Excellence or elitism?

As thousands of 17- and 18-year-olds across the country watch their inboxes with bated breath, awaiting that longed-for email bearing news of an Oxford or Cambridge interview, they have been met with the discouraging message that the institutions where they hope to study are making strides in the wrong direction.

Last month, data concerning just how concentrated Oxbridge admissions are in certain regions and income groups were revealed to a generally aghast social media audience, often under headlines proclaiming the descent of Oxbridge into the pits of elitism. According to the data, released after a Freedom of Information request, 48% of Oxbridge offers go to students in London and South-East England, 81% go to those in the top two income brackets and both universities made over 200 more offers to applicants in the Home Counties than to applicants from the whole of northern England between 2010 and 2015.

While it is not shocking in itself that wealthier students are more likely to get places at Oxbridge – they are, after all, more likely to live in "better" areas with better schools which have better knowledge of the long admissions process – the extent of the disparities poses a very real problem. Oxford and Cambridge are not just two universities with money and good teaching; they are breeding grounds for the country's next CEOs and Prime Ministers and Nobel Prize Winners. If the people who get accepted into Oxbridge are not diverse and reflective of the population, neither will be the people who run our country – and society will forever be dominated by those lucky enough to be born in a middle-class, southern English family, whether they deserve their position or not.

On that, at least, most people can agree. However, many headlines and social media commentators have responded to these findings by attacking Oxbridge specifically for "becoming more elitist", as if their selection processes were deliberately engineered to favour applicants from certain backgrounds.

Unfortunately for them, Oxbridge selection processes are not an exercise in social engineering; they are based entirely on critical thinking skills, reasoning ability and, where applicable, subject knowledge. Some admissions tests are incredibly difficult to prepare students for, even for well-financed private schools; the Thinking Skills Assessment, a requirement of several courses at Oxford, tests a variety of types of reasoning and is extremely hard to drill into someone's brain (I know this from experience of trying to drill it into my own).

But the crux of the matter is that with all this talk of Oxbridge's social obligations, it is easy to forget that they have one task above all else: selecting and nurturing the brightest minds.

If a privately-educated student from southern England demonstrates better critical thinking, copes with unfamiliar material with greater ease and altogether shows a better capacity to deal with the demands of an immensely fast-paced and rigorous degree than a less privileged competitor, rejecting them on the assumption that their academic ability is wholly reducible to their wealth is ultimately harmful both to Oxbridge's own standards and to the less able student who might struggle there.

A better way to ensure equal opportunity in admissions processes is through outreach programmes and summer schools. Both universities offer summer courses, study days and even essay prizes which are only open to disadvantaged students, and send representatives to schools to encourage these students to apply. Oxford and Cambridge already do this, and short of adding non-academic criteria to their selection processes (which is, ironically, rather unmeritocratic) there is not much more they can do.

Fortunately (or not), this is not just Oxbridge's problem. If a student's location can predict their academic ability to such a great extent, there is something more endemic going on which requires more thought than just blaming individual institutions. Universities would not have such a hard time selecting for academic ability while minimising the influence of other variables if the quality of the British education system were not so…well, variable.

Efforts to achieve equal opportunity cannot begin at tertiary education, by which time much has already been decided – they must exist throughout the education system and be a society-wide effort, not simply left to the whims of council workers or headteachers. If policymakers are to take anything from the debate surrounding Oxbridge admissions, it is that for disadvantaged students to be able to meet the academic criteria set by Oxbridge, the state education system must help them to do so.