ewx | (no subject)

My best mate from school, Reg, got the same A-levels as me. I went to Oxford to do Law, he went to Huddersfield to do Transport Studies. Six years later, he was operations manager of Metrobus, with a flat in London, and I was working in a shop, with a room in East Oxford.

YA Jarvis Cocker AICM5P. [but we knew this already]

My name is Andrew, and my specialist subject is the bleedin' obvious.

Well, quite.

Part of the problem is that some people who would thrive in Oxford or Cambridge (and I feel they're two very different establishments, so it's foolish to conceptually lump them together as "Oxbridge") don't get in, and many people who would be much better off elsewhere do.

While Oxford and Cambridge may be in some ways "better", the fact that they're different is much more important, and should be impressed on people much more. There's a presumption that anyone who can get in should automatically go there; that's quite wrong.

If someone is after a vocational degree that will give them skills directly applicable to some prospective career, and that will improve their employability and likely salary, Oxford and Cambridge aren't the places to go.

Your example is obviously far from unique. If more people believed that it's stupid to apply to Oxford or Cambridge solely because they have all-A predictions, the number of applications would fall, thereby increasing the chances of success for those who still wanted to study there. In the meantime, the admissions staff are faced with sifting through a huge number of applications from people who seem to have applied on the basis of fundamental misapprehensions or misplaced elitism.

As an aside, the CIA world factbook says there are 10,971,909 people in the UK aged under 15, which indicates roughly 730,000 children per year group. Those 7,000 admissions a year therefore represent almost 1% of the year group.

Admitting 1% of the population sounds a lot more impressive than "only 7,000 places" a year. Also, the Guardian article appears to be claiming that about a thirtieth of the population is "massively talented", which strikes me as overly magnanimous …

I've got an idea that, statitstically anyway, it was a fair bit harder to get into Nottingham to do history than it was to get into Cambridge.

If people lose this obsession with Oxbridge being the be all and end all of universites, then maybe they'll lose some of the other illusions about it, like the discrimination against state school students. And then maybe more state schoolers, will be a bit less scared about the prospect of applying for it.

And if Laura Spence was such a working class hero, how come she got a column in the Mail?

Sorry, rant...

Don't get me started about Laura Spence! Her initial application was misguided at best. She applied to read medicine at Oxford, which isn't exactly reknowned for its undergraduate medical teaching, rather than to a university with a decent medical school (like Edinburgh, to pick another ancient university). Having been rebuffed, she then went to Harvard to read biochemistry rather than medicine, which suggests that she didn't have the necessary level of dedication to the subject in the first place.

[as a rather ranty aside, I'm most irritated by the fuss made over her A levels. The suggestion in the press seemed to be that five A's at A level should guarantee you a place at Oxbridge. My A level results were marginally better than hers, but they still weren't quite good enough for the conditional offer I had to read maths and computer science at Cambridge in 1991. In retrospect, this was for the best; I'm not certain that I would have thrived at Cambridge in the same way that I did at Warwick, especially given that I'd applied to read maths and computer science rather than just straight computer science. In particular, I don't think that I would have carried on with postgraduate work and got my doctorate.]

I completely agree with you on the Oxbridge obsession. In short, Oxbridge is fine for some subjects, but for many subjects there are superior departments at other universities.

Yup. It is however, very, very pretty. Well Cambridge is, anyway :-) Never underestimate that joy.

Oh, I agree (I lived there for a couple of years, which is why I know ewx and other CUSFS denizens). The downside of being pretty is the tourists, which is something Cambridge shares with Edinburgh (where I did my MSc) and Bath (where I live now). It all evens out in the end.

What I remember most fondly about Cambridge are the large number of good pubs...

I very nearly went to Warwick... I wonder how things would have been. I'd probably be completely different.

Hmmm. Possibly not as different as you'd think. I could still see you getting sucked into the SF society, rocksoc and possibly the film society in fairly short order. Goth scene was a bit poor in Cov while I was there, but started to pick up later. Geek scene was very much in evidence.

Put it this way: socially, Cambridge and the extended CUSFS family felt like a home-from-home to me, so I think it fair to assume that there's enough commonality that you would have turned out much the same at Warwick.

In my year, 10 people applied to Oxford (9 got places, 8 accepted them) and 8 to Cambridge (5 got places, they all accepted them). The people who applied and didn't get offered a place were obviously upset, but they certainly weren't regarded as "failures". The one girl who didn't accept her Oxford place was told by the headmistress and by our class teacher that turning down the place would ruin her life and she would regret it for ever. Which fortunately (and predictably) was not the case; last I heard she was doing a PhD at Leeds & was very happy.

At our school the label of "failure" was reserved for e.g. the people who were withdrawn from GCSE/A-level classes because they weren't going to get high enough grades & would screw up the school's league tables if allowed to take the exam; and the (very few) people who didn't want to go to university at all, who were told (spot the pattern here...) that it would ruin their chances of getting anywhere in life if they didn't go to university. (Yep, 8 years later I'm still angry with the school for saying that sort of thing to people.)

Musing on a bit from the news article:

"""Even the most balanced parents don't seem able to suppress their negative emotions in front of their children. Once again, the term "Oxbridge rejects" rears its ugly head."""

My parents' reaction when I got in to Oxford was basically "You know, we don't mind which university you go to, we still love you". Which was all very nice and balanced and affirming, but at the time I wanted them to behave like all my other Oxbridge-accepted friends and be cracking open the champagne etc.. :) I guess they probably were proud of me, but they were every bit as proud of my sister when she got into Lancaster (and again when she got a postgrad place there).

No, I don't really have a point to make, just waffling really...

My parents were far more chuffed about Oxford Brookes than Cambridge, mostly because they figured I'd actually stick it out more than 2 terms that time. ;-)

Thank you for pointing this out! I shall cut it out and keep it, or at least cut and paste it, for the next time a trivial incident gets in the news because it happens at Oxbridge. Students kill themselves or take their clothes off at other universities, apparently.

(Personal experience? No one had been sent to Oxbridge from my school in living memory. I first had to be persuaded that Oxford wasn't a private university like Eton was a private school: an image I'd picked up from the meeja that nearly made me fail to consider Oxbridge.)

Yeah, my memory of exact figures is getting hazy now - I think there were seven Oxford applications out of which I was the only one to get an offer. Someone else got an offer for Cambridge but didn't get the right grades. One person - Jacqui, reapplied the following year and got an offer, and there may have been some random scientists about too.

But what I remember more than anything is how guilty I felt about getting an offer when Nimit didn't get one. He didn't seem all that bothered by it, and to be honest, I imagine he was happier in a less work intense place (LSE), but I felt so incredibly guilty about it all - particularly when he got better 'A' levels than me....

My school typically got between 10 and 20 candidates into Oxbridge. In my year there were 2 successful applications. Unfortunately for pretty much my entire life my mother had been telling me "if you're really smart, you'll go to Oxford or Cambridge". Hence *I* felt like a reject when I didn't, It was the first time I'd 'failed' at anything academic.

In my direct family, I'm the first generation ever to go to university at all (technically my mother went as a mature student when I was doing my A levels, but you get the idea). The fact that I still didn't go to the 'best' university still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I know logically it's not that big a deal, but I can't seem to let go of it. Shame.

I could wish I hadn't got in - i nearly went to Salford, which had a smashing course for what i wanted to do. If I had, when I was ill, it might not have scuppered my chances of getting a decent degree (for reference, i have an ordinary, which is to say, a 'not-worth-the-paper-it-is-printed-on), rather than me working myself into being ill twice in my third year trying to get a third so I could do the (much less exam oriented) fourth year.

On the other hand - I'd not have met

senji, so...

In terms of school and stuff - we usually had 15-17 'oxbridge' candidates, about 10-15 would get offers, and almost never did someone not accept an offer. One of my friends (who got 6 A-grade A-Levels (no, we didn't do General Studies)) didn't get an offer, and felt really bad about it.