international education
campusreview.com.au
‘Woke’ Oxbridge?
Just how committed to
diversity are they?
By Michael Marinetto
You can always tell an Oxbridge graduate. How? They tell us,
of course. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are not
mere ancient educational establishments. It may be the 21st
century, but they are still considered a class bastion of white, privately
educated, wealthy privilege.
It’s little wonder Oxbridge has long been dogged by claims of class
bias in the students it admits. One uncomfortable fact is the overrepresentation
of the privately educated. In 2013, The Guardian found
that applicants from private schools were 9 per cent more likely to
gain a place at Oxford than state educated pupils with the same
entrance qualifications. Class privilege wins out. But not anymore.
Oxbridge’s admissions policy has now moved with the current
zeitgeist, which has taken a populist and anti-elitist turn. This has
meant admitting larger numbers from non-traditional backgrounds.
That is, the poor and people of colour.
Both universities have invested in outreach programs – Oxford
($14 million) and Cambridge ($10 million) – to make contact with
underprivileged state schools. Oxford spends around $28 million on
widening access, although we need to remember that expanding
participation is required by higher education regulators.
Progress has been made in opening up ancient college doors to
unrepresentative groups. Reports from Oxford in January – when
offers to prospective students are made – claimed the university had
achieved a dramatic turnaround.
Marchella Ward, the Tinsley Outreach Fellow at Oxford’s Worcester
College, fleshed out the details of this historic moment in an article
for The Guardian: “Last week saw the news of a step forward on
that path, with 69 per cent of UK offers being made to state school
students, an increase from just 56 per cent five years ago.”
However, Ward concedes there are intrinsic limits to making
university entrance fairer and representative. For Ward, students
hitting Oxford’s exacting entry benchmarks are not representative of
modern Britain. This was highlighted in a Twitter spat in 2017 between
Labour MP David Lammy and Oxford University over the issue of
diversity. Lammy used a Freedom of Information request to obtain
more detailed (less massaged) admissions data from Oxford and
Cambridge. The FOI figures shattered the claims of progress towards
widening social participation at Oxford. The university defended its
record on participation against Lammy’s charge that “it is a bastion of
white, middle-class southern privilege”.
The reality is that Oxbridge is becoming less representative but
more regressive. More places are going to state-educated pupils, and
yet most of those admitted to Oxbridge come from affluent or highstatus
professional backgrounds.
Lammy’s data found the highest earning professional groups
(senior lawyers, doctors and managers) dominated Oxbridge places,
with their share of offers rising from 79 per cent to 81 per cent
between 2010 and 2015.
Needless to say, most applicants will be white. Lammy found you
are twice as likely to get into Oxford as a white applicant (24 per
cent) than as a black applicant (12 per cent). Or put another way,
in 2017, Oxford admitted more students from one private school
(Westminster: 49), than it did black students (48).
Critics are justified to lambast Oxbridge for a lack of diversity, but
they focus on the social and gloss over the geographic. The winners
and losers of Oxbridge admissions also follow distinct regional
patterns and inequalities, those between north and south, between
the Celtic periphery and England, and between the metropolitan
cities and provincial towns, and London and its home counties.
Lammy’s data just shows how wide these regional inequalities have
become. London and southeast England received 48 per cent of
offers from both Oxford and Cambridge, with the Midlands receiving
11 per cent of Oxford offers and 12 per cent of Cambridge offers.
Oxbridge has remained distinctively English in an increasingly
globally connected world. But how? The answer: it hasn’t. Despite
all the money spent on widening participation, the number of British
students getting undergraduates places at Oxbridge is declining.
Evidence from the Higher Education Statistics Agency and the
universities themselves show a 7 per cent fall in UK undergraduates at
Oxford and a 5 per cent fall at Cambridge between 2007 and 2019. In
real terms, “Oxford and Cambridge ... are teaching nearly 1000 fewer
British undergraduates than they were five years ago”.
Overseas undergraduate students, by comparison, rose by 51
per cent at Oxford and 65 per cent at Cambridge. This is a case of
internationalisation at the expense of diversification. Those Oxbridge
places going to international students are determined not simply by
ability but also the ability to pay. In some cases, international students
outside the EU have to pay annual tuition fees of up to $60,000. But
Oxbridge is not alone in recruiting high-fee-paying students from
overseas – many universities in the UK are diversifying internationally.
There is one important qualification about universities looking
abroad for their student intake. Unlike other prominent UK
universities, Oxbridge has largely refused to expand places for
domestic undergraduates to compensate for the growing number of
places going overseas. This policy is perfectly understandable when
you consider how Oxbridge sees itself. Increase domestic entrants
and Oxbridge begins to resemble any other modern British university
working at overcapacity. Oxbridge still has a sense of educational and
cultural exceptionalism, and it was the sense of exceptionalism from
which Brexit dreams were made (in fact, all the key architects of Brexit
attended Oxford).
Oxbridge exceptionalism suggests the diversity drive might amount
to ‘image washing’ in the age of woke. Or maybe the diversification
drive is a strategic way of justifying nearly $2 billion of government
funding going to Oxbridge colleges each year. Both ancient
universities are probably keen to maintain this financial pipeline, a
pipeline where the redistribution of wealth moves upwards. ■
Dr Michael Marinetto is a senior lecturer in public management at
Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University.
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