The curse of the Oxbridge reject

As offers and rejections go out across the country, Britain needs to learn that Oxford and Cambridge are just universities.

By Bethany Elliott

What are the two most important events in history? I’ve been pondering this since 2009. Asked during my Cambridge entrance interview by a don who was wearing three cardigans at once, I panicked and stumbled upon the death of Lenin (I don’t know why either) and a local government act so obscure that I no longer recall its title. Asked to furnish an explanation, I respectfully declined. It’s nice to retain an air of mystery.

The rejection was not entirely surprising. The next morning, my school invited freshly minted Oxbridge acceptees on stage for a Soviet-style round of applause that seemed to go on for days. I applauded in the darkness. What could be a better hazing ritual as I joined the Society of Oxbridge Rejects? With Oxford offers released yesterday (14 January – Cambridge applicants have another two weeks to wait), our club will be accepting many unwilling new members. In the 2023 admissions cycle, Cambridge made just 4,553 undergraduate offers out of 21,445 applications, while Oxford selected 3,721 from 23,211.

Welcome, newcomers! Tissues and wine at the door; you can never leave. You won’t spot many famous faces inside. Robert Rinder, Steph McGovern and Sara Ali Khan are among the few to reveal their rejection. Most keep themselves to themselves. When I contacted eminent individuals I suspected of being Oxbridge rejects – based, honestly, on them having gone to Durham – I met mafia-like omertà. Why take refusal so seriously? It can be the first time overachievers, their lives spent cruising from one academic success to another, hit the rocks of failure. “It absolutely broke me,” YouTuber Ruby Granger posted, having decided aged 12 to study English at Oxford. “I let my Oxford application define my self-worth.”

This is because, in British society, “Oxbridge” is so much more than a pair of universities. One ex-hopeful tells me that visualising Oxford as her future helped her survive school bullying, rejection making her question what it had all been for. For Rinder, Oxford meant “drowning out the working-class noise of my childhood. Then it vanished.” There’s embarrassment in failing where friends and relatives succeeded or depriving family of their first. Rani, a 34-year-old biologist turned down for medicine, told me: “After moving to the UK, Dad worked endlessly for the ‘Cambridge Fund’. When I didn’t get in, I felt I’d failed him by not providing the fairy-tale ending to his life story.”

Hopefuls have often been primed for a third or more of their lives. With schools competing on entry rates to lure prospective parents, education can become a hothouse. Turned down for English and French over a decade ago, Ethan reflected: “Applying to Oxbridge is the culmination of the school system where your trajectory feels predetermined and you apply not based on what you are passionate about but what you are good at. Rejection throws you off your axis totally, as you feel that this future you are entitled to has been taken. You probably shouldn’t have been applying for that subject, but admitting that calls into question everything you’ve been told for seven years.”

The career ahead seems more of a slog now. In 2019, the Social Mobility Commission found that “Oxbridge graduates make up around a quarter of the elites, compared to less than 1 per cent of the population”. In 2023, a Cambridge lecturer told hopefuls that their choice of course did not matter, since that illustrious stamp of approval alone would propel them into any field. With some candidates therefore gaming the system by choosing less popular subjects to gain acceptance, rejects can then find themselves wondering about the value of three years of land management in less charming surroundings than the banks of the river Cam. Besides, with Oxbridge portrayed as the gulf separating career failure and success, there is always that nagging question of how one’s life might have gone differently. While Oxbridge has countless influential alumni, there are few eminent rejects to look up to.

Much hinges on the dreaded interview, an experience marked by brainteasers so impenetrable that one published collection was titled “Tell Me About a Banana”. One English candidate presented with a poem – who did not recognise one term but spotted references to black leather trenchcoats – gave a confident treatise on the motorcycle accident at the heart of the text. The term was “Zyklon B”. His interviewers never corrected him, but patiently scribbled down notes, presumably for the SCR anecdote afterwards.

Interviews have taken place online since Covid. Previously, proximity to lecturers and rivals offered myriad opportunities for disaster. Ethan remembers his interviewer sighing and remarking: “When you speak French you make a sound that doesn’t exist in the French language.” Ethan sought to endear himself by mentioning his teacher, an old acquaintance of the don, “only to meet the blankest expression I’ve ever seen.” He subsequently tried to console himself by recounting his difficulties to another candidate, who replied: “I didn’t find it too bad as my family has a villa in the south of France.”

Regret-fuelled reapplications are common, candidates’ persistence revealed by Cambridge’s advice to not apply more than three times. Oliver Dobbs applied to Oxford six times across various colleges and courses before getting in, telling the Times that it is where he feels “at home”. Not everyone can keep hammering at medieval doors until they open, though. Many must take their pens and pocket protectors to other institutions, which bear the ignominious “Oxbridge reject” label.

The Durham student Rachel Tong Ng posts regularly on TikTok about her university’s “Oxbridge reject” status. “The title is openly discussed among students and treated as a joke,” she told me. “It’s not a bad reputation. All it says is that students are academically qualified to get into Oxbridge as almost everyone achieves fantastic A-level results, but sometimes they just don’t do that well in the interview.”

She is not the only one putting a positive slant on refusal. Claudia Vulliamy went viral in 2017 after making art from her rejection letter. She said to me that she was so amused by its “delicate tone” that she messaged friends: “I have an urge to make a pretentious artwork out of my Oxford rejection letter.” Why did it garner such attention? “I realised from people’s responses that it was interpreted as an act of optimism and pride in the face of rejection. There was a lot of love.”

Let’s take inspiration from Claudia. For a country so fixated on two seats of learning that we follow the elections of their chancellors like the football league, it’s time to remove the stigma of not quite making the team. Anyway, rejection teaches resilience better than any university. Within a year of completing postgraduate studies at Oxford (a victim of the reapplication reflex) I was turned down to be an air hostess, too short to reach the overhead lockers. Now that’s rejection.