Do the Tutors at Oxbridge have information where the student went to school when they are interviewing or is this information witheld form them?
Whats a bit worrying for me is that more eyes are focused on Oxbridge, the foot is being taken off other Rusell Group with Universities like Birmingham, Southampton and Nottingham having acceptance rates of over 80% of indie pupils compared to just 15% of state. I cant paste the table properly but the data below shows which universities have the highest acceptance rate of indie pupils.
Russell Group University acceptance rates of Independent School Pupils
ISC Data 2008 National Data 2008
First column is number of pupils accepted from independent school ie 1541 at Birmingham
Second Column is indies acceptance ie 86% for Birmingham
Last is the acceptance rate nationally ie 15% Brimingham
The University of Birmingham 1541 86% 15%
The University of Sheffield 1210 84% 16%
University of Glasgow 669 83% 19%
University of Newcastle Upon Tyne 1818 83% 18%
Queen’s University Belfast 246 83% 20%
The University of Nottingham 2411 82% 18%
University of Southampton 1019 81% 16%
The University of Manchester 2495 79% 17%
University of Leeds 2914 79% 21%
The University of Liverpool 766 78% 16%
Cardiff University 910 74% 17%
Imperial College London (University of London) 657 68% 18%
The University of Warwick 1412 66% 12%
King’s College London (University of London) 867 60% 12%
University College London (University of London) 1177 56% 13%
University of Bristol 1855 46% 9%
The University of Edinburgh 1593 43% 11%
University of Cambridge 571 36% 24%
Oxford University 588 33% 23%
London School of Economics and Political Science 285 27% 7%
London School of Economics is really the one that seem to reject more indie pupils only taking 27%. However I understand it also has a large cohort of International Students and nationally accepts just 7%
I read that blog and I really disagree with her here
So in my humble opinion, and what do I know after all - I'm just a state school kid who managed to stumble her way into Oxbridge in the day when there was still an Oxbridge exam - Oxbridge does discriminate against private school students. Of course they do. If they didn't, only a handful of state school applicants would ever get in.
Whats she says is that indie pupils are miles ahead of state pupil and that if indies pupils werent discriminated more would get in