How to end Oxbridge dominance? Try halting undergraduate teaching

The social damage caused by Oxford and Cambridge forming British elites at age 18 could be ended if the two universities stopped teaching undergraduates and instead educated adults “who never got a chance first time around”, a Financial Times columnist argues in a new book.

Simon Kuper sets out the idea in Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. The book traces how the group of public school-educated Conservatives who initiated Brexit – most notably prime minister Boris Johnson – had their style of political rhetoric, worldview and route to power shaped by their privileged life at the university; by its tutorial system, its Oxford Union debating society and its intimate links with the political elite.

More broadly, Mr Kuper told Times Higher Education that he wanted to counter the argument that there is “something of a fact of nature about the Oxbridge dominance in UK society” – or, more specifically, English society.

“It’s actually quite unusual for a country to bar 99 per cent of the population from entering its most elite positions aged 17 or 18, which is essentially what Britain does,” he said.

While Mr Kuper is an Oxford graduate, he has something of an outsider’s perspective, given that he grew up in the Netherlands and went to school there until he was 16.

When he joined the Financial Times’ graduate scheme in 1994, “pretty much everyone who had been on that scheme in all the years before me was Oxbridge – that was almost an essential criterion for entering”, said Mr Kuper.

Although he acknowledged recent progress in Oxbridge admissions, he said it remained the case that “if you go to a private school and you come from the right kind of family then your chances of getting into Oxbridge are very high”, while admissions from state schools tend to still be from “the leafiest state schools”.

Referring to French president Emmanuel Macron’s abolition of the elite École Nationale d’Administration, the book proposes the idea to “stop them [Oxford and Cambridge] teaching undergraduates”, which would remove their “biggest distortion of British life”.

Oxford and Cambridge’s excellence could be spread “much more widely” if their model, alongside postgraduate education and research, were to include education for “gifted but under-qualified adults who never got a chance the first time around”, or expansion of “summer schools for promising disadvantaged teenagers”, in an “Oxbridge for all” model, it says.

In the UK, if you were told what someone’s parents did for a living and where they lived “we could accurately predict almost all the 99 per cent who will not get into Oxford or Cambridge”, said Mr Kuper. “So that’s pretty much decided for most people at birth.”

Yet the reality is “we all have different phases in our lives where we’re more motivated – a lot of people discover a purpose and an interest relatively late”.

Many of those who were “never going to go to Oxbridge because of where [they] came from”, or who did not go to university but try to educate themselves, “would love the chance to go to Oxbridge for a summer, a year, three years”, said Mr Kuper.

“There should be a way for those people to apply and for Oxbridge to go out and find them. It would, of course, skill those people up, allow those people to go for the top jobs in an organisation rather than being stuck in the middle…The potential there must be a lot greater than [Oxford and Cambridge] going to 50 schools and saying, ‘send us the top half of your pupils’.”

“One retort I get to the book is, ‘Oh well, every country has an elite – that’s just the way it works,’” Mr Kuper continued.

But “social democratic countries often select their elites once you begin work: you all enter at 23, 24 with more or less equal starts if you’ve been to university” – though of course that excludes those who haven’t attended university – “and careers are made from then on”.

There are elites in nations such as the Netherlands and Germany, but “just not a very selective elite in the same way”, said Mr Kuper. “There’s certainly not this entry barrier at 18. And it doesn’t really matter where you go to university.”

Oxford and Cambridge were the only two universities in England until well into the 19th century, today endowing them with prestige, wealth and power far above any other university. Does that make their social dominance impossible to challenge?

“Of course there are things we can do about it,” Mr Kuper replied. “Of course we can make efforts to change the workings of society. And we’re not completely captive to the past.”

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com