Oxford diversity target ‘will push out middle-class high achievers’
Dons voice concerns that admitting more deprived candidates could mean better-off students miss out
MIDDLE-CLASS high achievers will miss out on Oxford places because colleges are under pressure to meet diversity targets, whistleblowers have told The Sunday Telegraph.
The university’s pledge to increase the number of undergraduates from deprived backgrounds will inevitably result in bright pupils from well-off families getting “squeezed out”, according to two senior Oxford dons.
Oxford has told the Office for Students higher education watchdog that it will increase its intake of disadvantaged students from 15 to 25 per cent by 2023. But two sources, both senior figures in Oxford admissions, have voiced their concern that this will lead to a degradation in academic standards.
“The vice-chancellor is on the hook now. She is really out on one with this pledge. It is pretty stark,” one said.
“The dial has got to move quite a long way. We are not like Bristol or Exeter who can hit their numbers [of disadvantaged students] simply by expanding by about 500 places a year. That’s not going to happen at Oxbridge, our system doesn’t work like that, with the constraints on college size. It’s got to be done at the expense of the middle-class kids.”
The source said that independent school heads “can see the writing on the wall” and are growing increasingly concerned about the direction of travel. “My biggest fear is we will end up polarised,” the source added. “We will still take them in heaps from the Etons and the Westminsters. And what gets squeezed out is the middle, the heads who used to send us two or three a year get squeezed out.”
Thousands of pupils learnt this week whether they were offered an Oxbridge place. This year, Oxford made the highest proportion of state school offers in its 900-year history, and the first time it has been more than double that of private schools.
From 2020, 250 state school students will receive free tuition and accommodation at Oxford as part of its latest multi-million-pound recruitment bid for disadvantaged students.
However, 50 students in the new intake – which will include refugees and young carers – will be eligible to receive offers “made on the basis of lower contextual A-level grades, rather than the university’s standard offers”.
Another Oxford source said that admissions tutors were “strongly urged” to interview candidates from deprived backgrounds. “The instructions we received were that we had to interview them as long as they met very basic standards. Some failed even those,” he said. “My experience is that those candidates just don’t do very well. We call them to interview because we have to.
“They just do really badly, and we reject them. But if this target of 25 per cent is going to met, we will have to start admitting some of these people.
“This almost certainly will mean they will be let in at the expense of middle-class students, who will have to make way for candidates who are not as academically talented as they are.”
An Oxford University spokesman said that rising numbers of applications in recent years “inevitably means more students will be disappointed”, and added: “The Opportunity Oxford scheme we have introduced this year is for candidates who will meet or exceed the A-level grades for the standard offer, then receive academic support to prepare them for entry to Oxford.”
The spokesman said there are “more than enough” talented pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds to fill places, adding that efforts to diversify intake have enjoyed “widespread support” among academics.