Stuck in the past? Oxbridge’s diversity problem

University College unveiled a plaque to Christian Cole this month. Born in Sierra Leone, the grandson of a slave, Cole became, in 1873, the first black student to study at Oxford, and went on to become the first black African to practice law in Britain. Alas, the trail he blazed is one few other black students have followed, said Labour MP David Lammy in The Guardian. As I discovered after submitting freedom of information requests to all Oxford and Cambridge colleges, our top two universities operate a form of “social apartheid”. More than 80% of their offers go to “the top two social classes, the children of barristers, doctors and CEOS”, many of them privately educated pupils from the south-east. In 2015, one in five colleges at Cambridge and one in three at Oxford failed to admit a single black A-level student. Yet, confronted with these figures, Oxbridge has blamed everyone but themselves. It won’t do. “If Oxbridge can’t crack this,” why should taxpayers go on handing them £800m a year? As a northern, working-class person, I know just what Lammy is on about, said Tom Rasmussen in The Independent. I defied the statistics and got into Cambridge, but it’s undeniable that “class and race divides are entrenched in the application system”. Until admission positions are given to people of diverse backgrounds, people who grasp the challenges faced by the excluded, the discrimination will continue. Nonsense, said former Cambridge admissions officer Andrew Tettenborn on Spiked. Most college fellows today are people who haven’t gone to private schools: a big majority are on the Left and “plagued by the usual middle-class guilt complex”. You need only look at how many students of Indian, Pakistani or Chinese origin get places there to see there is no discrimination against minorities. The truth is that only a few hundred black Britons scored the requisite three As or above, and even fewer were attracted to apply. It’s not as if the Government hasn’t made a concerted effort to level the field, said The Times. If a university wants to raise annual tuition fees above £6,165, it has to sign an agreement showing how it plans to recruit more disadvantaged pupils. Last year, universities spent £725m on school visits, summer programmes and bursaries in an effort to do just that.

The fact remains that Oxford and Cambridge, compared with Harvard or other top US universities, is still astonishingly white, said Priyamvada Gopal in The Observer. But the fault doesn’t just lie with them: it lies in Britain’s education system, in the unequal contest between its pampered independent schools and its woefully underfunded state ones that struggle to attract good teachers. Equally deleterious, said Clare Foges in The Times, is the bias that occurs after university. Such is the romantic hold that Oxford and its dreaming spires exert on the national imagination, recruiters to the top jobs lazily assume the mere fact of having gone there makes you special. Instead of trying “to break more people into Oxbridge”, we should be “breaking the Oxbridge stranglehold on the best opportunities”.