This Christmas, another generation of students will be worrying over whether they are going to make it to Oxford or Cambridge. After the Laura Spence controversy, can those from state schools expect a better deal this year?
I don’t think so. The key to the admissions controversy is the notorious interview. The universities make virtually no effort to monitor “rogue” interviewers – and, believe me, there are some – who discount students from less privileged backgrounds. They could easily compile league tables of how many female, private-school and ethnic-minority students each admissions tutor interviews and how many he or she admits. Yet colleges insist on the right of individual admissions tutors to be laws unto themselves. Interviewers are given no training in how to put students at ease and coax the best out of them.
Many grossly underestimate the extent to which private schools train their students for interviews. For example, Sevenoaks School videos its students in mock interviews and analyses their body language. And these students will then be up against students from an average comprehensive, who will probably have had no official preparation and no teachers who have been to Oxbridge. The amateurish and haphazard approach of Oxbridge colleges will have given interviewers no tools with which to distinguish between the best applicants and merely the best-prepared.
Admissions tutors, however, claim that the difficulty is not bias in admissions or in the treatment of less well-off students once they are in the system. Rather, it is that far too few students from the state sector apply. This is a specious argument, since, even when they do apply, state-educated candidates are more likely to be rejected by admissions tutors. In addition, while white students who apply to Oxford have a 38.9 per cent success rate in getting accepted, black students have a success rate of only 22.7 per cent (figures for 1999 applications).
The image of the two universities is not, as the apologists try to pretend, based on some nebulous fantasy that has been created in the public’s mind by watching repeats of Brideshead Revisited. Cambridge and Oxford are perceived as stuck-up, overprivileged elite universities because, much of the time, that is what they are.
If Oxbridge is serious about changing its image, then it needs to change its substance. A friend of mine visited Cambridge as a sixth-former in 1997. Her father is a postman, her mother a dinner-lady, and she had gone through some pretty rough and ill-equipped schools to achieve the highest grades. When she arrived, she saw people dressed in gowns chanting in Latin. She noticed that the majority had cut-glass accents. She saw an advert for a May ball with tickets costing more than £100. “Cambridge just isn’t for people like me,” she concluded. She is now at Leeds, where she has got Firsts in all her exams. The loss is entirely Cambridge’s.
In my first week at Cambridge, I chatted to a girl sitting next to me. I asked her where she was from, expecting her to name a town. Instead, she said, without a moment’s hesitation: “St Paul’s for Girls.” “Oh,” I replied, “where’s that?” She looked at me with utter incredulity, and called to a friend at the other end of the lecture theatre: “Arabella! Arabella! This boy’s never heard of St Paul’s!”
If anything, the familiar statistics for the Oxbridge intake underestimate the preponderance of entrants from private schools. Many students counted as “state educated” have attended a state sixth form after a private education. And that still underestimates the middle-class influence. Most of the students from comprehensives have gone to schools in leafy suburbs, which select not by fee but by house price.
Despite being at a college with one of the larger proportions of state-educated students, I am almost alone in being the first in my family to go to university. Virtually everybody else is from a family that listens to Radio 4 and reads a broadsheet newspaper. Even when Oxbridge is not explicitly public school, it is plainly upper middle class, in both intake and attitude.
Perhaps it is time we gave voice to something that is tacitly assumed by all the admissions tutors I have spoken to: that academic values grow out of middle-class values. The very act of going to university is part of a process of embourgeoisement, a lengthy confirmation in the ways of the middle class. Go into a pub on a council estate or to any building site and the folk will deride the notion of subsidising people to go off and read about theology or physics or sociology for three years.
There was a furore last summer when the black academic Tony Sewell said that black youth culture was partly responsible for the underachievement of African Caribbean children. Yet the problem of a pervasive youth subculture that derides “swotty” values of hard work, dedication and intellectual achievement is by no means restricted to African Caribbeans. A culture that gives more kudos to being able to down ten pints than to getting ten As at GCSE is not a culture that will produce young people who aspire to places at Oxbridge.
It is hard to deny that these values are more prevalent further down the social and economic scale, or that there is little Oxbridge can do to challenge them. But this very conservative argument has given Oxbridge leeway to not even try to eliminate its most grotesque manifestations of snobbery. Yes, perhaps accepting middle-class values is a prerequisite to success in academia. Yet it does not follow that the more middle-class you are, the more successful you will be. And behind all the obfuscation and double-speak, this seems to be the implicit view of many Oxbridge tutors.
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