NS letter on university admissions

Last week`s Leader rightly stated that "we do too little to help the poorest ascend the education escalator", and criticised the government`s "dogmatic marketisation" of universities (Education and the common good, 23rd February, 2018).What it omitted to mention, however, was how social mobility is also being "harmed" by the admissions policies of the so-called "elite" universities. David Lammy, last October, revealed how both Oxford and Cambridge, recipients of over £800m of taxpayers` money each year, enrol consistently around 80% of their intake from the top two social classes, with more offers being made to pupils from Eton than to students on free school meals across the whole country. Totally unsurprisingly, the number of ethnic minority students accepted is so low, Lammy concluded there has to be "systematic bias"! The universities claim that the Teaching Excellence Framework, with one of its judgement criteria being drop-out rates, limits taking risks with undergraduate enrolment, but it cannot explain why students with straight As from an economically poor area in the north of England stand far less chance of being accepted by one of the Russell group universities than does someone with similar grades from a public school.

      Where is the "risk", anyway, in offering a place to a student from a school in an economically-deprived area, who achieves grade Bs and Cs in traditional A-level examinations? He or she may lack, unsurprisingly, confidence, and may not perform well in a nerve-racking interview, but research by Cardiff and Oxford Brookes universities has proved students from state schools gain better degrees than independently-educated candidates with the same A-level grades.

     Rather than a government review of university finance, May`s government should be investigating Pre-U examinations, popular in most public schools, where there is the possibility that the exam papers were either set or marked by their teachers. A cheating scandal was exposed involving these examinations last summer, resulting in an "investigation" by the Commons education select committee. These examinations, not inspected and regulated by the Joint Council for Qualifications like all the other examinations taken by sixth-formers, are run by Cambridge Assessment International, part of Cambridge university, and must give already privileged pupils an extra advantage.

     Reducing fees for some degrees is not going to improve social mobility, but that never has been the aim of this, or any recent, Tory government!