Widening Access to Universities

After reading this article http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/20/oxbridge-access-poor-students I have one or two musings.

The article is worrying about how to get more students from poor backgrounds into Oxbridge, namely by countering the stereotype of Oxbridge as an extension of boarding school for the rich. The problem is that this is what 50% of Oxbridge is. Admittedly the other half of good teaching and research combines to provide the material for state school kids' eulogies of their time at Oxbridge. However they all mention the Others, the students with black tie suits, wine cellars and surefire careers ahead of them in law, media and politics thanks to their family connections. The Upper Class. As though they are somehow above us, as though that is what we are supposed to aim for when we are told to better ourselves.

In my opinion the answer lies not in changing Oxbridge. Leave it to the rahs. Rather, why do we have this mindset that the UK has only two great universities? If you want to improve underprivileged students' access to an Oxbridge education, why don't we improve the universities they already go to? Rather than thinking being surrounded by gothic architecture and drinking malt whiskies is where our inner cities kids should aim to be, we should be investing in universities such as Manchester, UCL (which curently only has classic British snobbery and the all too convenient acronym Oxbridge stopping it from being counted as equal. Ucloxbridge anyone?) and Glasgow. Perhaps even Edinburgh. What if we had 5 universities in the UK as good as Oxbridge? We wouldn't be worrying about access then, as those students would just not be in Oxford or Cambridge. And by having those 5 top universities the old boys network might be broken up as well. It's very easy to do all the networking needed in two small towns so close to each other, not so easy when one is in Scotland and the other in London. Wonder if our Oxbridge educated government will think of doing that. Probably not.

Well, this is what I would do if I was in charge.

We could probably finance improving the other universities from charging high fees to Chinese students.They'd pay ;)