Minister: Oxbridge diversity failures are ‘staggering’
THE universities minister has attacked Oxbridge for its “staggering” failure to attract more black students, saying that colleges must look beyond exam results to improve diversity.
Sam Gyimah, who in 1997 became the first black British president of the Oxford Union, claimed diversity at the two universities had scarcely changed from his own student days and warned it was time they “stood up to the mark”.
Speaking openly about the issue for the first time, Mr Gyimah said he struggled to understand how Oxford and Cambridge could produce Nobel prize winners but could not “crack the issue of admissions”.
He told The Daily Telegraph they had “not done enough” to improve admission rates of black British students and urged them to “take into account a broad range of factors”, rather than focusing purely on academic results.
Debate is growing around so-called “contextualised” admissions, which lower grade requirements for applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, after other leading universities including University College London, King’s College London and York introduced such schemes to improve the uptake of black and ethnic minority students.
A spokesman for Oxford agreed that the university had “more work to do”, but both Oxford and Cambridge insisted they had made progress.
Mr Gyimah said: “There are rules to this game, and there are some schools from the age of 12, 13, that are schooling their students ... so that when they get to A-levels it is part of their DNA. If you go to a school where this is not the system at all, you find it very difficult to catch up. You’re quite smart, you’ve got the potential, but there’s no-one there to help you.
“What Oxford should be doing is helping those schools that do not have those in-built systems, to actually develop those advantages. If you don’t know those systems, you don’t have a hope of getting through.” He added that the universities should make more use of contextualised admissions.
Mr Gyimah said Oxbridge needed to “cast its net wider” by expanding its outreach programmes with state schools, noting that a significant proportion of applicants still came from the elite feeder schools.
Oxford and Cambridge have so far resisted pressure to introduce schemes for reduced offers, instead opting for a “flagging” system that alerts tutors to disadvantaged applicants.
Mr Gyimah has urged the universities to reconsider, warning that “very hard levers” were available to the watchdog, the Office for Students, if they failed to change their ways. “The numbers disappoint me, and it’s disappointing because it’s been going on for too long,” he said. “Years ago we were having the same debate about Oxford and Cambridge as we are today.
“I don’t think they’re doing enough ... It is staggering that we have the best minds in our universities and we still do not know what the best way is when it comes to applications.” He said the
Office for Students had “access and participation” remits with every university, with the power to set fines if universities failed to hit the targets.
In recent weeks both Oxford and Cambridge have released admissions data showing discrepancies between their colleges in the number of students admitted from black and ethnic minority backgrounds.
At Cambridge, six colleges had failed to admit more than 10 British black or mixed-race students in five years, and St Edmund’s College failed to make a single offer. Similar figures for Oxford, compiled between 2015 and 2017, showed that one in four colleges had failed to admit a single black British student each year. Overall, the success rate for white British applicants was almost double that of black applicants.
Mr Gyimah said it was “in Oxford’s interests to do it”, and that Yale and Harvard had found a way to attract people from diverse backgrounds. “It is clearly possible to preserve excellence, your prestige, and to be diverse. It’s about time that Oxford and Cambridge stood up to the mark.” The disclosures about Oxbridge’s lack of diversity provoked anger among MPS, with David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, branding Oxford a “bastion of white, middle-class, southern privilege”.
Last night Oxford said it was expanding its summer school programme by 50 per cent, adding that it was making “rapid progress” and that tutors were taking into account GCSE results and whether students were from and “underprivileged background, in care or from a poorer-performing school”.
Cambridge said it was committed to attracting “high-achieving students”, regardless of background, and had made “significant progress” in the last decade. It added that one in five students now identified as black or ethnic minority.