Dear Student,
Thank you for your application to this world-leading university. We are pleased to offer you a place to read for a degree at our institution. We look forward to welcoming you in September, and thought you might like to hear some feedback with respect to our deliberations, given a highly competitive field of applicants. If I may be honest, your application was not of the highest standard, and we did have to reject numerous applicants who were far stronger, academically, than yourself. We hope the subsequent feedback will place you in firm stead when you leave our university and apply for jobs in whatever field, even if you may not leave with a very strong degree.
As I have mentioned, your application fell short in several areas. First, though you may have convinced some members of the academic panel of your skills in a few areas of the course, you will likely find that upon arrival at our university, you struggle considerably with other aspects of your degree. Second, and relatedly, the intense academic workload at our institution may, from my own judgement, not be kind to you, and could catalyse dissatisfaction on your part.
Of course, it is far from unfair to suggest that not every university is suitable for every type of person. There is truth in the old axiom “horses for courses”. Yet, in the name of “equality and diversity” agendas ravaging across universities, we are pleased to let you know that you will be admitted to our university irrespective of your performance in your forthcoming school examinations. Everyone else to whom we have offered a place might face possible rejection, if results day in August does not turn out in the desired way. We have made a particular case for you: we hope you understand. You have needs, we have needs.
“Why me?” you may ponder. I hate to say it, but you fulfilled some unwritten quotas, and ticked some boxes. In an era when job applications pride themselves on asking personalised questions about one’s background, univer-sities have not been immune to this trend. What is more, in a highly selfish act, some senior academics felt that by admitting you, they would feel good about themselves.
In the future, they can say to their colleagues that it was they who were responsible for taking people from particular ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds; that they were the saviours of this movement. Questions of whether this university would be the optimal university for you were, unfortunately, ignored. You, in the abstract, also make us individually look good. Not least in the papers and on the BBC. You wouldn’t wish to be taught by bad-looking people.
“Isn’t that profoundly unacademic and highly selfish behaviour?”, you may think. The answer is a resounding “yes”. If, a year later, you feel you do not like our institution, you can leave and venture elsewhere. By that time, though, it will be too late for us to offer your place to someone whom we initially rejected. We hope you under-stand.
As one of the members of the panel, I am being neither unjust nor seeking to dampen your future enjoyment of our university. In what I have said, I am being frank, which is more than can be said for some of my colleagues. I sincerely hope that you enjoy your experience here. In so doing, I have one crucial piece of advice for you. Not only must you hold yourself to high academic standards, but you must also ensure that the standards for you are not lowered.
The ongoing diffusion of positive discrimination in academic institutions means that not all individuals are being held to the same academic standard, a pernicious logic that can have deleterious implications once a student’s time at university reaches its conclusion. A member of the Admissions Panel
The University Admissions Team