Thankfully not at the moment, but I get your point.
My original point stands- looking at the social network connections, nothing these days is a surprise with regard to general composition.
Is it the best? No, I think it is elitist and pointlessly or harmfully exclusionary. These are fundamental divisions in society, a glass ceiling that is hard to break through.
I went there, and I didn't see anything but ordinary people. Something like Classics will naturally skew towards secondary schools that have a Latin class, but apart from that admissions are close to a dice roll among qualified kids. Certainly the impression I got was that dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who would get in.
The place was non-elite enough that I never even realized the Bullingdon Club was a thing until after I left.
As you might expect though, a fairly large proportion of kids came from wealthy backgrounds. Private schools that cost way more than university tuition, that kind of thing.
If you look at how admissions work, it seems reasonably fair: most courses have some sort of entrance test, and then a grilling by the don. There's not a lot of soft questions in those interviews: what's e, let's take the log of a negative number, what's magnetism. Not a lot of cultural fit or motivation questions.
There's also the fact that the dons seem to just have their own set of applicants to look at. My understanding of the US system is you have a whole pile of applicants from which to shape the class as a whole. At Oxford it seemed like your don has 10 applicants and chooses 2 or 3, and that's his class. The rest of the uni does the same and the incoming few thousand kids are just whatever the sum of those little decisions is.
Totally different than the US and much more meritocratic. Steps are:
1. Be qualified to apply. In UK this means at least AAA if not more. Varies by course. US equivalent is have at least three 5s on AP and above 1450 on SAT. This is roughly equivalent to top 10% of uk graduates.
2. Take the entrance exam. Huge weed out. This really separates the grinders vs the smart kids as the tests are based on what you intend to study, but most are more intelligence based and cannot necessarily be prepped for.
3. Assuming you make it past that, you get two sets of interviews. They are testing for the ability to go toe to toe in an intellectual conversation on your subject. This is obviously biased toward a certain "type", but given the small group tutorial teaching, it is really a responsibility of the student to engage this way to provide a good experience for all. No sitting in the back of the room taking notes!
4. There are some additional crazy things like applying to specific colleges, and wildly different admit rates based on the course you choose. But the overall impression I got was that for a well prepared and smart kid, it is much more straightforward than the so called elite US schools.
Yes, plus you can skip applying to all the US schools if you get accepted, because you get the acceptance letter in December.
I went to a high school that sent kids to both US and UK universities, and the US ones are incredibly onerous, not to mention expensive to even apply for. Multiple teacher references, essays that are supposed to be some sort of work of art, requirements to do extracurricular stuff. I did the SATs, got the Oxford acceptance, and just dropped all the US stuff entirely.
Can you expand on that? I would be amazed to find tests that truly measure intelligence and where your score doesn't improve with practice.
I think in general people who know the answer to something misjudge how hard it is to figure out from first principles.
Just look on oxfords website for the admissions test. The TSA test for example is required on top of the math test.
Of course you can train yourself to do these better, but because they are so specific to each major, there is not a test prep industry behind them. So it is a more natural test.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...
Isn't this what was depicted in The History Boys? The extra class for kids who wanted to get into Oxford? Can't quite remember.
In the UK system, even if you do have privilege, you still have to do the same exercises and the same work, and impress the same person to get in.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...