Suprisingly good idea. Always been dubious over the Oxbridge thing, not out of jealousy, honest, but because it becomes a bubble for students that go there at eighteen.

I'd always recommend other Russell Group Unis for eighteen year olds, if they have what it takes. They seem more in touch with the real world.
http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/our-universities.aspx

I am a sixth year student at an independent school in Edinburgh, which is somewhat of an exception to the national norm in that 25& of school-age children attend a private school. I have already accepted a place to study at one of the top 5 universities in the UK, and the vast majority of my peers have or are expected to gain places at well-regarded British institutions. However, for many of my friends who do not attend private school, the situation is very different.

I agree with many of the comments posted here. The problem is not Oxbridge's 'social elitism', but their 'academic elitism': is it really so bad for the top institutions in the world to refuse entry to those who they do not deem to have displayed a sufficient standard of academic ability?

The reason for the disproportionate number of indepently-schooled pupils at Oxbridge is obvious - a higher proportion of state schools than private schools fail to sufficiently motivate their pupils or to instil in them a positive work ethic. The same story can be seen in the newspapers every year after A-Level Exam Results Day: children from private schools increasingly out-perform those who attend state-funded secondaries. Oxbridge wants, and should have, the best, a disproportionate number of whom go to private schools.

There is a 'scandal' here, but its not one of which the responsibilty falls on the universities' shoulders, but the governmnent's.

@Ali Ray

"The concern here us the assumption that only the well-to-do get into Oxbridge. This may be the majority of students in these institutions."

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at with this point? You state it's an "assumption" that the 'well-to-do" get into Oxbridge, before going on to admit that this "may be the majority". Your point seems paradoxical as it is, but by all means clarify it! It's beyond an assumption that those from backgrounds with more money - i.e. those attending the top private schools and public schools etc - form the majority at Oxbridge, simply because these schools give their students the best opportunities and preparation for the universities, so they're always more likely to produce Oxbridge candidates.

"However, as someone who knows a couple of people who attained the grades to get into Oxford, and certainly weren't upper class

No-one's arguing that everyone at Oxbridge is from "the upper class", simply that those with a family background of 'money', who can afford to be sent to the top private schools, have an innate advantage. As such, they form the majority of students at Oxbridge. That isn't to say they're all "upper class", either.

Like you, I know people that attended both Oxford and Cambridge. We all attended a state grammar school, and they got their on the basis of their academic achievements, certainly. However, there is still a massive bias towards those at the 'best' schools or those with family 'contacts', which allow applicants to plump up their extracurricular credentials. Several of the people I know had this additional advantage.

That's not to say, in any way, that they weren't extremely bright and hard working - and still are, I'm sure. They point is just that someone who is equally bright and hard working but attends the local state comprehensive school has less of a chance at gaining a place at Oxbridge.

"(one guy's parents are teachers, for example), this has been a route to good jobs in academia and the civil service, respectively."

A respectable, traditionally middle class profession such as teaching is hardly someone breaking through the social strata to attend Oxbridge.

"In a time when we worry about social mobility, high achievers from regular lower/middle class backgrounds can do well if they have an Oxbridge undergrad opportunity.

I'd like to echo the points about private schools simply feeding into these universities, where social divisions have already been well established."

I agree that Oxbridge should remain as an opportunity for undergrad students. However, the point remains that something needs to be done to ensure a greater equality of opportunity for those that do not have the money to attend the best private schools.

Jon S. Find me on Twitter - @legaljourno

Why are people so touchy in bringing things out into the open and discussing them? What are they frightened of? Better to talk than carry on through the centuries with heads stuck firmly in sand.

A very conservative approach it is.

My initial reaction is: genius! But I'm sure someone more perceptive than I will highlight why this would be a bad idea in some respects. Does this have any implications for funding?

One college - All Souls Oxford - does this already, by the way.

One possibility would be for the government to impose a new tax on oxford and Cambridge of say 25,000 pounds a student from families with incomes say of over 50,000 a year. That way the taxpayer would not have to pay and those who can afford it would then pay the same market price as students at Ivy League universities such as Dartmouth. That way would also encourage it to take people from poorer backgrounds or else. They might even manage to take a few more from racial minorities.
Danny Blanchflower

No.

Is Oxford all that wonderful for undergraduates? In terms of resources, yes. However, my education consisted primarily of reading out a weekly essay to a disinterested tutor in his dressing gown. Well, at least the books were easy to get hold of.

Oxford and it's admissions system is not the problem. The problem is that many state schools are unable or unwilling to educate their pupils to the required standard.

Take the 'black students' debacle from a few days ago - only 452 reached the required standard in the entire country, and Oxford gave places to just under ten percent of them. Given that other elite universities are available, that seems entirely fair.

Where do you get the idea (mentioned in the second paragraph) that Oxford and Cambridge somehow offer less teaching than other universities? In my experience I have more hours of contact time and more work per week (on average) than my friends at other universities. The divide between research and teaching is very finely but very well balanced, as anyone who has ever been in a supervision/tutorial will tell you.

@Tim

A bit like the BCL is already becoming in practice? Interesting point.

The problem is funding. At the top end of universities, research is subsidised by undergraduates. This will be even more the case with fees going up and central govt funding going down. At the moment, Universities collect £3000 per student per year. For arts and humanities students the only benefit undergraduates get which postgraduates don't is teaching - maybe 10 hours a week including lectures, seminars and office hours. So the bulk of their money is going to fund post-doctorate research - money that would be gone if it was limited to postgraduate study.

This is not a problem - the benefits undergraduates receive at top universities is a direct result of the top academics they're funding. Moreover, interactions with students help academics to hone and improve their own work - a quick look through the acknowledgements of most academic work points to this.

Postgraduate students also benefit from undergraduates. Most postgraduates are only able to fund themselves by teaching undergraduates. Remove the undergraduates and that's a major source of income allowing less affluent postgraduates to study there. It will also remove the interaction which, as previously said, allows research students to hone and improve their work.

In short, universities without undergraduates would be poorly funded, even more exclusive and would produce poorer academic work. There's a reason why academics tend to work in Universities rather than museums or private studies, and its not for the nightlife.

wouldn't this make it even more elitist? I came from a bog standard comprehensive and got into Oxford (albeit a LONG time ago when it was free) and I am thankful to this day that I was an undergrad there.

Blanchflower

"One possibility would be for the government to impose a new tax on oxford and Cambridge of say 25,000 pounds a student from families with incomes say of over 50,000 a year. That way the taxpayer would not have to pay and those who can afford it would then pay the same market price as students at Ivy League universities such as Dartmouth. That way would also encourage it to take people from poorer backgrounds or else."

You mean a bit like "fees"? Tell it to the Lib Dems.

Interesting question to ask. For me though the Oxbridge thing is just a symptom. We've had a more equal and socially mobile society before. The electorate as whole has not seen it as a priority though.
The shift towards the right that's happened in UK politics for the past 30 years was always likely to produce a more unequal, unfair society. Until we are honest about that issues around opportunity hoarding and a lack of social mobility will continue as part of a broader picture of unfairness

Agree with David Blanchflower. I come from a privileged background and recognise that it was absurd that my friends from poorer backgrounds paid the same fees as I did. I should have had to pay through the nose to go there so that people who couldn't afford it could have got in for free. Would require a more nuanced tax that David proposes, however.

Oxbridge's "bias" towards privately educated pupils isn't Oxbridge's fault.

It is the fault of a state school system that exists to deliver an education that is so dumbed-down there is little room for Oxbridge aspiration among its students.

Unless you are lucky enough to be at one of the top state sixth forms in the country - as I am - you will receive very little support in applying to Oxbridge, and you probably won't have entertained the idea in the first place.

It's an interesting idea. One that was proposed many decades ago and quashed.

As an alternative another or a few more leading universities could be picked to be funded in order to be equal to Oxbridge as "leaders" and put the cat amongst the pigeons. Eg UCL, Imperial, Edinburgh?

It's not just about being smart enough though; it's about being smart and well qualified enough. Universities aren't equipped to take on uneducated raw talent; they expect students to turn up knowing the basics of their subject and how to study effectively. That should not be an unreasonable expectation to have of a functioning school system.

So someone (or astroturfer?) moans about liberal values destroying all that was good and pure but then raises a China threat?

So China's education system huh? So let's see... they exclude everyone from a certain class from even remotely near-decent education; poor rural registered children, if they got a chance to go to the worst schools in Britain it would be much better than what they have and very few of them will ever even sniff in direction of entering an university, let alone be enrolled as a student. Urban children have much better opportunities, they have the chances to go to a Chinese university, but of course Chinese universities have the problem of censorship, so anything opinion based is going to be 2nd rate and the plagiarism, well they don't care, that makes most graduates undesirable to the world at large. And then the children of the elites, they get taken to the US, UK and Hong Kong etc to study.

So yeah I don't get the point raising China? Where the majority of people are stuffed before they are even born, just destined to cheap dirty jobs for most of the day like their parents and grandparents before them, even if they have the potential to be the most intelligent person on the planet.

Not to say I disagree with the grammar school arguments but I really hate arguments and terminology that sound like they are lifted out of terrible newspapers and the use of scaremongering examples of something they know nothing about.

@S.L.S

Astroturfing? In whose name exactly? I'm sorry to brust your conspiracy bubble but I'm afraid I'm a simple soul acting alone and with no agenda.

I was rather under the impression that China is a major economic threat to the global economy. It's speeding headlong down the path of industrialisation moving hundreds of millions of people from the country to the city to participate in its economic expansion. Surely it's no surprise that there are still hundreds of millions living in rural communities with little educational opportunity. Education for all won't happen there overnight.

However, what is happening is that the Chinese are hothousing the best minds that they can find, providing them with the best educations they can, including at western universities and with zero hand-wringing about equality of outcome, etc., etc. The Chinese wipe the floor with everyone when it comes to mathematics and I daresay they will be doing the same in fundamental science and engineering too.

If we're not maximising the home grown talent we have we don't stand a prayer in the decades to come. You can consider this to be some kind of astroturfing scaremongering if you like, although I have no idea who would benefit from it.

Your contributor misses the point, as many comments point out: the social division begins in schools. This is not just because posh private schools have cultivated broad highways to Oxbridge, but also because of the poverty of aspirations induced in too many state secondary schools. I give thanks that I had a state grammar school education, where half the staff had proletarian roots and reverence for intellectual achievement and argument - what Oxford was looking for. Hence I, a railway worker's son (OK he was ASLEF, so aspirational working class) and a school friend, a bus driver's son, matriculated together, plus an AEU member's son and a couple of girls from school who were a bit more middle class (being working class AND female were 2 obstacles too much I suppose). Then - 1959-60 ane the '60s - 55% of entrants at Oxford were state school pupils. Not much different now, but that is a measure of how badly the state school system has deteriorated. In those days 75% of state school pupils left at 16, so Oxford colleges had to choose from a much smaller pool of state sixth-formers than they do now.

@Steve: "Frankly, unless you are willing to countenance a state school system which provides selective grooming of the most promising candidates from a fairly early age, then the privately educated will always have an advantage. They have the family background, the motivation, the expectation and the support."

Hmm, interesting. The highly selective German system, which varies wildly from Bundesland to Bundesland, has middling outcomes in the recent PISA OECD study. Finland and New Zealand, who have been performing well in those evaluations for over a decade now, have comprehensives up until at least age 15 (Finland).

Much of the mobility within the German system came from allowing alternative paths to university, where young people could start out in an apprenticeship and get their university entrance qualifications later.

But that's a tangent.

I'm surprised that not more commenters have pointed out that there are other universities that are just as good as Oxford and Cambridge, if not better, in quite a few subjects. Maybe it's not the quality, but the networking that is decisive, and if it's the networking, well, then making both universities postgraduate only won't change that - it will only shift the same class-based selection biases up to the master's and doctorate level.

Also, as Jon Park argued, undergraduates are the lifeblood of universities, and an institution would need quite a few very expensive Master's programmes to compensate for their absence.

No! i'm a state school student at oxford and there are loads of us! if your smart enough to get in you get in! simple!!