest breaks left right and centre. Extra time, word processors, separate invigilation too. Not forgetting post exam reviews of marking. Being able to afford to pay for every unit to be remarked. The actual exam system works far more in favour if you are a private school child.

@lavendarwillow ,

I think, tbf, that the exam system favours those with money, regardless of their school choice.

But, at private schools, lots of remarking does get done as a matter of course. Basically, if you are close to a grade boundary (upwards) you apply for a remark.

Clearly it’s much easier to get an A in an exam at a private school than it is at a state school. You cannot compare the two - the state A is a better A than the private one.
DD is at a state school. She has to contend with such awful behaviour from other pupils, it rare that the teacher actually manages to impart any knowledge in a lesson - it’s more about behaviour management. Large classes, intimidation if you are perceived as academic, office staff supervising students as there are no teachers, no resources, no supra-curricular activities, mixed ability classes for everything except maths, fire alarms set off regularly, kids whose main aim in a lesson is to avoid working or sometimes to try and smuggle a desk out of the door!
Her school isn’t a bad one either, it’s not eligible for contextual offers.
Oxbridge would be much better off accepting state school pupils as they are obviously going to be very bright if they can get decent grades in a state school.

Have you thought of hunger strike or non violent protest for this blatant discrimination OP, contact your local MP, the King, the ECHR, the United Nations, this can't stand paying for your child's education deserves to be a protected characteristic, my flabber has been thoroughly gasted at such horrendous discrimination OP and you're right to highlight it

I read that article and thought ‘what a plonker’. I went to Cambridge in the early 2000s. As a state school student it was horrible to be honest. I’m sure it’s much better now that kids from Westminster and Wycombe abbey don’t dominate the social scene so much.

I also don’t recognise his description of people debating issues long into the night. Maybe with his colleagues, but not most students. As a previous poster said, it was more about debating who was shagging who/the plot of neighbours etc etc. normal students in other words.

he’s a twat.

A publicly funded institution (which universities are, despite tuition fees) shouldn't discriminate against any unpopular group, regardless of whether the group is protected by equality legislation or not.

It should offer places based on merit, not politics.

People used to be suspicious of left handedness - thankfully not any more.

Left-handers make up only 10% of the population, but a far higher percentage of engineers.

If suspicion towards left-handedness led to Cambridge making a policy that only 10% of engineering offers should be made to left-handed candidates, and as a result much weaker right-handed candidates were offered places in preference to stronger left-handed candidates - to the extent that left-handers were 1.4 times more likely to get a first than right handers (since only the very best left-handers got in due to the prejudice) - then that would also warrant investigation and a demand that Cambridge drop the discrimination. Despite left-handedness not being a protected characteristic.

The question is ‘how is merit defined?’

For superselective grammar schools - also state funded - merit is chosen to be defined as ‘highest marks in 11+’ despite the fact that this favours those who can afford paid-for tutoring / private primary grammar crammers. Even with some tweaks around the edges about priority for PP children (and the fact the Government website no longer makes publicly visible the measure that showed how many grammar pupils were at private primaries), the contrast between %PP at grammars and local non-selectives tells its own story. When the data was last available, iirc 22-25% of Y11s at a superselective grammar had been at private primaries, compared to <5% at local non-selectives. Are they choosing the ‘best’ or the ‘best groomed’? It is interesting that such schools often have a ‘second go’ at selection after GCSEs, and that those they admit at that point (almost all from local state schools, lowering the overall % private) do at least as well, and often better, than those admitted at 11.

Oxbridge COULD define ‘merit’ in the same way - give places to the highest scoring candidates in either their own tests or in A levels. They don’t - instead, they use a range of different measures to try to identify ‘those who best merit a place’, and these take into account some measures of the candidate’s context. Is it perfect? No. But to say that it is easy and ‘better’ to choose some non-contextual measure of merit because then you get the ‘right’ candidates is false.

How is merit defined? Very simply - by performance in Cambridge University's degree examinations, analysis of which concluded:

"There are significant [attainment] gaps between students from Black and White ethnicity groups, Asian and White ethnicity group and a number of disability groups, particularly mental health conditions."

What they also found, and did not discuss in their conclusion, was an equally significant attainment gap by school type. By every metric, students from state schools lacked merit, relative to privately educated students.

If you take the trouble to read their access and participation plans it is very clear that they were admitting weaker students for political reasons:

"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. It is however a measure published annually by HESA to allow comparison between HEIs, and is of high interest to the public, politicians and the media."

@Marchesman ,

What would be interesting is to see data over more years and also data on postgraduates.

Obviously, if you make a contextual offer, you are taking a risk as, effectively, you have a weaker data set. Fewer firsts (particularly if the independent firsts are centred around classics etc) might not matter if Cambridge was catching the truly exceptional students from weaker backgrounds, the future Stephen Hawkings, at the expense of some students who turned out to be weak.

But offers by race and sex, in STEM, are also highly biased. The best predictor of a Cambridge first in maths is sex, with men scoring fully 8% more firsts than women. Do you feel Cambridge should use future degree predictions to not favour girls applications to read Mathematics?

If there's that large a difference between firsts between males and females in Maths (or for that matter Classics), one could easily conclude that there's a problem with the teaching rather than the admission process.

@rhinoc,

I don’t think you can conclude anything from a bald statistic with no context.

There is no point in measuring merit at output and saying ‘you admitted the wrong people’ - you need to be able to identify who should have been admitted by merit to start off with.

Well, no, but it isn't stopping either the Spectator clown or some on here jumping on their particular hobby-horses.

Gets a complete kicking from current and former Cam students here, incidentally: www.reddit.com/r/cambridge_uni/comments/1gbymk1/decline_and_fall_how_university_education_became/

Absolute nonsense. Private school dc have so much poured into them that very average dc excel at exams. This is what inflates things. University levels things finally and for the better.

When i was at Cambridge the private school students were furious about this because they'd been told all their lives how special and better they were.

I would be really interested to see stats for ‘bridging course’ participants vs matched candidates (by background, course and results at A level)who did not have that opportunity. My hypothesis is that those few weeks of ‘demystification / preparation’ might support higher final outputs for those from less conventional Cambridge - entering backgrounds.