State school oxbridge bias

[confusedmommy]

Hi, come March 1st, we are very likely to be in the fortunate position to be able pick between a top independent boys school in london ( KCS or St.Paul’s ) and a grammar school ( Tiffin or Wilson ) for my DS. The choice will be a difficult one for us. We can afford the fees but not without some sacrifices. Meanwhile I’m hearing that oxbridge is beginning to favour state school applications more so in recent years. Is this really true ? And if yes, is this only true in Oxford or is this trend seen in other top Russell group universities too. Given grammar is a realistic option for us, I am wondering even more if independent is the right choice for my DS ( who doesn’t really have a strong point of view personally )

The reason rich clever DC apply to Oxbridge is maybe a better chance of getting in. Harvard is 5%. Oxbridge is better then that.

@TizerorFizz - is that the % for international students?

I just do not understand how someone can say giving top uni places to overseas students doesn’t impact the employment and earning potential of UK resident students. The vast majority of Oxbridge undergrads become lawyers, medics, accountants, teachers etc etc and not academics. They feed directly into the middle class professions and the highest tax brackets which we then all rely on, including the education and health systems we do have.

You cannot compare Oxbridge acceptance rates to the Ivies. The Ivies have zero prerequisites for applications. Oxbridge makes very clear what the required A-levels are for different subjects. A very weak student can apply to Harvard, they cannot apply to Oxbridge. Also, from the 2016 Harvard admissions lawsuit, we know that nearly 50% of Harvard applicants have zero or near-zero chance of being accepted.

The acceptance rates are therefore not comparable.

International students aren't taking the place of UK students, they are ensuring we survive, it’s that simple.

Indeed @DaddyPhD

How many times do I have to say it?

1. International students are admitted under a separate quota from UK students.
2. International students do not "take places" from UK students.
3. International students subsidise all UK undergraduate & postgraduate students.

and as a consequence of point 3:
4) If we did not admit international students we would have FEWER places for UK students, because the fees UK students pay do not cover the costs of even a Humanities degree.
5) International students are often more qualified for places at our top, research-led universities (and there are far more of them than Oxford & Cambridge) than our UK applicants.

That is before we start discussing the huge advantages to UK students of a mix of home and international students (attested to by many PPs on this thread).

The UK has a world class education system, particularly at secondary & tertiary (HE) education levels. Instead of exercising your little England exclusionary muscles, why not exercise your brains to see the educational, political, and cultural advantages this system brings UK citizens?

If you want to be absolutely neo-liberal & instrumentalist about it, there is MONEY in the soft power of a UK university education for the very talented international students who seek to be educated in our best universities. I know from assessing Commonwealth University postgraduate scholarships, that they all go back to their home countries to use the education, tools, and networks they establish here in the UK to make changes. And if we do it right, they remember the UK as a place which nurtured & trained them.

BTW, I'm a senior academic and I've served in leadership roles in several universities (all RG or research-intensive), worked in the HE systems of 3 very different countries (including UK), and at national & International levels in scholarly associations for my discipline. I do know what I'm talking about, unlike @Cosyblankethottea

The reality is that Oxbridge is now more interested in social engineering than accepting the best candidates, and the brightest applicants from the private sector are effectively excluded. When the reality kicks in three or four years from now then employers will start valuing candidates from the better public schools with degrees from other universities more highly on the assumption they have been the victims of social engineering. Likewise a state school candidate with a run of the mill Oxbridge 2:1 and no meaningful addeds on their CV will be treated with caution. The market will respond to the terrible situation facing applicants today.

The blunt discrimination at play now has to be balanced against the long-term upsides of private secondary education, which are to a significant degree a function of maximising the prospects of a child having a close group of friends whose parents come friend higher tiers of the socioeconomic pyramid. That is a consistent key factor that delivers across a broad range of quality of life metrics.

we should be happy that they are applying, so the top universities have a bigger pool to choose from, and that our young people are competing and mixing with the best in the world.

Hear, hear! @wydlondon Particularly this:

It plays a big part in the UK staying relevant globally.

This is so important! Without the soft power we can wield via our educational & cultural prowess, the UK would be a pretty low-ranking developed nation, on the edge of Europe, and nothing special.

@WindyHedges - so the UK’s primary mode of funding elite universities is by your own admission, international students? And that is OK?!

Reminds me when I used to go to Russian museums in the late 1990s. One set of fees for the foreigners and another for the Russians.

Surely there has to be a better way to fund!!! What can senior academics like yourself do in this regard? What can corporates and alumni etc do? What about a stronger information campaign, tax breaks etc - what are the universities really doing in this regard.

Oops sorry. Perhaps “educating the general public” and fund raising is beneath you.. that is left to us commoners, right? You know the commoners who also have an Oxbridge education and also hire graduates, but in the private sector.

It is not the case students are bringing in gold bars or suitcases of cash to pay fees.

How unlike the home life of our dear King.

Wow that is emotional. The only difference now is that the playing field is being levelled a bit and clever state school DC feel that Oxbridge is less remote and more achievable. Hats off to the Oxbridge outreach programmes. A shift towards a fairer system just feels unfair when unfairness has been the norm for so long. Oxbridge applications, for most candidates, are a bit of a lottery and it is just so easy to blame not getting a place on some bigger forces at play. And for the record, in my DC's state school we have children of city lawyers, human rights lawyers, barristers, surgeons and academics as well as those of office admin workers, cleaners, first generation immigrants and refugees ie. society. I consider that a huge positive and far more attractive than keeping my DC within the mind-narrowing constraints of 'the higher tiers of the socioeconomic pyramid'

“we should be happy that they are applying, so the top universities have a bigger pool to choose from, and that our young people are competing and mixing with the best in the world.

Hear, hear! @wydlondon Particularly this:

It plays a big part in the UK staying relevant globally.

This is so important! Without the soft power we can wield via our educational & cultural prowess, the UK would be a pretty low-ranking developed nation, on the edge of Europe, and nothing special.”

You can still do that with 10 per cent of international students at undergrad level if you do pick the very brightest. It is a question of recruitment and time invested.

However, instead the quotas are set to make up the budgets?! Please could you explain this to us commoners.

so the UK’s primary mode of funding elite universities is by your own admission, international students? And that is OK?!

That is not what I wrote. I used the term "subsidise." I did not say 'primary mode of funding.'

The reality is that Oxbridge is now more interested in social engineering than accepting the best candidates, and the brightest applicants from the private sector are effectively excluded.

This is so distorted & inaccurate that I don't even know where to start. Some PPs on this thread sound as though they're Tory bots posting from 55 Tufton Street.

@DaddyPhD - “The grad student situation is dire in the UK, simply we don't have the numbers of UK grads wanting to take up postgrad study, Research is the lifeblood of universities, and research demands the best minds, wherever they come from. We frankly don't care where they come from as the university benefits from their research and in turn the world. We don't care about jingoistic bullshit and leave those concerns for lesser minds.”

The private sector in many other countries simply values a PhD more than our top banks/law firms/accountancy firms etc.

Have you got a statistic on how many post grads take up academic careers both in UK and abroad? It is simply a cultural anomaly that you don’t get a higher pay grade in the NHS/law firms/accountancy firms in the UK than in many other countries.

The role of universities is most definitely to also educate the general public. In fact, primarily so at undergraduate level. It isn’t about nationalism, it is about public duty.

Universities are in the business of knowledge and research.

Why should I or @WindyHedges spend our time fund raising instead of research and teaching when other countries fund their universities properly?

THAT IS THE DOMAIN OF GOVERNMENT.

The comments on here do not reflect the reality of applications in 2022 as shown by "The only difference now is that the playing field is being levelled a bit and clever state school DC feel that Oxbridge is less remote and more achievable. Hats off to the Oxbridge outreach programmes. A shift towards a fairer system just feels unfair when unfairness has been the norm for so long."

This is nonsense. The playing field has not been "levelled", if there was a case for levelling at all, it has been tilted to the point that the sixth formers with expected straight As or A*s at the top public schools are being told not to bother to applying to Oxbridge in the current climate.

The Times ran a story about an applicant to Catz in Oxford when the subject access and FoI data showed it was impossible for the private school applicant to make the criteria set for entry and all the slots went to those with bonus points added to their poorer academics. And it not just Oxbridge, it turned out this year that students applying for law at Edinburgh could never met the entry criteria even with straight A's if they did not have added application points attributable to socioeconomic factors.

What matters most for the nation as a whole is the cohort that form the top 10% of an Oxbridge year. The best from the state sector who are in the category get into Oxbridge and always have done. The best of the private sector in that category are not getting a chance to get in now, being sacrificed to make way for a few fungible candidates who form the bottom 50% of an intake.

And the government’s role in educating the 'General Public’???

In most EU countries university’s role is knowledge and research not 'educating the public'. They are international in outlook and focused on cutting edge research, that’s what Oxford does, Cambridge, Durham, Harvard, Brown, Peking university, et al

If you want stats on numbers of UK grads going into postgrad research, the type of research that gives us medical and tech innovations, teaching method innovations - look it up, it's pretty easy to find out this info for yourself.

PhDs are highly valued by private firms, I don't know what gives you that idea, from my cohort, many went into top positions in private industry, it’s the mugs like me that stayed in academia who are poorly paid, remaining in institutions that are kicked around like a political football.

Its studying for a PhD in th UK that is prohibitive in this country, same as master’s degrees and undergrad degrees- other countries don't have fees or very low fees, they have grants not loans for poorer students, other countries fund uni's properly, because they know education and research is important.

I believe that top public schools are being told that straight A stars is not enough any more and they need to be able to supplement with supra-curriculars etc. to stand a chance. Surely if they are so able and motivated, that shouldn't be too much of an ask? They should also be able to enhance their PS by leveraging all that networking potential in 'the higher tiers of the socioeconomic pyramid' as you put it. No? I can't see what is wrong with this if they are competing against DC with a string of A stars from a school where the odds of that achievement are totally stacked against them. The public school DC just need to show that they can outperform their context as the others have done in order to be viewed as an equal candidate. And also, Oxbridge don't give out contextual offers, the DC from the more challenging learning environments still have to achieve high offer grades.

There isn’t a bias against private school applicants to Oxbridge. Private school pupils make up circa 26 percent of the top A-level grades and circa 30 percent of Oxbridge places so purely on academics they are still slightly over represented.

All students state or private have to meet the same minimum grade entry requirements for the course.

The only exception is foundation courses which are a tiny fraction of total admissions and are reserved for the truly disadvantaged (pupils living in care / refugees / etc)

Private school numbers are falling because a greater number of qualified state school students are applying following successful outreach programmes.

There is a lot of nonsense spread on this thread

To be fair to private parents the nonsense is spin spouted by their schools. Lovely parents I know who send private have told me their heads tell their students they're at a disadvantage managing expectations and apportioning blame I suspect. Or disinformation.

@BinTheirDunDat Westminster was the school with the highest number of Oxbridge places last year. If your hypothesis were true, how could this possibly happen?

And I don't think for a minute that private school parents the length and breadth of the country hold these views. For the majority, Oxbridge isn't even an end-game or on the cards for their DC. However, even if distorted views such as this are held by a minority, it is damaging, not least for the extremely clever and less privileged DC, who have earned their place and have every right to own it.

You lot do realise that the Oxbridge grads teaching at Westminster and Eton do speak to their don friends at Oxbridge colleges and that is is a network? And that it is not all nonsense spouted by parents tricked into paying fees, right?

There is a lot of nonsense spread on this thread

Indeed. I can't help feeling this thread is the MN obsession with Oxbridge and gaming the system, on steroids.

@Cosyblankethottea “educating the general public” by that I mean that is done at school level, which is another issue. I do not mean universities are not for 'commoners' and I am sorry if it sounded that way. Universities are selective by default, I think we need to concentrate on getting our own students to levels where they can compete with anyone in the world.

You lot do realise that the Oxbridge grads teaching at Westminster and Eton do speak to their don friends at Oxbridge colleges and that is is a network?

So you are accusing academics of corruption?

Just wind your neck in and stop spreading defamatory statements about institutions about whose funding & management you know very little. You're embarrassing yourself now.