Oxbridge & other universities are coming under stick for supposed selection bias towards children from independent schools. Such schools educate only about 7% of children but account for a much larger proportion of university students
This argument would be particularly boring were it not for the allegation that things used to be better, in that a greater per centage of students in, say, the 1930s, 40s & 50s came from the lower social classes via grammar schools
The interesting point is that, judged in this way, Oxbridge has gone backwards. Does this mean that the elite middle classes have reasserted themselves, or that those who managed to heave themselves up through the class system are particularly unlikely to offer a helping hand to those behind them?
Well maybe. But I offer two thoughts which suggest that it is not so much the selection process as the route to Oxbridge that has changed
The first concerns sex discrimination. For example in the early 1970s concern was regularly expressed that the higher civil service was overwhelmingly male, white, public school & Oxbridge. But it seemed to be changing.
In the early/middle 80s however there were regular headlines which announced '1st woman this' that or the other, particularly in the public services. This was obviously a Good Thing, but I was surprised when I realised that almost all the women promoted were public school/Oxbridge girls - as a grammar school girl myself I believed in the meritocracy & also supported the drive to rid the higher civil service of its earlier elite image. But the drive towards sexual equality hid this backwards slide, & whatever its merits, sexual equality hid the reduction in social class equality
The second important change was the removal of the special status of direct grant grammar schools. Was this a Labour or Conservative initiative? Whoever initiated it, it closed off an important meritocratic route. Manchester Grammar boys are now classified as 'public school' in political or media headlines or Oxbridge entrance statistics, & few, if any, go there without the support of parents who can pay the fees. People like my god-brother or Kenneth Clark (a scholarship boy at Nottingham High School) were deprived of this meritocratic route to advancement, or, if their families made sacrifices to pay the fees, moved from the 'state' to 'independent' category in the statistics of university admissions
Has anyone done an analysis of Oxbridge admissions over time which takes account of these 2 factors as well as the simplistic public school v comprehensive dichotomy?
