Access to Oxbridge – the most overegged issue of our time
The beginning of January is an exciting time – at least for a tiny sliver of households. Around this time of the year, a number of 6th formers will recieve letters informing them whether they have made it into Cambridge (Oxford manage to get the letters out a few weeks earlier).
Having spent years listening to the constant chatter about widening access – in both the national press and in Cambridge itself – I have decided that the question of who gets into Oxbridge is not the burning political issue that it’s sometimes cracked up to be.
The average state school student who is interviewed and turned down by Oxbridge will probably end up in another very good university. There are serious, serious inequalities in our society. The division between those who go to Oxford and those who go to UCL is not one of them. For crying out loud, half of young people don’t leave school with 5 A-C grades at GCSE. While the only question on the minds of the literati might be whether William gets into Oxford or Durham, they should really stop projecting their own particular anxieties onto the nation at large.
Secondly it is ridiculous to pretend that the question of Oxbridge admissions represents a substantial part of the struggle for class equality. Even if Oxbridge was to become fully representative, this would only benefit a tiny sliver of exceptionally able working class students. Think, 0.01 of the entire young working class or something in that ball park. And if there is one thing that makes me sick it is this fetishisation of the “working class genius”, this speical commitment to those who happen to be of great ability, as though it is more morally acceptable that those of “average” ability be condemned to a life of low wages and boring work.
Which leads onto my third point: meritocracy sucks! Or at least it doesn’t get my passions burning. As a socialist I am less concerned with the question of who get to be a doctor and who gets to be a dustman, than I am about the huge wage differentials that pertain between such jobs. Equality pwns meritocracy.
And finally, the obsession with whether Oxbridge admissions tutors are biased distracts from the serious structural inequalities that characterise the education system. It has been well demonstrated that even a good comprehensive school can massively jack up local prices, making it the preserve of the rich. Perhaps the liberal fantasy of combining equality of opportunity with inequality of outcomes is just that.
Reader Comments
All good points, on the list of national inequalities this figures pretty lowly. However, Oxbridge educated socialists probably are expected, fairly or unfairly, to make a stand on the issue or risk charges of hypocrisy. Given that, I think it’s fair to argue for widening access to Oxbridge as part of a broader assessment of the education system. After all, for all the morons in politics and the media who want to put quotas on offers to public school students, everyone with a brain knows that prevention is much more important than cure. If you want to deal with inequality in the education system, you have to start with the schools. Meritocracy, as you say, is not a particularly exciting ideal. There are many greater tragedies in the world than intelligent working class students being held back by their peers in failed schools. However your analysis places too much importance on economic capital at the expense of cultural capital. Levelling the playing field in the case of the latter is an important parallel to creating egality in the former. For that reason, and assuming we’re agreed that people shouldn’t be financially penalised for not having ‘academic’ qualifications, I do think the re-introduction of grammar schools is essential.
I think Oxbridge access does get focused on in the national press in huge disproportion to it’s scale: I suspect, because an awful lot of national newspaper journalists are Oxbridge educated, as are politicians, and so they tend to use it as an example to score political points as often as they can. In the case of the current government, this has usually been to ignore all of the efforts the university has been making, and trot out statistics they don’t understand, and present them as though they prove a point that they don’t! And why does the government do this> Could it be because this is an area of the education system they DON’T have full, centralised control over? And thus can criticise without attacking themselves? Surely not!
However, while admissions to 2 universities is obviously not an issue that will change the fabric of Britain, we should still encourage smart people from non-typical backgrounds to consider Oxbridge, and to give it a fair and unprejudiced appraisal. Those that apply will be a small number, and those that get in smaller still, but a small step in the right direction is still a step in the right direction.
I’ll leave my rant about how poorly used and presented admissions stats are, for another time.
Salman – totally agree that entry to university is far too late to be trying to deal with educational inequalities, and that much more needs to be done in school. I’m also comfortable with the idea of academic selection, if the demand for it exists. This somewhat fits into my general philosophy/feeling that there is way to much centralised control and prescription in schools, and much more freedom should be given in admissions, ethos and teaching methods. I think grammar schools should be allowed to be founded where there is demand, not forced upon areas.
Worth remembering what Tony Benn always says about Grammar schools:
“The demand for Grammar Schools is a demand for Secondary Moderns”
Grammar Schools were an avenue for a small section of the working class to get a chance in education but the deal was an inferior education for the vast majority of working class children.
So we learn from the mistakes of the past, and where there are grammar schools, don’t under-resource the other schools. Simples!
From someone definitely not a ‘working class genius’ but certainly an uncomfortable social interloper at Cambridge back in the 80s:
I agree that the inequalities of Oxbridge admissions are not the worst or most significant injustices in our society. But like the monarchy, the house of lords and a whole number of other archaic institutions, the symbolic significance of their continued existence refutes the lie that class is no longer important.
As a socialist I would argue anyway that social mobility in a meritocracy is a long way from social justice – and can constitute nothing more than a pressure release valve for inequality.
Journeyman.