Oxbridge education remains an elitist pursuit in the UK
The journalist and polemicist James Delingpole believes that to get a “real Oxbridge education” it’s now important to apply to another university altogether: Durham. Having spoken recently at both Oxford and Durham, and failing to garner sycophantic applause from his student audience at the former, the writer can apparently draw no other conclusion than that academic standards at Oxford are falling due to an influx of working class students creating a “PC monoculture”.
Cambridge is, he says, suffering the same fate. As he puts it, Oxbridge is endangering itself “in its eagerness to purge itself of students from a certain kind of background”.
Delingpole is a fierce critic of the working class “snowflakes” who he claims are now taking over Oxbridge. Ironically, he then goes on to construct a ludicrous myth of his own victimhood at the hands of these allegedly brainwashed Oxford students.
Regardless of the laughable hypocrisy of his remarks, the Spectator article of which they formed the base has been widely shared online, no doubt leaving some working class Oxbridge students with a familiar sinking feeling. We’ve been told enough times that we don’t deserve our success.
Tempting as it is to take the common advice about online punditry — “Don’t feed the trolls” —Delingpole’s rhetoric does need to be challenged. Given the rise of far-right demagogues such as the disgraced Milo Yiannopoulos, and even the electoral success of Donald Trump, it just won’t do to dismiss such groundless accusations without challenge. Such rants reflect disturbing trends in public thought that need to be eradicated before they evolve.
So was what Delingpole said true? His argument points to a lingering sense of entitlement among the middle class students and parents who dominate the UK’s elite universities. Perhaps they believe they are being deprived of their rightful place in the student corridors of power?
But the figures tell a different story. The ratio of privatelyeducated students to state-schooled students in the UK’s topranked cradles of learning has always been horribly skewed in their favour — and it still is today, despite Delingpole’s claims. Oxford still has one of the lowest state school intakes of any university in the country; somewhere between 55 and 59% of offers go to state school students, despite that fact that less than 7% of the population are educated at private school. One wonders what proportion of working class students would be considered acceptable to Delingpole.
If working class presence in Oxford is growing, albeit slowly, it is not due to admissions tutors becoming “increasingly prejudiced” against private schools, but because the class systems that have kept poorer students from achieving their academic potential for so long are finally collapsing. The suggestion that affirmative action is in place is smoke and mirrors. Delingpole is indignant about the idea that working class students are being given some kind of free pass into elite universities, but that simply isn’t the case.
I am a working class Irish student who attended a community college, far removed from the private feeder schools whose populations are disproportionately represented within the Oxbridge elite. I still got into Edinburgh University — ironically one of the institutions Delingpole hails as a last bastion of reason — because my academic ability earned me a scholarship. I achieved one of the top 100 exam results in the country. No doubt some would still think me undeserving of a place.
It is quite telling that Delingpole describes himself as “a member of probably the most discriminated-against subsection in the whole of British society — the white, middle-aged, public-school-and-Oxbridge educated middle-class male”. As the rise of the American alt-right has showed, that hypocritical sense of victimhood among the privileged is in no short supply. It reveals itself again, when he describes today’s Durham students as “Oxbridge rejects, of course, but of such a high calibre that they would once have been a shoo-in”.
If I were a student at Durham, I would politely decline Delingpole’s toxic endorsement of my university. Let’s hope every middle class student at Durham who didn’t, for whatever reason, achieve a place at Oxford or Cambridge is reasonable enough to know it’s probably because there was somebody else who deserved it more – whatever background they’re from. THE INDEPENDENT
I am a working class Irish student who attended a community college, far removed from the private feeder schools whose populations are disproportionately represented within the Oxbridge elite.