(no subject)

[ewx]

It's so rare that the media talk anything but nonsense about Oxbridge admissions that it seems worth flagging it when they break the habit. Certainly my recollection is that those of my classmates who didn't get into Oxford or Cambridge weren't considered somehow inferior or to have failed; we all knew perfectly well that there was a large element of chance involved.

Comments

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

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.

[daneel-olivaw.livejournal.com]

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

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

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

[gerald_duck]

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 …