pg thinks this is because of letting in poor people: https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1969334665375813679
I can't take that seriously. Middle class students in the UK would not take on the level of student debt required to study in the US, the sums of money required are vastly, vastly different between the two countries.
Sounds like PG has a hobby horse he very much wants to ride no matter what the facts show.
It's a most excellent insult.
You get the implied snobbery of an upper-class person looking down on their inferiors, whilst also maintaining some street cred via not insulting the painfully poor.
examples: "stupid middle class French boys" "god-awful, self-indulgent prose that only the most basic of middle-class housewives could appreciate" "a speech reeking of vapid middle-class cliches" ...
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Oxbridge has historically admitted a lot of kids from quite a small group of high cost private schools. The fact they’re adjusting their intake to somewhat reduce that is something to be celebrated.
Unless you’re a very wealthy person with kids at an expensive private school in southern England hoping that they’ll get admitted to Oxbridge, of course.
Class isn't tied to money as much as the US.
For example, I grew up poor (as in eligible for free school meals in the 90s poor) however I was one of the posher kids in the school. Class is fucking hard to explain definitively.
UK middle class also includes university lecturers, teachers, various health professionals, graphic designers and so on, most of whom make less than 100k USD/year and some not much more than 50k.
Given the disparity in middle-class household incomes between the UK and the US, I suspect a majority of UK middle-class students would be eligible for some form of financial aid from US universities (assuming Oxbridge vs US equivalents with need-blind + full-need international admissions), meaning their net cost to attend could be lower than studying in the UK.
Very unlikely, most financial aid is not available to international students.
I don't think its possible to have a full student loan from the UK and study abroad the whole time. (you can do a year abroad though)
Oxford University has been discriminating people from independent schools for a while now. To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.
That's not "letting in poor people" as you framed it. It's letting in dumber people, worse students. Lots of that is mainly based on classism (against people from middle class), racism (against white people).
Oikophobia is a cancer, and Oxford getting worse ratings is the direct result of that.
Is it?
Maybe a kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder than, say, Prince Charles with his private school and dedicated personal tutors.
I think the point the OP is making is that getting 4 A*s when you benefit from exemplary schooling and personal tutoring doesn't necessarily make you the best nor the brightest.
Maybe they are supposed to do this, but let's not act like the filter doesn't quite apply the same way if your parents are rich and or well connected. They're however very effective in filtering out bright kids whose parents can't afford the tuition and aren't lucky enough to get a scholarship.
It sounds like you think admissions should be based on how hard people think they worked relative to others.
I’ve met smart people who do poorly on exams. I’ve met dumb people who do well on them.
We could fill the world with Maybes, but the one thing I’ve noticed about people who succeed, is that it’s generally their work that performs, while anticlass-based triage has only made hateful people reach high positions.
In the future, it's going to be a nil argument anyway, as world-class AI tutors are going to be available for every child 24/7 for a penny.
In France, our elite scientific schools recruit students based on anonymous nationwide tests. It turns out most of the recruits come from privileged backgrounds, and I've heard this is more the case today than it was several decades ago.
I'd love to see more diversity in these schools, but I prefer to maintain our educational excellence rather than dilute it artificially with worse students. I'm all for paying tutors to poorer but promising student, but they should be admitted against the same criteria as anyone else.
It's nothing bad that their kids end up good students again.
I think that French system is superior. It gives fair chances to everyone.
An equally, if not more valid cause is that having money makes it much easier to get good condition/tutors etc for preparing for the exams.
It is quite common people say, that something is only a correlation and not causation. But if you can point to a common denominator, that has been shown multiple times, to have a massive effect, it's not likely to be just a coincidence. Genes are this common denominator. Society and habits (for example, protestants vs catholics) are another.
Things that consistently impact the whole population are not just a random process that picks: "You will be clever, ugly.", "You will be pretty, sporty, but will be dumb." It's always genes, society and habits.
Or now, for $20/month OpenAI? Or for pennies through OpenRouter?
Pretty much all French physics Nobel Prize and Field Medal laureate when to the same top school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supérieu...
This is the point of training: the more training you have access to, the better you do. If it was not the case, then the notion of school itself as a way of training people to be able to think by themselves will not have any sense.
And that is just training. Even with the same amount of class hour, kids who don't have to worry about take care of their siblings, of the house chores, or of even having access to decent relaxing conditions will get higher score even if they are in fact less smart.
If you want to build an elite sport team, I don't think you want to artificially put less athletic kids for the reason they had to work harder.
I think the question is why do we need elite higher education at all. Maybe we don't. In my view, we want to funnel the brightest people there and make sure they get access to the best resources.
You are saying that you don't want less athletic kids being accepted artificially. That's exactly the point: the score does not correspond to the talent, you have to correct for it: to compare 2 persons on their merit if they have had different training, you need to calibrate to get a variable that correspond to the merit.
If you are world-class talent (someone who gets to Oxford), you should be capable of similar results as kids from independent schools. Like Joe Seddon did (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Seddon - growing up with a single parent mom, working as a therapist in NHS).
It isn't fair to ask ones to have 4A* and others to have just 3As.
Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A.
And 1 in 83 gets 3 As.
Making it 31 easier for people from state school is discrimination so bad, it should be illegal.
This is an entirely expected outcome. Water will find a way to ground.
I understand an argument saying people will game this setup, but arguing that state school kids are not disadvantaged is indefensible, in my opinion
I don't think thats an objectionable statement.
Also, while not wanting to paint with a broad brush, people I know who work in state run schools are aware of how many other challenges students must face when they're on school grounds. They're fighting more than the test criteria, they're fighting their peers, outside criminal influences, prostitution, drug dealing etc etc.
Meanwhile this stuff is rarer and more swiftly dealt with at private schools because the parents won't have it, and they pay the bills and have some leverage, the financial incentives are different in the model and it shows.
I personally don't have a problem with loosening the grade criteria, even if it's gamed, the candidates are all interviewed anyway, it's not like a free pass, more an opportunity.
At A level my secondary school couldn't accommodate most A level subjects: students were sent off to many different schools for different subjects, and forced to choose which A levels they did based on complicated scheduling arrangements. The only reason some of them could afford to do A levels was because of the £30 benefits payments they received which covered their transport costs (I believe it was called EMA (something like "Education Maintenance Allowance") at the time, but it was a long time ago).
As far as I recall, the maximum possible qualifications from my secondary school was 6 A* GCSEs and 3 A levels.
> And 1 in 83 gets 3 As.
And what if that’s not always an indication of which person is smarter?
Quite the contrary: there is a long history of "objective" tests being shown to be deeply flawed and biased towards certain factors (often cultural and class based), we explicitly know it isn't the case that test scores are purely about some innate intelligence characteristic: there is a reason the rich spend a lot of money to raise their children's scores.
My secondary school claimed to have the best results for Business Studies A-levels in the country. They achieved this by taking the pre-released case study, writing every possible question they could think of about the study, writing model answers, and telling the students to memorise them. The idea that these scores represent some innate intelligence of the student is obviously nonsense if you interact with the system at all.
In the U.S., research shows the SAT is highly predictive of college performance: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-week-educatio... (summarizing research).
How will you explain that Asians outperform white British otherwise, knowing that the idea that Asians and white British are genetically different enough to explain this has been scientifically debunked, or that adopted Asians don't show the same pattern as not adopted Asians?
(and, yes, of course SAT is highly predictive of college performance, isn't that the point: people who get better training get better college performance while not being "smarter", just "better trained")
(sure, we expect that a small difference in "normal situation" should be relatively small, but the samples are defined as biased, so you cannot really rely on them unless making unproven assumptions)
> The cause of [test achievement] differential is not known; it is apparently not due to any simple form of bias in the content or administration of the tests themselves.
https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/APA%201985%20Intelligence%2...
Also, on just pure logic, I don't think the document shows what you think it shows. The document you provide (which is 30 years old, so with just this one, we should not assume it reflects today's consensus) explains that the difference is not understood, and that there is no _obvious_ answer, neither from biology, from group culture or from bias in the tests. In other words: the difference is due to something _not obvious_, for example (but not limited to, of course, it's just an example), _not obvious_ form of bias.
Don’t forget that China chose Confucianism to put a halt to the perpetual, European style wars.
Stagnation was by design, and caught up with them after 2000 years.
Am i objectively smarter than every single other peer who only got 4 As?
(I, for one, am confident I know the answer to this question).
All babies are stupid, I therefore assume?
What about the people who never get the chance to do any A levels? Are they all less smart than those who do?
Still, your grades (and mine) pale in comparison to all these youngsters with an opportunity to get A* grades...
It’s one metric of many. We know that paying for a tutor can change test scores. We know that a shitty home life can, too. They’re just harder to measure.
https://www.schoolmanagementplus.com/exams-qualifications/a-...
Much more on the disparity if one cares to search.
Before you continue, there are governments in the UK that have created formulas to mathematically measure your level of "struggle"...these happen to, in a massive coincidence, benefit areas that vote for them.
The same logic is also being applied within universities to boost grades as managers at universities have quotas to hit from government. This leads to odd situations where a subject like Scottish Law at Edinburgh has no quota for students without appropriate social credit because it is a subject which, unlike other courses at that university, gets largely Scottish students applying so it has to be used to fill quotas. And these students have to be carried to the end of their course because they are there to fulfill a quota.
Sounds like a great idea but, as with everything like this, the assumption is that a university administrator or bureaucrat can accurately measure your struggle...they can't, I am sure the wisdom of this approach will dim when you are being operated on by someone who filled a quota at medical school.
Or ABB for the incoming president of the Oxford Union, the one who cheered Charlie Kirk's murder a few months after debating him in person. <https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2025/09/oxfo...>
An extremely tenuous connection. Abaraonye (and even less his words on Kirk) had absolutely no relevance to the criteria by which the Times assesses universities, thus had no impact on Oxfords placement, thus has no relevance to the conversation.
> To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.
In reply, I provided a recently prominent example of someone recently admitted to Oxford with lower than 3 A grades on the A-Levels. I only mentioned Kirk's murder as context because, as I keep repeating, the person a) only became prominent because b) he publicly cheered said murder c) after debating Kirk in person. I don't know what else you can ask for here.
Perhaps a demonstration of any kind of connection between his grades and his views on Kirk? The implication in what you're saying is that an ABB student is saying bad things than a 4 A* student would never say. I'd love to see anything backing that up. There are plenty of ABB students who said nothing of that nature and I'd wager you could find 4 A* students (albeit with a lower profile) who did.
Absent that connection it just looks very much like you're using the person's grades as a tenuous excuse to bring them up.
If I argued that his comments were an obvious sign that Oxford needs to stop admitting people whose last name starts with A you’d rightly say I was being absurd. But basing the argument around his grades is no more valid.
“allegedly due to ideological fit” says it all. We’re just making stuff up to fit preconceived notions.
Because there’s no evidence for them! They themselves used the word “allegedly”. Asking for evidence to back up an assertion is not rude, it’s table stakes for any kind of debate.
This is what was actually said:
>> I provided a citation for the ABB grades, which is relevant to the comment I replied to.
> An extremely tenuous connection. Abaraonye (and even less his words on Kirk) had absolutely no relevance to the criteria by which the Times assesses universities, thus had no impact on Oxfords placement, thus has no relevance to the conversation.
>> I provided a recently prominent example of someone recently admitted to Oxford with lower than 3 A grades on the A-Levels. I only mentioned Kirk's murder as context because, as I keep repeating, the person a) only became prominent because b) he publicly cheered said murder c) after debating Kirk in person. I don't know what else you can ask for here.
> Perhaps a demonstration of any kind of connection between his grades and his views on Kirk? The implication in what you're saying is that an ABB student is saying bad things than a 4 A* student would never say. I'd love to see anything backing that up. There are plenty of ABB students who said nothing of that nature and I'd wager you could find 4 A* students (albeit with a lower profile) who did. Absent that connection it just looks very much like you're using the person's grades as a tenuous excuse to bring them up.
Do you see how this comes across to a third party as @TMWNN vaguely hinting about ideological picks doing ideological things, you knowing this is what they're doing, but then stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that and just repeatedly saying, "show me the connection!" when you know very well what it is?
This is what worries me about the left. Why must you refuse to even acknowledge someone can hold views antithetical to your own? My best guess is the left has stricter ideological purity tests, and just saying something that can be misinterpreted as accepting anti-left views is dangerous. So, you cannot have an honest conversation with a racist because just saying, "maybe you think some races are superior, but..." could be weaponized in inter-party fighting as a tacit endorsement of racism. And so, you pretend to stick your head in the sand as if racists aren't out there, and the person vaguely hinting at racist things is literally babbling nonsense instead of sensible-through-a-racist-lens ideas.
The issue with this kind of discourse is it's entirely ineffective. I like to say, 'racism is stupid, because people usually only use race as the explanation when they're not smart enough to figure out the actual problem.' The solution to racism isn't to pretend the problem doesn't exist (to deviate from racism for a bit: OBVIOUSLY Abaronye's comments are a symptom of Oxford losing prestige; don't pretend you couldn't make that connection), it's to offer a better explanation. This is why I said,
>>> It's very strange to say, "there's just no connection at all," instead of, "I don't think his lower offer letter was due to affirmative action, but probably due to skills in other areas (heck, he's the president-elect of the Oxford Union!)."
Obviously the right has issues with obfuscation and dishonesty too. They're just worse at it. @TMWNN's vague hints were... anything but subtle. I don't like to play these obfuscation games, because pretty much tautologically they make it harder to agree on reality. But I find it very worrying when calling out obfuscation and explicitly writing down what everyone is already thinking is met by digging one's heels in and moving over to another patch of sand. Why not just actually try to reach common knowledge? Why do I have to drag you around, kicking and screaming, before you'll even acknowledge your actual point?
> My point still stands: there’s no actual evidence for OP’s assertion.
You're making this out to be some kind of final stand, when this is the first time you have even gotten close to putting your point in writing. But which assertion are you referring to? There are lots of implied ones, and no explicit ones (again, why obfuscation is frustrating). I think your point is:
> Abaraonye was admitted on his merits, and there is no actual evidence for OP's implicit assertion that he is an affirmative action admit.
If so, why wasn't this your entire reply to @TMWNN?? It's rude to start a debate without doing your due diligence of actually saying what you mean, and giving your best effort to parse what they mean!
> You're making this out to be some kind of final stand, when this is the first time you have even gotten close to putting your point in writing.
“show me the connection” is a request for evidence. You’re saying I’ve said that repeatedly then you’re claiming I’ve only done it once at the end. What else would “a demonstration of the connection” mean?
> So, you cannot have an honest conversation with a racist because just saying, "maybe you think some races are superior, but..." could be weaponized in inter-party fighting as a tacit endorsement of racism.
I’m not a member of the left wing debate club you have in your mind (if it exists at all) but my starting point when having an honest conversation with a racist would be to ask “what evidence justifies your racism?”, because absent that we’re not having a conversation based in reality.
Same here. The reason I’m asking for evidence is basically what you’ve already said: OP’s assertions are vague at best. Yours haven’t been a lot better. It’s all attributable to “ideology”. Then you say he’s “one of the most prominent voices for that ideology”. What ideology? And by what metric is he one of the most prominent voices?
This is my problem with much of the right: it’s gotchaism. The only reason he’s prominent is because statements he made in a private WhatsApp chat were leaked and circulated in right wing circles. The president of the Oxford students union is not normally a person you ever hear anything about on the national stage. The vast majority of Oxford students don’t even care about who they are.
So the right makes a relative unknown prominent by excessively hyping their statements then turns around and says “look at this prominent spokesperson!”. The union have disowned his comments. He has disowned his comments. And yet, despite his views being endorsed by absolutely no one, he’s still held up as emblematic of a larger, completely unattributable larger movement (the “ideology”) that is responsible for all kinds of problems, apparently including Oxford university’s ranking. And anyone associated with that “ideology” (vague enough that it encompasses whoever it needs to) must atone for the sins of this newly prominent spokesperson they never even heard of a week ago.
That’s why I have asked repeatedly what these supposed connections are. Because when we actually get into the details none of this adds up to anything. And none of it has anything to do with Oxford’s university ranking, the actual topic at hand.
Evidence... yes, that narrowed it down a lot. You're looking for evidence! In a debate! I never could have guessed! Luckily for you, @TMWNN did, and tried to help twice, but clearly they didn't know you were looking for evidence, not whatever they provided.
In case it wasn't clear, I'm being sarcastic. You asked for evidence of a connection, they gave you it twice, and yet it clearly wasn't the evidence you actually wanted because you wouldn't just tell them what you actually wanted!
Also, btw, I never said this guy was prominent. I meant what I said, not something slightly different to further a not-so-hidden agenda.
> debated Kirk [at Oxford]
> cheered assassination of Kirk, which happened within months of debate
Is this really dragging American culture war into things? This is clearly relevant to Oxford
So yes, in that sense it's an useful piece of information.
There was no person being talked about, though. This is a discussion about Oxford's university ranking. The GP brought up a person entirely irrelevant to that discussion and informed us of his views on a topic that's also irrelevant to the discussion.
Entirely depends on what circles you move in. The vast majority of people, especially those outside the US, are not talking about Charlie Kirk at all. Hence my objection to him being brought up. At bare minimum it has no relevance to the ranking being discussed in this topic.
> Celebrating violence against free speech doesn’t make sense for Oxford’s name to stand behind.
And they do not stand behind it. Oxford does not control the students union. I don’t buy any argument that they should somehow be policing free speech in the name of free speech. Makes no sense at all.
The society leaders decided it’s okay for him to do that because of racism based on their most recent response.
Shall we ask the parents of the victims of the school shootings?
BTW why is a god given right not mentioned in the bible?
> To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations—that one 'will rule them with an iron scepter and will dash them to pieces like pottery'—just as I have received authority from my Father. (Revelation 2:26–27)
Any good Sanctuarian[^1] would know this refers to the AR-15, and Americans' right to bear arms.
Clearly this PPE student has some talent for politics to be elected president of one of the more prestigious societies, so it seems right for him to have been given a place.
It's a very bold assertion that A level grades are the ultimate arbiter of "dumbness".
In the UK, there's 1.5 million kids playing footbal. 1:83 ~18000 kids play in any professional club. 1:2600 ~580 kids get to play in Premier League, EFL Championship in a season
What is Oxford doing is letting kids who play in absolutely any club, if they go to state school, or only those who got to Premier League, if they go to independent school.
Again, it's discrimination so bad it should be illegal.
In my sons' prep school, I have seen kids playing musical instruments so good, they could do concerts for a general public. I have seen boys taking GCSEs in Year 6.
And 100% of parents are university educated, often high achievers. Don't let me start speaking about Chinese, where kids come from school 6pm, and they often get two more lessons at home (Chinese + music instrument most often).
Parents in state schools don't put in even half of the effort on average.
I wondered how long it'd be before we'd see "parents who can't afford private education just aren't putting the effort in".
And I say it as someone who went to a state school, just like my parents, grandparents...
Or do they need to just be luckier?
In China, they speak about 996 (working 9am to 9pm 6 days a week; and since we speak about education, Chinese kids often learn from 7am up to 9pm, and when they are getting ready for University, they pull 12–14 hours a day consistently), in Europe, we speak about working only 4 days a week, and whether it is bad for kids to have homeworks.
We all, in Europe, should speak about working a bit harder. Especially those, who are not happy with where they are.
There are plenty of people who are not happy with where they are despite working hard. This "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality is cancer to the problem, it solves nothing.
Talking about a 6 day work week aspirationally is truly odd. There are parents of independent school kids who do not work 6 day weeks, I'd dare to wager many of them. It's foolish and naive to assume that grinding harder is the way to make up the difference.
This isn’t a surprise, because independent schools hothouse children to ensure they peak at a levels, whereas what universities want is students who will continue to improve at university.
I have two children (3xA*, 1A for one and 3As for the other) who were not interested in Oxford or Cambridge. My experience of Cambridge students (I live in Cambridge) is that I have seen many burn out. You also end up with a very narrow program of study which for children with broader interests forces them into a box very early. It’s also a 3 year undergrad program with 24 contact weeks a year, which is insanely short.
My children have gone to Scotland (Edinburgh and St Andrews) which allows significantly more flexibility than English universities offer in choosing subjects outside your chosen degree pattern. St Andrews even lets you change degree completely if you find something else you like.
If you really really want to be a mathematician at 18 then I can see why Cambridge or Oxford might appeal; for kids with more breadth, I think it’s a poor choice.
To some extent, but one of the things about it that I liked was the course I was on was more general than most other English universities. But still, it's not as broad as e.g. a US university, so it's pretty relative. (Basically, for engineering the curriculum is basically 'all engineering' until the second year, where you then can pick specific modules to go into specific areas. Natural Science and Mathematics are similar. But, relevant to your point about burnout, they didn't really cut anything from each area compared to other, more focused courses, so the workload was definitely intense). For me it was a perfect fit because I knew I wanted to go into engineering but I didn't really have a strong preference for which type (still haven't really given up being a generalist).
> My experience of Cambridge students (I live in Cambridge) is that I have seen many burn out.
100%. I "burnt out" (actually, I think I discovered there was more to life than the academic slog I'd spent my entire schooling immersed in) and despite 6 A levels came 94/97 in my third year.
It happens a lot, and my suspicion is that the burnout is caused by the whiplash of going from a high intensity/pressure school environment (where you're likely told you're the smartest person in the room), to a more adult, self-driven one (where it's clear you're not).
> You also end up with a very narrow program of study which for children with broader interests forces them into a box very early.
This depends on the course I think. I did natural sciences which is extremely broad, and allows much later specialisation. Other courses are far narrower d think.
This just isn't true in my area (Physics), the courses at Oxbridge are just as broad but go much deeper than you'd study in another University.
I don't think it's true of written subjects either, from friends that studied there it sounds like the cranking out of essays is weekly or more at Oxbridge whereas my housemates at University were doing termly stuff.
No, it's nowhere near that intense on average. And also, this sounds like it very much is about the quality of the schooling, no? But, if you're also going with 'all kids aren't equally smart', then that would suggest that the results from that stage of schooling are not necessarily indicative of how well they would do at a given university, where there's a lot less support in general.
All kids aren't equally smart. Not all kids can also handle such a regime. It isn't for everyone. Those, who succeed in such schools, deserve not to be discriminated against, because their dad has a Range Rover and tweed suit.
If a good independent school prepares a child better than a state school, the child should have a preference. Otherwise, all those years of preparation and all that talent is wasted.
In other words, the parents should get a return on their investment?
Your child is not entitled to an Oxbridge place over a state-educated child because they might have more potential and ability, they're entitled because you paid extra for it?
Anyway. If Oxford is going to pass on those kids, who are often multiple years ahead of the average, some other university will accept them. And then, this university will likely beat Oxford in ratings.
If, however, you want to convince yourself that the amount of money you've spent on your child's education means they're smarter than the rest, go right ahead and believe that.
Universities don't select for whether a candidate has "reached their full potential". They select for what that potential is.
For smarter. My narrative is more prepared, used to working harder. And also, it's self-selection. If you are not made for that type of education, you are going to leave.
No matter if universities select for potential, or operating near it. Both would be nice. Now, it is increasingly also how they will shape the society if they accept student A instead of student B. And they want to shape society in a way that discriminates against certain kids for who their parents are.
It cannot be understated how much of an advantage someone who went to a private school has over someone from a state school, with respect to the entire process (exams/admissions tests/interview prep).
(I would, in general, be in favor of fixing GCSEs and A-levels. They have persistently moved in a direction that rewards memorisation of particular keywords, something which especially rewards teaching the test, as well as getting easier and especially less good at discriminating the top end of ability accurately. But it's still not going to be enough to remove this difference)
The whole point of the interview process is to assess not just the applicant's past achievements, but what they might be able to achieve if they got their place at the uni. Part of that is looking at the applicant's background, and knowing that even if they aren't currently at some elite high-fee school, they might still have the ability and capability to do well.
I am all in favor of this style of selection. The dark old days of "this kid's dad went to our college, we should do them a favour and let them in" are long gone, thankfully.
Can you point to any kind of evidence that Oxbridge are dumbing down their teaching, or lowering their standards of teaching? I doubt it.
Full disclosure: cambridge alumni, from a state school!
Dumbed down it was not, in my experience. Dumbing down would be a way to up the score on these rankings, though.
My understanding (based on a discussion with one Natural Sciences admissions tutor at one Cambridge college nearly 20 years ago, so strictly speaking this may not be true in general, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't common) is that during the admissions process, including interviews, applicants are scored so they can be stack-ranked, and the top N given offers. Then, for the students that are accepted, and get the required exam results, the college also records their marks at each stage of their degree. To verify the admissions process is fair, these marks are compared with the original interview ranking, expecting that interview performance is (on average) correlated with later degree performance.
I don't know if they go further and build models to suggest the correct offer to give different students based on interview performance, educational background, and other factors, but it seems at least plausible that one could try that kind of thing, and have the data to prove that it was working.
Anyway my guess is that of the population of people who would do well if they got in, but don't, the majority are those whose background makes them believe it's "not for the likes of me", and so never apply, rather than people who went to private schools, applied, and didn't get a place.
(also a Cambridge alumni from a state school, FWIW),
(alumnus not of Cambridge, but from a state school, fwiw)
('people called Johns, they go the Cambridge?!')
Growing up without privilege is (obviously) markedly more difficult than being provided with the best education money can buy throughout childhood.
The students aren't necessarily worse; but they will be unaccustomed to the codified approach that other students from independent schools understand.
The system has been built to serve the privileged.
While you might feel blame can fairly be placed on differing entry requirements; the truth is more complex.
A 'sticking plaster' solution has been lazily applied to address disparity, when in reality, the whole system needs to be reworked.
'Dumber' and 'worse', are not labels that should be used here.
Which isn't true, and never was. I get why we do that with kids in Reception and Year 1. With young adults, like University students, the fact of inequality of potentials of individuals, is just a fact anyone has to live with.
I am clever, but I am a fat, average looking guy. So that's what I have to live with. David Beckham is not so smart, but he is sporty and looks great. He uses his innate talents, and I use mines. Nobody is discriminated by being different.
The system has been built by those with means. And those with means more often than not are clever, hard-working people. That's how you get successful in the first place. And when you are born with great talents, you will go up too. That was the point of aristocrats being replaced by bourgeois, and now people in tech growing no matter where they are from.
Imagine the same person, cloned. Clone A is born into an economically challenged household; while clone B is born into an upper-middle class household.
Now consider whether both clones would achieve the same results at A level.
One could expect the child born into the poorer household to experience more challenges, and perhaps achieve worse results as a consequence.
In this instance, how would it be appropriate to call clone A thick or less intelligent than clone B?
If you are a talented child born to a millionaire, your success is to go from £10M to £1bn.
If you are a dumb child born to a millionaire, you go from £10M to £1.
You probably assume that people with the same skills should have the same absolute outcomes. I don't. There shouldn't be glass ceilings for talented ones, so a son of a carpenter has a right to become a billionaire, or earn a Nobel Prize in science, or apply his talents in any field. But I don't think there exists any socioeconomic system that would deliver more equitable results and had more pros than cons, especially compared to the current system.
Describing a family that doesn't have money as 'bad' is outrageous.
I don't say people are evil for not having much money.
I grew up in a family with very low income (my dad was earning about £12000 per year, when he retired a few years ago, my mum about £6000, I am from Central Europe, so things are a bit cheaper there, but not much). He worked shifts, and my mum worked 1.5 jobs.
Yet, I was able to achieve everything I wanted.
Maybe you should re-read what I write to understand it better.
However, that's exactly what the class system in the UK does. The potential of oeople born into lower classes of society is actively limited.
I went to a relatively poor state school. I did very well regardless but on average the results were not that good. I remember sitting in my history GCSE class and a teacher chasing a student around various classrooms on multiple occasions. I remember not having a permanent teacher for Year 10 English. I remember my GCSE Spanish teacher bribing everyone with chocolate when OFSTED came around because this was the third time doing the same lesson and he wanted us to look stronger than we were.
The interview is absolutely the primary test here, with the grades just acting as a filter to provide a manageable number of applicants. Widening that filter to allow more disadvantaged students the chance to interview seems perfectly reasonable - given that the interview itself remains equally demanding (and I've seen no suggestion or evidence against this).
You are designing a contest, and students compete. You have to try to represent your goals in terms of the contest, this is very lossy. It’s just never going to be very accurate, and in highly selective institutions much of the selection will be random no matter how you structure the contest.
I attended one of the worst secondary schools in the country. Less than 10% of my year earned the qualifications necessary to go on to university. I know that many of these people, who have gone on to be successful in life, would have excelled at an independent school and would have excelled at university. They were in poverty, not stupid.
You cannot compare the achievements of a student at an independent school to those of a student at a state school based on grades. State school and independent school are a fundamentally different educational experience.
If you think Cambridge and Oxford exist to accept the highest graded students in the country, rather than to accept the students that have the most academic potential, then sure, let's only admit students who have 3 A*s.
While I agree with this as a conclusion, I believe you cannot really go there without acknowledging that this has been a deteriorating situation ever since most of the UK abolished the grammar schools.
"Comprehensive" education has done nothing except result in the oppression of the very people it claims to be liberating.
Students are not equally capable across all subjects, and their ability changes over time. Grammar schools mean there is no room to give you what you need in subjects you fall behind on, and students who start to struggle or start achieving post-11-plus have to transfer schools to fix it, creating huge friction and basically ensuring they'll miss out on the education they should have.
Comprehensives that have a full range of sets to teach at the skill level of the student for each subject are infinitely better for actual education.
I was one of the fortunate ones who was pretty generalist and so I didn't suffer too much by it, but I consistently saw people just give up on subjects because they were too far behind and the school had no other options because there were no lower sets.
Oxford admissions have a heavy interview component: if they think you're really smart, have great potential, and then you'll be of the caliber to get 4 A* no question if you had rich parents and went to a top Public School (but don't, so may not), then -- yeah -- they can make you a lower offer. Their place, their rules.
It isn't dumbing down or taking worse students, it's easing out the rich types who will drink/play lacrosse or rugby/bore to at least Blues standard, are pretty bright but have been spoon-fed to get there so will turn out to be dumber and worse students that people whose potential hadn't been fully revealed by 17/18, even if the spoon-fed cohort get better A Level results.
Assumed, they really are 4 A* material.
If not, what might happen is, that Oxford might get worse in ratings. Is Oxford getting worse in ratings?
> It isn't dumbing down or taking worse students, it's easing out the rich types
But those rich types already have 4 A*, or they are close to it. Their kids have spent 10 years boarding, learning 10 hours a day, including Saturdays. And then, they are discriminated, because of hate towards the rich.
I guess, what will happen, is that some other universities will pick them up. Kids, who are used to work extremely hard. Kids, who know how to learn. Kids, whose parents and grandparents knew how to apply themselves and who instilled all this in them too.
And Oxford will be dethroned. Cream always rises to the top.
This obviously doesn’t follow, and you should feel a decent amount of embarrassment for ignoring the fact that exam grades don’t correlate with “dumbness” or lack thereof.
It should be trivially obvious that a student who is perhaps from a less well-off background, attending state school and achieving decent grades, can be equally as talented and deserving of a top-tier education as a better-off, privately-educated student.
Access programs go some way towards trying to tackle snowballing generational inequality - which essentially results in a bias away from merit, and towards those able to afford private education.
If you want to argue against that, then fine - but at least don’t start with such faulty assumptions.
where does it say that here?
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/admiss...
Although I do note that foundation PPE only requires BBB, which given the current crop of people in westminister, it makes sense.
Really, oxford and cambridge as well as other top universities can have a simple algorithm. They should bias against those from private schools in terms of admissions criteria until the point at which outcomes (as measured by graduating degree scores) are equal. This wouldn’t happen though because then private schools would drop to 5% of enrolments and there’d be no advantage gained from paying for a private school education. Unthinkable!
Is it? That assumes that the grade is a fair differentiator between two students. But we know that that's not true because the gulf between private education and state education is enormous.
This is not, generally, true. Cambridge tends to have higher offers, and I had a friend offered 5A*+S1 (STEP), but that’s mostly because he buggered up his interview (and he was taking 5 A-levels). The standard offer at Oxford for mathematics is A*A*A, which is exactly what those applying from any public school will be asked to achieve.
> or just 3 As from state schools
Not for maths. For easy courses like PPE, someone who misses a standard offer of A*AA might be let off by a few grades. People at public schools who miss their offers are much likelier to be a bit thick.
See also, Bernie 10 years ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0&pp=ygUVYmVybmllIG9...
I don't know at what point people were convinced that the push against immigration is some kind of billionaire plot, but is has been great cover for said billionaires.
It’s a distraction and divide et impera to prevent that immigrant and lower class local workers join forces.
Some kind of employment ping pong. At the end it‘s always cheap labor
Much like most other leftist rhethotic, this belief is not based on any real logic. Basically, the entire process went like this:
1. Corporations want more immigration to suppress middle class wages and workers' rights
2. They run propaganda campaigns targeted at the left and their virtues ("the poor immigrants are suffering and need our help! only racist nazis disagree!")
3. Said leftists, desperate to virtue signal and avoid being seen as racist or xenophobic, immediately move to support the cause unconditionally
4. They see the world as purely black and white, good vs evil, so when they ask themselves "do billionaires want immigration?" the thought process goes "billionaires=bad and immigration=good, therefore billionaires hate immigration"
Do you think Trump got into Wharton on his academic prowess? Legacy admits and donor kids take spots from both middle and lower classes.
> And no one is saying immigrants are taking the spots.
Sure they are. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/08/27/trump-administration-pro...
I felt the original thread wasn't recognising the social disparity authentically.
pg's lack of awareness that this has basically always been true smacks of naiveté.
Christ's Cambridge famously used to hand out "2 E" offers to those in the first group who they know would put the effort in anyway, but "3/4 A" offers to those in the first group they thought might just coast with a 2E offer.
A "2E" offer was certainly a mark of prestige.
(You get your offer in around December time, but sit your A levels in the summer).
I have second handedly seen the effects of such discrimination in other societies and it really is crippling to the economy. Be wary of any kind of discrimination specifically one that lowers expected grades.
He did say exactly that.
If it was because of the poor people, then Oxbridge would still be winning, as they are the only ones that have entrance exams & weird interviews still.
Also, nobody thinks gaming a teaching quality survey ranking (something traditionally focused on more by much less academically selective universities) to jump up the Times list means that Durham is on average outputting more elite students
Yep, but this is a fairly common take I've noticed in England (not as severe in Scotland).
The air is thick with a semblance of classism, and I've found the business culture to be horrid due to this "old boys club" mindset.
Imagine an America where the only way to open doors to the upper echelons is to attend only an Ivy.
And I say this as an Ivy grad.
To a large extent I feel this is because the British economy is so heavily tied to legal, financial, and media services, and as such the "Magic Circle", "The City", and the media consolidation in Greater London has such an outsized impact.
Ironic too because there are fairly decent clusters of engineering research like DefenseTech in Southwest England (which tbf is fairly posh) and Robotics and HPC in Edinburgh.
The list is semi-bullshit and not just based on student performance, so I'd say he's talking out of his arse.
None of my Cambridge uni friends would have applied to go to America because of contextual admissions criteria.
In any case taking someone's background into account is actually the logical thing to do. Who do you think would do better: an Eton student who scored 50% on the test, or a comprehensive student who scored 49%? The answer is pretty obvious and they're right to try and get the best students; not just those that score best on admission tests.
- grades of incoming class (the changes 'pg alleges could lower those grades even if th actual quality of the incoming students don’t change. Balance by subject can affect this too as eg science students tend to have more UCAS points. Private school students may also have more UCAS points because their schools are more likely to do things like putting students in for extra A-levels or GCSEs (taking those exams costs the schools money)). Alternatively, university funding is in a dire state in the U.K. (though less so for Oxford and Cambridge given their endowments?) so maybe they can trade prestige for letting in a larger number of international students who pay full fees but who would have otherwise not met the bar.
- research output metrics, which seem quite unrelated to undergraduate selection – there is a high lead time and if you get the selection wrong you can still hire researchers from elsewhere. These metrics also seem somewhat gameable
- metrics around outcomes for graduates. I wonder how biased these are by subject mix (ie how much is this just a measure of what percentage do courses that lead to good programmer/finance jobs) and how much they are affected by students perusing further education. I think to some extent this can also be affected by class mix because more privileged students may find themselves in better jobs (either because of parental connections or just class filters in hiring though one would hope that the university would train students to be able to pass such filters)
I recall being sceptical of these league tables when I was applying many years ago for reasons like these (not that it stopped me from applying to highly ranked universities).
Though comparing to American schools, I do think there are reasonable advantages to going to the US – you’re much more likely to work in the US (and therefore likely to get paid a lot more) if you go to a North American school. If you’re trying to compare Oxford to Harvard (with offers) and the financing works out either way, it seems to me Harvard would obviously be a better choice today and 10 years ago before the ranking changes. I’m not sure what the quality of US school is where you prefer Oxford.
One other thing: Oxford and Cambridge delegate a lot of admissions to colleges so I’m not sure how much one can claim that it is a global shift in attitude, though there are some ‘second chance’ mechanisms and schools that send many students to oxbridge will have better recommendations for which colleges to apply to, and the policies between colleges can still move in a coordinated way even if each college does its own policy.
2. As usual, the question doesn't really make sense in the context of the UK. The UK is far less diverse than the USA as a country: 80% of the population is ethnically white followed by 9% of Asian from former colonies.
3. Without affirmative action, Oxford is already noticably more diverse than the UK overall because it attracts applicant from all over the world. It's mostly true for Asian students but remains true for black students.