How to democratise Oxbridge
Posted on Thursday 20 May, 2010
Filed Under Education
ACTUALLY I do have a problem with the term ‘Oxbridge Mafia’. It is just so unfair to the Cosa Nostra, which at least welcomes working class applicants and is sufficiently discreet to ensure that members keep schtum about their adherence.
By contrast, the graduates of our elite universities flaunt their education for all to see, and make no pretence of their desire to monopolise every leading position in politics. Take, for instance, the Labour Party leadership race.
Runners so far include David Miliband, who has a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford; his brother Ed Miliband, who has a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford; and Ed Balls, who has a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford.
Just to inject some variety into the proceedings, Andy Burnham and Diana Abbott did at least go to Cambridge, which makes them les damnes de la terre in this context.
Whoever wins the contest will face a government headed by David Cameron, who has a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford, and Nick Clegg, who went to Cambridge. Incidentally, some 70% of the ministers in Con Dem administration are Oxbridge educated.
Not that I’m prejudiced against the bastards, honest. Indeed, I was out drinking with a posse of them last night, including the two excellent former Oxford lawyers who acted for me pro bono in my recent libel case.
The ex missus got a double first from Cambridge, while the last girlfriend but one got a first from the same place, although I’m not quite sure what the distinction is there.
I grant that the typical product of Oxbridge is extremely bright. There’s little doubt about that. Even the ones that come out with a third, after spending three years thrashing restaurants when not punting up and down the Cherwell, strike me as clever, at least in the sense of not actually dumb.
Most of them, in my experience, are personable as well. In the majority they are public schoolies, although that is not universally the case. A handful genuinely are from ordinary backgrounds.
The question is, does this matter, or am I just thinking like a chippy provincial grammar school boy who didn’t make the cut? I guess the main point here is that a place at Oxford or Cambridge is itself a privilege, in so far as it is almost a guarantee of career success.
Yet survey after survey has shown that entry procedures are stacked in favour of a small minority of elite fee-paying schools, which are themselves by definition unavailable to the majority of the population.
The entire mechanism designedly perpetuates class divisions, and that situation will only be exacerbated by the trends towards allowing top higher education providers to charge ever-higher fees.
It’s not that the left should not advocate that existing centres of excellence be torn down, of course. The provision of world class education is something that should be encouraged, while efforts are made to level other universities up.
The question is how to achieve democratisation in the meantime. The abolition of private education would be just fine by me, but is politically a non-starter. That onlyleaves positive discrimination, and we all know the drawbacks with that.
But unless anyone has got any better ideas, Oxbridge should be forced to apply it on a massive scale, just so the other 99% of us occasionally get a look in.
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Those of us from provincial grammar schools have nothing to be ashamed of. And that was great crack last night, Oxbridge mafia or no.
I guess the main point here is that a place at Oxford or Cambridge is itself a privilege, in so far as it is almost a guarantee of career success.
‘Almost’, of course, is logically equivalent to ‘not’. If I named the eleven people in my English group at Jesus College, Cambridge 30 years ago, I guarantee you wouldn’t have heard of any of them. (I went straight from JCC to the glittering prize of a year on the dole in Manchester.) With a few exceptions, the people from that generation who are stars now were stars then – the rest of us weren’t, and aren’t.
As I understand it, Oxbridge accepts students in fairly closely matching proportion to its applicants. The reason so few state pupils get in is that so few of them apply. It’s often the case that pupils don’t apply because they don’t think they’ll fit in, or (worse) because their teachers don’t think they’ll fit in.
Maybe there is nothing we can do about Oxbridge. Maybe what we should, as you suggest Dave, seek to ‘level up’ the sector of HE were most working class kids go, which to be frank is serving them pretty badly at the moment. Crap degrees, high drop-out rates among working class students, massive debt and the top jobs are still the preserve of the Oxbridge crowd. Improve the education in the ‘bog standard’ universities and that might undermine Oxbridge privilege from below. I’ve been giving off about this sort of thing for a while here:
http://mediastudiesisshit.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/should-working-class-students-boycott-university/
Hey Splinty, stop farting about here and give us a long ovedue new post on your own blog!
We’re immigrants. My son made it into St John’s College at Oxford on the strength of 5 good A-levels and a letter of recommendation from his form tutor at his state/CofE school. Otherwise, nothing particularly special, and he was treated with more fairness during the entire process than was probably warranted.
I have no problem with Oxford and Cambridge whatsoever.
Yup, a grammar school scrote, to be sure. Otherwise you would have gone to Ruskin College, which in my day was a genuine working class institution with strong links to the unions. Or you could have gone to Plater College, which was for Catholic working men.
Oxford was always very welcoming to working class people, but it has always treated the aspidistra flyers with the contempt that they deserve.
The thing is, in the end it’s down to the professors who will be teaching the students to choose who gets in, and I honestly don’t think they’re a bunch taken to wanton class prejudice. They’re all to geekily enthused with their own subjects to want to chose any one other than the most able students from whatever their background. The problem then is lower down in the education, where a private education can guarantee all but the absolute most thick a shiny array of A*s at GCSE and As at A level, have the resources to give kids interview practices and help brush up their personal statements, and perhaps most importantly, foster a culture of confidence that if one applies for Oxbridge they have a chance of getting in.
So what to do? As Dave says, I don’t think abolishing private schools is realistic, though certainly more pressure should be applied to make sure they earn their charitable status with community efforts and scholarships. Of course we must spend more money on state education, not just rebuilding decrepit old schools but building many new schools, and hiring tens of thousands of new teachers so nobody has to go a class so big they never get any help from the teacher. One to one tuition with students who are falling behind should be rapidly expanded. And we should look to the American example of “bussing in”, by setting quota’s for the amount of working class kids in grammar schools, ensuring that the middle and working class are not segregated in the state education system, and having the benefit of raising standards across the board.
On the Oxbridge side of things, positive discrimination is a messy solution, but one we should use as a threat. If you do not increase the proportion of comprehensive schools students within a certain amount of the time, a quote will be imposed/will get so much stricter. Oxbridge must continue and expand it’s outreach program to poorer areas and schools, and more than that it must adopt an explicit policy of weighing grades in context. A B in English Lit from a comprehensive with a 30% pass rate is simply worth far more than an A from a private schools with £20,000 a year tuition fees and class sizes of 10.
It surprises me just how many people on the thread seem to be meekly accepting this situation. I would have thought that the abolition of private schools is essential, and as for being politically impossible- it’s hardly going to lose a socialist party many votes is it? But ultimately, you’re never going to have equality in education provision without equality in society.
PS: Is it really the case that Oxbridge is so superior academically? All those Oxbridge politicians must be hiding their intellectual attributes well because they don’t seem especially bright or thoughtful to me.
Scuvy,
I appreciate that expanding Oxbridge’s outreach is an attractive notion but you’re still left with a university system which is essentially elitist – a number of ye olde institutions full of the rich and carefully selected students from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds, who get a first class academic education. And then all the others, where the great majority of working class students go to get feed a diet of ‘skills’ and ‘employability’ – effectively becoming the proles of the new economy.
Shouldn’t we be making the argument that kids should be entitled to the same academic education whatever university they attend, rather than always trying to breach the walls of Oxbridge, so that a few might benefit?
Phil tells us that he went to Jesus College, Cambridge and then was on the dole in Manchester for a year.
That year’s meaningless penance was, one assumes, his choice; any number of second-tier and third-tier American universities would have flung their arms wide to accept a Cambridge graduate onto an M.A. course and have found some dosh to keep him there, too.
The fact is that IF one plays one’s cards right, an Oxbridge degree can open doors. However, people with degrees from other places – Lancaster, for example – seem to do just fine. Readers here can probably name scores of them.
Does anyone remember the fuss when a bright girlie got the thumbs-down for Oxford and a huge row blew up because it was assumed that she was rejected on the basis of her school or her accent or something equally silly?
It turned out that she’d received an offer to read medicine at Edinburgh but was still miffed because she’d been “rejected” by Oxford. Given that Oxford is a place of finite size and that every place awarded is a place that cannot be awarded to another person, she had no reasonable cause to complain at all.
“”The 2006 Sutton Trust survey also reveals that of the 81 per cent of the leading journalists in 2006 who had been to university, more than HALF were educated at Oxbridge, including a third who went to Oxford. Among the 1986 sample, 78 per cent were university graduates, 67 per cent of whom had been to Oxbridge, including two-fifths to Oxford.”
So, hardly likely that Britian’s “spendidly diverse” media is likely to advocate change is it? And, if there’s not a brilliant career in upmarket hackery or the dinner-party commentariat, why there’s always a fast track into the City and unlimited dreams. Because “those early contacts really are everything”.
VIVA THE NEW FUEDALISM.
I believe that we ought to define our terms here, what exactly is ‘academic excellence’ and what is it’s purpose. If you want ot excel at anything ie music, maths, whatever, it has been calculated that it is necessary to spend 10,000 hours upon the subject. My experience of state schools and private schools suggest that the former do not, while the latter do. I have found the speed with which my kids rushed through subjects at primary school dizzying and they didn’t learn from it.(And they are the more able ones). The school education system appears to me to have lost its way. I hate the Holocaust as much as the next man, but do they really need to spend so much time on it in English, in History, in Personal relationships education (or whatever its called)etc? At the end of the day, education and schooling is political, who is taught what and why. I would hate to see ‘elite’ organisations dumb down, someone needs to do Ancient Dead Languages.
Salve, Magister! [he said to Sue R.]
Robert Fisk is probably the internationally-best-known graduate of Lancaster University …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fisk
… would he be a better or a worse person or journalist for having attended Oxbridge instead?
Sue R. just made a point about the 10,000 hours theory. I’d halve it, IF the learning environment is good. The bummer about crappy primary education – no matter how happy and smiley it might be – is that kids learn next to bugger all. Up to a point, this doesn’t matter much, but it matters later on, when the obviously-missing foundations are laid bare.
“Sir, were the Normans before the Romans?”
Ruth Henig, now a Baroness due to her selfless toil multidimensional for NuLab, once told me of her surprise on encountering kids who’d been shining successes at school and got straight A-s in every subject but who arrived at Lancaster University to major in History never having heard of the Korean War.
Well, whose fault is that? Theirs or that of their teachers or the people who stick the curricula together?
The reference above was to multidimensional toil, not toil multidimensional … MEA CULPA
I have to leave the keyboard now but I can’t resist telling an anecdote, prompted by something Sue R. wrote.
In our first week at Lancaster University, we were told informally “… don’t get Ruth Henig started about German nationalism. She’s got quite a bee in her bonnet about the subject …”
All became plain later; Ruth Henig was born in the U.K. in the early forties. Her parents, Dutch Jews, had fled the European continent – for their great good – in 1940. It can be surmised that many people known to Ruth’s parents, possibly including close relatives, perished in the Holocaust.
Which sparks another memory; an American colleague saying, “Sure, we Americans don’t know sh-t from sugar about our history, but – hey – why should we? Little kids in Ireland and Poland and Serbia are force-fed all their goddam history from the time they’re weaned and it doesn’t make them any goddam happier, does it?”
The order is actually “Philosophy,Politics and Economics”.
Rabelais point is a good one. Oxford has the resources to give each student two individual or near-individual tutorials a week, and to hire the best teachers to do it.
Why is politics dominated by such as go there? Partly because they make connections there, partly because the same abilities to get in are those that engender success in political parties (even the SWP has had a fair sprinkling of graduates).
I went to Cambridge: to Churchill College, which prides itself on maintaining a higher proportion of state-educated students than the traditional colleges (to the same proportion of state/private as the country at large). It achieves this with difficulty. It engages in very extensive outreach programmes which, as Tony Finch correctly identifies, are targetted at trying to convince state school students that there is potentially a place for them at Oxbridge. It is appalling that this is necessary.
Certainly my experience with Cambridge dons was that they were all of a pretty lefty persuasion (as am I myself) and were constantly unhappy about the unrepresentative numbers of public school students in the University at large. Admittedly, there may have been a lefty bias at Churchill, but I believe that this concern was pervasive throughout the university.
However, the fact remains that, as ScurvyDom says, the dons simply want to admit the best students. Which doesn’t necessarily mean the cleverest (which we can probably assume are evenly distributed throughout the classes), but does mean the most able in terms of analytical skills, communication ability, knowledge, application and so-on. The best private schools are very good at their job, and they educate their ablest students very well. It is also fair to say that those students work very, very hard to achieve their success. It is this education which makes them into the sort of students that Oxbridge wants.
If you look at Oxbridge students of whatever background, you will find that, with very few exceptions, they all learned to read very early, at their parents’ knee, and their parents had high expectations of them. Private schools are extraordinarily expensive.
We made the decision to take our children out of the state system (even though they were at a small local first school with consistently “outstanding” Ofsted ratings) because it was failing our children (or, more specifically, our son). He (and another boy) were consistently so far ahead of the rest of the class that they were constantly bored: one of them became disruptive, and the other disappeared into his shell. Both became hell to live with, and the school refused to respond (don’t assume “pushy parent” here – you don’t know me, and you don’t know the rest of the story).
We, and the other boy’s parents, decided to move to private education.
In my son’s case, the result has been dramatic, and we now have a much happier and settled son that we did before. Remember that our son was at an “outstanding” state school.
Many parents make significant sacrifices to give their children the best education. We are still in the same small modern red-brick house we bought when we first married 15 years ago.
How convenient it is, when you can call on ideology and say “we know that private education is better, but we just can’t do it because we’re socialists”, and then spend the additional £15k a child you’d otherwise be spending on a large house or a couple of expensive holidays a year. The Guardian readers’ archetype of privately educated children all being the children of aristocrats and oligarchs is, of course, true to a certain extent, but even at the school where my children go, which is one of the country’s most highly regarded prep schools, the parents we have made friends with (which may be self-selecting) live in very small houses (and this is not relative – take a 70s ex-council house, for example) in down-at-heel locations.
Of course, this works both ways. I can sit here and smugly congratulate myself on spending shedloads on the kids’ education, and still have a pretty comfortable life, thank you, whilst still living in a pleasant (if small) house in a very nice town in a lovely part of the country, and not zipping off to the Caribbean every five minutes, but still managing to go ski-ing every year, and holiday in France or Spain in the summer. But the fact remains that, actually, what I am spending my money on is something that has created two extremely happy and balanced children, who are a pleasure to have in the house. I am certain that had they remained in the state system, this would not have been the case (of course, I can’t be sure of this, and neither can you, but I have very good reasons to believe, and not just post-purchase justification).
So the problem is not with Oxbridge. Changing the entrance requirements so that ill-prepared and ill-equipped students (no matter how clever) can get in is, self-evidently, not going to work.
It is deeply unfair that some people can have access to better education than others. To suggest that this is best achieved by closing down private schools is naive at best, and disastrous at worst, and has shades of culling the intellectuals in a cultural revolution. The best education in the country is provided by private schools (that is, of course, not to say that all private schools provide an excellent eduction, or that is not possible get a good education at a state school). To shut down these centres of excellence is simply daft (and would lead to interesting consequences which I won’t expand on here).
It is deeply unfair that some people are born into families which will never give them the support or nuturing they need to realise their potential, especially in the very early years. (This is not a swipe at the working class – I know of plenty of upper-middle class families who have failed to support their children, either by failing to give them any time, or by trying to outsource their parenting to a Croatian nanny whose English is insufficiently good for her to help the child with his or her nightly reading book effectively).
I am also concerned that some of the best educated people end up in jobs where their intelligence and education give them no ability to contribute in any meaningful way to society. As a commercial lawyer, I count myself in this unfortunate category (I try to compensate in other ways). (Potentially)good: human rights lawyers, family lawyers, criminal lawyers, constitutional lawyers, teachers, doctors, surgeons, scientists, artists, novelists, musicians, engineers, politicians and (some) civil servants.
(Potentially) pointless: corporate and commercial lawyers, insurance brokers, accountants, tax advisers, merchant bankers and (the other) civil servants.
You will notice that the “pointless” list tends to contain people with significantly higher salaries, which is why I have no problem taxing these people (myself included) highly in order that the revenue can be used to increase the quality of education for all, particularly at the very early stages. (This list, incidentally, is not a reflection of my personal prejudices – there is a logical rationale behind it).
Spending on education needs to increase. Teachers should be plucked from the most able and the brightest. Their salary levels should reflect this. Their profession should be able to regain the respect it once had (and still does, for example in Germany and some Asian countries). But since early years are terribly important, they should be able to intervene more in the home side of the child’s education: for example, be expected to tell the parents that it’s unacceptable that their child comes into school not having read their reading book with their parent.
Which leads onto the most difficult question, and the one which the more interventionist, statist and authoritarian parties (I’m looking at you, Labour), should find it easier to countenance, and that is the extent to which the state can intervene in family life to ensure that, in the earliest years, the children are given the best possible start, in terms of having interaction with intelligent, caring adults who can encourage them on the first steps to reading, learning to concentrate and so-on.
I don’t know the answer to that. There’s an argument to say that providing free child care from a very early age will not only enable mothers to re-enter the workplace, but will also allow the State to start inculcating some of these desirable characteristics into their children, even if the parents won’t.
However, how effective can the state be at actually doing this? Providing sufficient support to parents to enable them to spend sufficient time and effort on their children is one thing, but getting non-responsive parents to change their behaviour, or getting the state to intervene in failing families is something else. I’m uncomfortable about it happening, and I’m also uncomfortable about it not happening.
However, if you believe in equality of opportunity, then the fact remains that there is no way to compensate for poor parenting by changing Oxbridge goalposts. To try to fix the problem that way, is, for any individual child, about 17 years too late.
“even the SWP has had a fair sprinkling of graduates”
A fair sprinkling. British understatement at its best, don’t you think?
The rich can also afford to pay for private tutors and so we have a system that not only doesn’t attempt to maximise everyone’s potential but doesn’t even maximise the potential of the ‘brightest’ students. All it does is serve the rich.
But Education is part of a greater whole, social problems impact upon education, resource allocation (which is under threat from the deficit cuts) and cultural factors and inevitably others I haven’t thought of.
Positive discrimination is all well and good but a more fundamental change is needed and we should recognise that fact.
As a P.S. Nothing I said precludes improving the quality of education at other universities, or policies designed to get employers to higher from a wider range of graduates. Indeed, universities should be given the money for better facilities and one on one tutoring so that there should not be such a big gap between Oxbridge and the rest.
Incidentally my views on tuition fees have been changing lately. Though I used to be outright opposed to tuition fees, I’m ever more thinking they’re a good idea (even if it might be better if they were paid as a graduate tax). I’m becoming more convinced of the benefits of the universal welfare state – the Scandinavian model where everyone is taxed highly but everyone can benefit from the welfare state, rather than the British, more targeted model (apart from the NHS, which is one of the things which makes it so great and popular) – wallowing for lower taxes, but only giving welfare to the poor, wasting money on checking who’s eligible and who isn’t, forcing the poor through faceless bureaucracy, and creating a class of permanent poor. However maybe higher education is something of an exception. I see no justice in people paying tens of thousands of pounds a year to go to a top private school, only to move on to paying 3,500 a year once they get to university. While providing full bursaries for working class children, I think tuition fees should be pegged to the costs of the private school one attended.
“To suggest that this is best achieved by closing down private schools is naive at best, and disastrous at worst, and has shades of culling the intellectuals in a cultural revolution.”
Yes, because those of us opposed to private education fully advocate executing people with private educations don’t we?????
The point isn’t that privately-schooled people are cleverer or more intellectual that us peasants, because that’s simply not true. Plenty of non-Oxbridge, state-school students are of high intelligence and possess great knowledge, especially in this era of mass education. The problem is that private schools and Oxbridge transfer status to their alumni. It is recognised that they are the elite, partly because of certain social and educational attributes they acquire at school or uni, but mostly simply because of the fact that they’ve attended more ‘exclusive’ educational establishments. Dealing with educational inequality naturally means that, either establishments like these lose their exclusive status, or society in general becomes more equal and social hierarchy much less significant.
Igor, I went out of my way to say that privately-schooled people weren’t necessarily cleverer:
>the dons simply want to admit the best students. Which doesn’t >necessarily mean the cleverest (which we can probably assume are >evenly distributed throughout the classes), but does mean the >most able in terms of analytical skills, communication ability, >knowledge, application and so-on
They may, or may not be, disproportionately more intellectual. What I am worried about is why it’s a good idea to dismantle a system providing excellent education, rather than have it compete with a much-improved state system.
The status issue is a complex one. No one can get a 2:1 at Cambridge without being very bright, and without having demonstrated a lot of application. Those are qualities that are sought by employers (and they may, or may not possess other qualities which make them unsuitable as employees).
I know there are also plenty of people who are equally as intelligent and well educated as those from Oxbridge. So the fact is that in a pile of CVs, if someone is selecting for intelligence and application, they will favour the Oxbridge candidates, because they have already demonstrated those capabilities. In order to level the playing field, how can other candidates show, in their CVs, that they also demonstrate those characteristics?
Please bear with me: I’m being descriptive, and not prescriptive. From a left-wing perspective, everyone should have equality of opportunity, and from a right-wing perspective, it’s simply inefficient if the best educational resources are not able to select from the widest pool of talent in terms of the students they are educating. How many potential Einsteins are alive now who are not being given the opportunity to fulfil their potential?
What concerns me is not so much that there is an elite (I would say that, wouldn’t I, since my education seems to bring me within its definition), but that access to that elite is restricted, and that (as Michael Young identified in “The Rise of the Meritcracy”) the meritocracy itself forms a new social class which itself perpetuates the definition of what “the elite” is. I think what Young (as a sociologist) was saying was that since social hierarchies are inevitable, how do we at least stop them from becoming self-perpetuating, and maximise social mobility? I think redistribution of wealth is clearly an important part of this, but more fundamental is how we can change society to make aspiration to education, for universal good, regarded as a good thing, and to ensure that it is a legitimate aspiration for people of all classes, and all backgrounds. It’s so depressing to hear people with bright children say “ah, but that’s not for the likes of us”.
Worship of Mammon doesn’t help: at a recent balloon debate a scarily large proportion of my son’s class decided they wanted to be Bill Gates. Why not Sir Tim Berners Lee? Deification of celebrities and the conflation of “rich” and “famous” are symptomatic of this. It’s deeply depressing that Toby Young is vastly better known that his father, Michael Young.
If we can decouple the exclusivity that goes with an Oxbridge education from the class system, so that anyone from any background has a similar opportunity, would that satisfy you? That’s a genuine question.
Andrew – No. Yes it would be good for everyone to have the opportunity to fulfil their potential, restricting the best education to a few does not make for a better system.
It’s hard to imagine how the two could be decoupled in any case. Oxford doesn’t pick so many from public school because of a deliberate bias, it is because more pupils from their schools have been raised in conditions where achievement is more probable.
I’m reluctant to disclose too much personal details because of those who use it for sectarian ends, but as it happens I passed an Oxford entrance exam when I was 16 to start a PPE course, having attended a comprehensive where I got more than a third of the A grades at ‘O’ Level in my year, but pointing out there was a error in a question about a building site on one of the papers which didn’t allow for the possibility that the workers might take more time off.[Check out the 1985 General Paper II if you want to try it]. I think that the reason I was in such a position was being read to and encouraged to read from an early age, reforming the entrance system alone won’t change the biases, as many working-class kids cannot see what trying at school will do for them in our class-divided society.
Skidmarx
Thanks for the links.
And yes, thanks for confirming my suspicion (probably non-contentious) that learning to read (and being encouraged to) is almost a sine qua non of academic achievement.
I’m more concerned about *everyone* having access to high quality education (bearing in mind that what is the best education will vary significantly from person to person), and that everyone should have an equal opportunity to get into the best education, that I am about the very best education being restricted (I’m also concerned about the products of the best education being wasted).
If you’re concerned about the unfair advantage that an Oxbridge education gives, well, yes, so am I. And it is unfair. But in trying to tackle that unfairness, I want to ensure that we don’t simply level down and make that level of quality education available to no one at all.
And yes, you’re absolutely right that reforming the entrance system won’t do the job. How do you ensure that kids can see that trying at school is worthwhile? And not just so that they can earn more money?
And, while I don’t subscribe to the idea that everyone is born with the same number of ability points which are just distributed randomly amongst different personal characteristics, of which intelligence is only one, there are definitely people with extremely worthwhile non-academic skills which also need generating and nurturing (although for some irrational reason, sport seems to be the one singled out for most attention – yes, exercise is good for you, but I have no interested in watching it, thank you, and excellence at football has no other benefit other then encouraging other people to try to be excellent at football, most of whom will be sorely disappointed).
We need more worthwhile working class role-models, and fewer vacuous ones. There was a time when the Labour party was very good at generating them, but it seems to be less good at that these days.
I was privately educated courtesy of HM government (my father was an army officer), and did my UG and PG degrees at Oxford. I am neither ashamed of this or proud of it, since it’s merely the luck of the draw. I have taught at a ‘big civic’ university (Leeds) a low level ‘new university’ (Solent) and a ‘Robbins’ university (Lancaster) and am now teaching at Oxford. I’m not ashamed or proud of this last, either: it’s just a job.
My daughters went through the state system & got pretty spotty GCSEs and A levels but somehow managed to blag their way into their chosen universities.
You might expect that forty years after Robbins, graduate recruiters would be ‘mixed’ enough that the old college tie wouldn’t matter so much. But recruiters, including those not educated at Oxbridge, still prefer Oxbridge graduates.
The reason is not that Oxbridge kids are brighter: having taught the same subjects at other places I’m pretty confident that they aren’t.
Rather, the reason is simple. Oxbridge works students a lot harder than other universities: much longer reading lists, and twenty-four essays a term as opposed to four essays a term. Oxbridge also monitors work more closely and is more likely to kick people out for skiving. The pace of work at Oxbridge is therefore much closer to a “proper job” than at most universities, the transition to full-time work is easier, and the pair tutorial/ supervision is a lot more like a job interview than large seminars are. Unsurprising that grad recruiters should prefer the product.
This is possible because of differential resources: compared to other universities, Oxbridge has radically different staff-student ratios, and radically different access to books. Both are paid for out of the college endowments, i.e. the fact that the colleges are large rentier institutions.
I don’t think trying to fix the Oxbridge admissions system would help. There are very few of my colleagues who don’t recognise that an A level (or a GCSE) B from an underperforming state school is ‘worth’ a good deal more than an A from a private school, i.e. says more about the candidate’s underlying ability and hard work. The problems are:
(1) that the effort to *regulate* the admissions system and make it more transparent, for fear of the ‘old school tie’ and suchlike biasses, actually makes it harder to give the extra weighting to kids from weak schools, by placing more weight on the paper record. The private schools get their fees because they spend resource on knowing how to play the system.
(2) the point several commenters have made, that the divergence between class educational attainments *generally* arises much earlier – in pre-school, but it is also the case that Callaghan’s cuts, the national curriculum, & league tables have operated to degrade the quality of education available in the state system, especially in the primary sector. The result is to increase the weight in the child’s success or failure of the parents’ cash or intellectual property resources (books at home, etc).
(3) is most fundamental. At the end of the day any degree is ‘useful’ to the student as an entry ticket to a managerial or professional job (this is just as true of English or philosophy as it is of the trainee vultures I teach [law students]). Under capitalism there are only a limited number of such jobs, and a lot of working class kids *correctly* judge that they have a low likelihood of getting them even if they work hard at school: so why try? Or, from the parents’ point of view, why push the kids to try?
A working class regime should raise the resource level in state schools to that in the private schools, and raise the resource level in other universities to that in Oxbridge. If we try to go the other way, i.e. reduce the resource in private education, the rich will just hire private tutors for their kids (part of the middle classes already are) – and no legal system, even a Soviet-style one, could prevent “black-market education”.
But at the end of the day fundamental change in social inequality will depend on rotational employment: i.e. that nobody gets to be a career politician, a career manager, or – for that matter – a career academic. And the road in that direction is more likely to begin with adult education and labour movement education – workers’ education, labour colleges, and so on – than with any fiddling with the current educational system.
That would be ‘Salve, magistra!’ to Sue R, Mr Corr. Back in the mid 1960s, thanks to a generous policy regarding class sizes, I was the only person in my Central Scottish industrial town studying classical Greek as well as Latin at my state school and, also, the only person in a council flat to be regularly construing Herodotus and Homer, Virgil and Horace in the kitchen by the warmth of a paraffin fire. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see the classics, in whatever form, being spread more widely throughout our schools. Bring it on!
All this talk about Oxbridge is a sympton of the fact that people know that jobs are an endangered species. For years people have grumbled about Oxbridge, but no-one did anything because the economy was still expanding. The rise of immigrant groups with high expectations as well also puts pressure on the system. Everyone wants to get on. When I was a girl, progressive education was the watchword, and all the tak was about crativity and free expression. You don’t hear that talked about much nowadays.
“a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford”
I remember reading those words in an UCCA book and thinking it was interesting that the older Universities were teaching multi-subject degrees.
Tony Finch @ on May 20th, 2010 at 19:29
“The reason so few state pupils get in is that so few of them apply”
Given the extra hurdle of admission by Colleges, rather than the University, that is hardly surprising. It’s a system that puts a premium on inside Knowledge and previous generations of family or school familiar with that obscure stuff.
A better way of detering applicants and favouring the in-crowd could hardly have been constructed if it was deliberate.
I have a degree in listening to bullshit. I do admire people that go on to university. Why work for a living when you can talk a good useless story and get away with it.
I have been avoiding the related discussion to this post on Lib Conspiracy and would rather put in my tuppence worth here (my preferred blog!)
Oxbridge is entitled to select the best of the crop, and while I would like them to outreach past the private schools, the onus is on the state sector to then meet them. I also agree with Mike McNairs’s point that students really do have to pull their weight there; the ‘Brideshead’ image of idle toffs is now well off the mark (Admission: I was a comp-to-Robbins uni-student myself and proud of it, but know a lot of Oxbridge graduates in my line of work). It means that sixth-forms have to be unafraid about encouraging both ambition and learning for its own sake.
I think a related problem is that as ‘going into politics’ is now essentially a profession, it attracts the people who set out as teenagers to do so, and Oxbridge (or maybe just Oxford?) seems to be the best place for that for many reasons. But surely that is a reflection on how the main parties choose to organise in our post-industrial culture, where alternative life experiences (not least trade unionism) have been downgraded. That is a very familiar point I know, but criticising the educators is in this case mistaking the real cause.
Sorge mentions being a comp-to-Robbins man.
Those who selected the first few students in the earliest days of Lancaster University were determined to get as varied an array of students as possible and were extremely successful.
These students included Fisk, of course, plus a proto-gay ex-Glasgow policeman [long before ANYONE was glad to be gay and even before many gays even knew the term] and a decorated veteran of the war which established Israel and quite a variety of posh kids; one such young lady attained [brief] immortality by saying – in a sociology seminar – ” Well, people live on farms and poor people live on little farms.”
After Cambridge, I could probably have got onto an MA course if I’d wanted to; I didn’t want to. I wanted to get a job. Really I wanted to be a journalist (don’t they all), but I had no idea of how you went about doing that (i.e. go to London, blag your way in at the NME or the New Statesman, work for nothing and keep going to the right parties until you catch somebody’s eye). Not that my parents would have tolerated that.
The last time I saw Anatol Lieven (who was in my year & was already a bit of a star), I asked him what he was thinking of doing. He said he thought he’d go into journalism. Wow, I said, good luck with that (the memory of my rejection letter from the Associated Newspapers graduate entry scheme fresh in my mind). I asked him who he was thinking of writing for. Oh, I thought the Times, he said. (See also Julian Barnes, who went from university to a job as the wine critic for the Spectator. Possibly not via a graduate entry scheme.)
You see, I think there’s a spurious correlation here. Having money behind you makes it much more likely you’ll be in certain ruling-class networks to start with, and gives you the wherewithal to spend time and effort getting into them if you’re not. Having money behind you also makes it much more likely you’ll have gone to a private school, which in turn makes it much more likely you’ll have gone to Oxbridge. But it’s the money and the class that are doing the work, not the two-person tutorials and the Latin grace.
Nunc est bibendum!
I don’t have problems with people who went to Oxbridge. It does seem to give a fluency and a certain degree of overbearingness (in some). But the sheer acadmic quality of much work done there is surely pretty bleeding obvious.
Of course for chaps like Dave, many of us here and indeed my good self (advanced degrees in Marxist-Trotskyist factionalism, cum laude) the place is not for the likes of us.
But like hey ever met a Graduate of France’s ENA?
All of these anecdotes are interesting, but surely paint a rather subjective and limited picture of Oxbridge.
I think it would be helpful to get people’s views on how Oxbridge truly fits into the British class system, what its role is and how degrees from these Universities are both restrictive (only certain people can get them, without them access to *certain* jobs is near impossible or exceedingly limited) and enabling (as the first rung on the ladder) in terms of the British Establishment.
It would be good to get a political perspective on Oxbridge and its ramifications for the British ruling class.
Simple solution: nationalise all private schools and turn them (in many cases back)into state grammar schools with admission based purely on open examinations and boarding places reserved for those successful students who live in ‘disadvantaged’ circumstances.
If you presented this as both egalitarian and elitist – remember the 1944 Butler system of three tier schools was universally considered ‘progressive’ at the time – it would in fact be supported by a great many middle class parents who are spending an absurd amount of money on private education and are all convinced that their darling little Joshuas and Sophies could easily pass any exam.
And of course primary education would be revivified if it was judged not on artificial tests but its proportion of students making it to grammar schools.
Its not ideal but we have to accept that like so much of the left’s other sixties baggage comprehensive education is part of the problem and not the solution.
Oh and we also need to get rid of most of the McDegrees and the ex-polys that dispense them and transfer the funding into primary education.
If you really want to do a degree in golf club management or the 57 varieties of business studies its vocational training not higher education and should be funded by the students and companies that benefit directly – not the taxpayers.
I have just read an article on the BBC website: it seems that thousands of graduates are being churned out in countries as diverse as Poland, Australia and Hungary (to name a few). There are many countries that send 60% of their young people to tertiary education. India and China are building thousands of more university places. The question then arises in my mind, where are all the jobs for these people? Leaving aside access to the elite institutions, isn’t there a need to ask whether a university education is a good thing in itself? I suspect many of these degrees are in subjects such as accountacy and Business Studies: subjects that in my day, were learnt through specialised professional bodies and on the job training. It seems to me that the state (most universities internationally are administered through the state, except for the prestigious ones of course)has taken over the role of the private employer in providing training, and the wonderful thing is that the trainee has to pay for it! To adapt the slogan from the 1984 Miners’ Strike, Jobs not Self-financed Degree Courses’.
I think SueR makes a good point in pointing out that private employers are providing less training and universities are taking the burden. I have a CIPFA qualification paid for by a local authority but it should be pointed out that training budgets are now being squeezed. The broad attacks currently taking place against the working class can only help the rich. The ConDem pact will only make things worse.
But if they can attack us then it begs the question why the hell can’t we attack them! If their wealth allows them the privilege of a world class education then take the wealth from them!
‘The question then arises in my mind, where are all the jobs for these people?’
Sue,
You’ve hit the nail on the head. We produce more graduates than there are jobs for. This is according to Prof. Alison Wolf, an expert in all things educational and work-wise. Wolf takes to task the simplistic notion that more education means that more people earn more and we are all commensurably richer. This, Wolf argues rather persuasively, is bollocks. More that this I would suggest that the that not only do we produce more graduates that we need but now there are jobs that ask for a degree that once upon a time sought no more than a clean drivers license. And the glut of graduates in other areas means there is a surplus of apparently qualifies professionals which helps to depress wages. It begs the question, is the extension of higher education really benefiting students, many from non-traditional backgrounds, or the rich and ruling?
Higher education is becoming an industry. Universities compete for students by proliferating more and more useless courses all promising skills and employability. But do these courses that that presented in increasing vocational qualifications really have the resources to to train students like old-style apprenticeships? My own experience would suggest not. I doubt many universities really have the technical or human resources to do the job of training very well. Still, students now pay for the privilege of achieving degrees of dubious value and then in 3 or 4 years time they will be encouraged to ‘up-skill’ or re-train at their own expense again.
So what is university really good for? Well the universities make money. The management in HE is extra-ordinarily well paid with VCs earning more than the PM. So that’s all right. Some employers do alright, provides a large army of students who will work for low pay to see them through there studies. And you get the added advantage of lots of young people all in huge amounts of debt before their 21st birthday, which I’m sure the financial sectors greatly appreciates.
I entirely understand why people get irked with private education and Oxbridge but I really think the Left is looking the wrong way on the education debate if it thinks Oxbridge privilege is the issue at the moment. The real crime is being committed in the universities that most working class kids are encouraged to attend.
Forgive me for being a bit of a blogging self-publicists but you can read some or my more heretical thoughts here:
http://mediastudiesisshit.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/should-working-class-students-boycott-university/
No, I don’t think you are being heretical at all, Mr Rabelais. It is an old socialist demand that people should be able to learn whatever and whenever they want, but what happens in most universities most of the time is not that. Many occupations that were formerly the preserve of bright workingclass kids are now being ‘graduatized’. Journalism is one, and I’m talking proper journalism not Media crap. Teaching is another. Nurses nowadays have to do a degree (although they don’t pay for it in the way that other BSc students do.). There was a very clever chap on the television the other day, I forget his name, but it was a Middle Eastern one, and he is a very famous economist (so I imagine Dave will know who I mean) and he was saying that the crisis at the moment has resulted in private capital using state owned resources to prop itself up (hardly controversial for a socialist, but i don’t think he was a socialist); it seems to me that the same is taking place in education. The world could use all these talented, clever people, they could be set to work solving the problems of famine and superstition etc but of course that is not going to be how they are going to be used.
Sue R. mentions nurses needing a degree these days.
All well and good, one might think, but the hideous result is that some critical areas of their training end up being neglected so that time can be spent on academic or semi-academic stuff or little or no relevance.
ONE EXAMPLE, DRAWN FROM LIFE:
Hands-on trauma management hours cut so that nursing students could attend classes about starving picanninies on the Upper Limpopo or Lower Zambezi.
One can easily imagine the sort of Great Brain which considered this a Good Idea.
This is way off-topic, but will be of interest to many here:
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=5931
Referring to Fisk, graduate of Lancaster University, reminds me that he has a cameo role …
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/pearl-249812-daniel-obama.html
… in this piece by Mark Steyn
why do I get the feeling Bill Corr is going beyond the anecdotalist’s call of duty when using the term “picanninies”.