Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian
The numbers are clearly unacceptable. Several colleges in both Oxford and Cambridge frequently admit cohorts with no black students in them at all. Roughly 1.5% of total offers are made to black British applicants and more than 80% of offers are made to the children of the top two social classes. With offers made overwhelmingly to those in London and a handful of the home counties, both universities are consistently excluding entire ethnic and regional demographics. They also continue to admit a grotesquely disproportionate number of privately schooled students. In effect, the two ancients are running a generous quota scheme for white students, independent schools and the offspring of affluent south-eastern English parents.
There is undoubtedly a great deal that both institutions can and must do to remedy this. Our admissions processes at Cambridge are not sufficiently responsive to the gravity of the situation. Despite periodic panics in response to such media “revelations” or staged political scolding, and notwithstanding the good intentions of many involved in admissions, questions of diversity and inclusion are not taken seriously enough in their own right.
The focus on educational achievement, itself defined in purely numerical terms and worsened by internal league tables, means there is little sense of meaningful diversity as an educational and community good in its own right. Despite having contextual indicators that would allow us to diversify our admissions, we balk at non-traditional attainment profiles for fear that the student will not be able to cope once here.
For any Oxbridge college to not have a single black student at any given point in time, where they would rightly not tolerate having low numbers of women, is not just about looking institutionally racist but also impoverishes the educational and social environment we provide. The same holds true for regional and class exclusions.
When I first came to Cambridge in 2001, having taught at different institutions in the US, I was struck by the relative whiteness and sheer cultural homogeneity of this university. Even the minimal improvements I’ve seen since then in some years – more students from ethnic minority backgrounds, more young women from northern comprehensives – have made a huge difference both to me as a teacher and, more importantly, to what students are able to learn from each other.
Not all of them will get first-class marks, but they both gain a lot from and have a great deal to give to the educational environment here, not least by expanding the definition of what counts as achievement. We need more of them. (At Cambridge, in recent years, a quantum of vocal BME students as well as students from northern comprehensives has demanded change, often to good effect. There is some cause for hope.)
There is also undoubtedly a culture of denial when it comes to matters of race and racism, which students speak of both in class and privately and which I have experienced when I’ve tried to draw attention to them. And more than one student from northern comprehensives has told me about being discouraged by teachers from applying and feeling amazed to have received an offer only to feel alienated by the stultifying class conformity of the affluent south-east once they get here.
It is simply not good enough for Oxford and Cambridge to say that they are welcoming of diversity and in effect blame certain demographics for not applying despite their outreach programmes. It is Oxbridge that must change more substantially to provide a better environment for a diverse student body. The two ancients must be held to account; homogeneity must fall.
But should they be the only ones held to account? In having a necessary conversation about elitism and exclusion, are we forgetting – or being encouraged – to not have a larger one about wider deprivation and systemic inequality? It is striking that some quarters only too happy to periodically attack Oxbridge for its failings, from rightwing tabloids to Tory ministers, are rarely interested in the roots of inequality and lack of opportunity of which Oxbridge exclusion is a symptom but is hardly the origin.
We should be careful that a headline-friendly focus on these two institutions alone does not become an easy way to avoid even more painful and challenging questions. It seems somewhat selective and inadequate to focus on what David Lammy rightly calls “social apartheid” at Oxbridge without discussing the widespread and worsening economic apartheid in this country.
We know that access to university education in general is sharply determined by school achievement that, in turn, is shaped by parental income and education levels. In an economically stratified society, it is inevitable that most young people from economically deprived backgrounds have a substantially lower chance of achieving the kind of marks that enable access to higher education.
Hence it is incoherent to have a discussion about access to higher education without having one simultaneously about economic disadvantage, which, in some cases, including British Caribbean and Bangladeshi communities, has an added ethnic minority dimension to it. In a context of worsening economic fault lines, there’s a whiff of something convenient about only attacking the admissions failings of top universities.
The other obvious missing dimension to this discussion is the existence and encouragement for independent schools. It’s somewhat contradictory to encourage a market culture where money can buy a deluxe education and then feel shocked when the well-off get their money’s worth by easily meeting the requirements for offers from high-status institutions. It’s worth saying that as long as independent schools, hardly bastions of ethnic diversity, exist, there will remain a fundamental apartheid between two kinds of students.
Oxbridge, or even the Russell Group of universities more broadly, can only do so much to mitigate this state of affairs, which lifting the tuition fee cap will only worsen. Lammy notes that more offers are made to Eton than to students on free school meals.
But why not also question the very existence of Eton and the lamentable state of an economic order that necessitates free school meals for many? Add to this the parlous condition of state education with its chronic underfunding, inflated classroom sizes, an undermining testing and target culture and difficulties in recruiting and retaining good teachers.
The same politicians who rightly point to Oxbridge’s demographic narrowness are rarely willing to grasp the nettle of a two-tier educational structure in which some are destined to do much better than others. Who, for instance, would be willing to call for the abolition of private schooling, subject as such a suggestion would be to shrill denunciations about how individual choice, personal aspiration and the workings of the market are being interfered with?
There are other tough discussions that could be had if the aim truly is to address and undo inequalities in university demographics. Would politicians and institutions be willing, for instance, to impose representational quotas for both ethnic minorities and state-educated students that reflect the national pie-chart?
Currently, the Office for Fair Access (Offa) makes some toothless demands around “widening participation”, a rather feeble phrase, which are not accompanied by penalties for failure. Lammy, whose suggestion that admissions be centralised has some merit to it, not least towards undoing the unhelpful internal collegiate caste system at Oxbridge, has made also a comparison between Oxbridge’s abysmal intake of black students and Harvard’s healthy numbers.
Would the political and intellectual classes be willing to have a discussion about something like “affirmative action” in the US, a process of “positive discrimination” by which underrepresented ethnic minorities and disadvantaged groups are given special consideration? We must hope so. For failing a wide-ranging discussion aimed at radical measures, all the huffing and puffing about Oxbridge is destined to remain a yearly ritual, each controversial headline simply making way for the same unsurprising headlines every year.
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