Given the disparity in middle-class household incomes between the UK and the US, I suspect a majority of UK middle-class students would be eligible for some form of financial aid from US universities (assuming Oxbridge vs US equivalents with need-blind + full-need international admissions), meaning their net cost to attend could be lower than studying in the UK.

See also, Bernie 10 years ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0&pp=ygUVYmVybmllIG9...

I don't know at what point people were convinced that the push against immigration is some kind of billionaire plot, but is has been great cover for said billionaires.

Is it?

Maybe a kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder than, say, Prince Charles with his private school and dedicated personal tutors.

It's a very bold assertion that A level grades are the ultimate arbiter of "dumbness".

The whole point of the interview process is to assess not just the applicant's past achievements, but what they might be able to achieve if they got their place at the uni. Part of that is looking at the applicant's background, and knowing that even if they aren't currently at some elite high-fee school, they might still have the ability and capability to do well.

I am all in favor of this style of selection. The dark old days of "this kid's dad went to our college, we should do them a favour and let them in" are long gone, thankfully.

Can you point to any kind of evidence that Oxbridge are dumbing down their teaching, or lowering their standards of teaching? I doubt it.

Full disclosure: cambridge alumni, from a state school!

Growing up without privilege is (obviously) markedly more difficult than being provided with the best education money can buy throughout childhood.

The students aren't necessarily worse; but they will be unaccustomed to the codified approach that other students from independent schools understand.

The system has been built to serve the privileged.

While you might feel blame can fairly be placed on differing entry requirements; the truth is more complex.

A 'sticking plaster' solution has been lazily applied to address disparity, when in reality, the whole system needs to be reworked.

'Dumber' and 'worse', are not labels that should be used here.

The interview is absolutely the primary test here, with the grades just acting as a filter to provide a manageable number of applicants. Widening that filter to allow more disadvantaged students the chance to interview seems perfectly reasonable - given that the interview itself remains equally demanding (and I've seen no suggestion or evidence against this).

You are designing a contest, and students compete. You have to try to represent your goals in terms of the contest, this is very lossy. It’s just never going to be very accurate, and in highly selective institutions much of the selection will be random no matter how you structure the contest.

I attended one of the worst secondary schools in the country. Less than 10% of my year earned the qualifications necessary to go on to university. I know that many of these people, who have gone on to be successful in life, would have excelled at an independent school and would have excelled at university. They were in poverty, not stupid.

You cannot compare the achievements of a student at an independent school to those of a student at a state school based on grades. State school and independent school are a fundamentally different educational experience.

If you think Cambridge and Oxford exist to accept the highest graded students in the country, rather than to accept the students that have the most academic potential, then sure, let's only admit students who have 3 A*s.

Oxford admissions have a heavy interview component: if they think you're really smart, have great potential, and then you'll be of the caliber to get 4 A* no question if you had rich parents and went to a top Public School (but don't, so may not), then -- yeah -- they can make you a lower offer. Their place, their rules.

It isn't dumbing down or taking worse students, it's easing out the rich types who will drink/play lacrosse or rugby/bore to at least Blues standard, are pretty bright but have been spoon-fed to get there so will turn out to be dumber and worse students that people whose potential hadn't been fully revealed by 17/18, even if the spoon-fed cohort get better A Level results.

This obviously doesn’t follow, and you should feel a decent amount of embarrassment for ignoring the fact that exam grades don’t correlate with “dumbness” or lack thereof.

It should be trivially obvious that a student who is perhaps from a less well-off background, attending state school and achieving decent grades, can be equally as talented and deserving of a top-tier education as a better-off, privately-educated student.

Access programs go some way towards trying to tackle snowballing generational inequality - which essentially results in a bias away from merit, and towards those able to afford private education.

If you want to argue against that, then fine - but at least don’t start with such faulty assumptions.

where does it say that here?

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/admiss...

Although I do note that foundation PPE only requires BBB, which given the current crop of people in westminister, it makes sense.

Really, oxford and cambridge as well as other top universities can have a simple algorithm. They should bias against those from private schools in terms of admissions criteria until the point at which outcomes (as measured by graduating degree scores) are equal. This wouldn’t happen though because then private schools would drop to 5% of enrolments and there’d be no advantage gained from paying for a private school education. Unthinkable!

He did say exactly that.

Yep, but this is a fairly common take I've noticed in England (not as severe in Scotland).

The air is thick with a semblance of classism, and I've found the business culture to be horrid due to this "old boys club" mindset.

Imagine an America where the only way to open doors to the upper echelons is to attend only an Ivy.

And I say this as an Ivy grad.

To a large extent I feel this is because the British economy is so heavily tied to legal, financial, and media services, and as such the "Magic Circle", "The City", and the media consolidation in Greater London has such an outsized impact.

Ironic too because there are fairly decent clusters of engineering research like DefenseTech in Southwest England (which tbf is fairly posh) and Robotics and HPC in Edinburgh.

Some universities are better at optimising for rankings, see also REF research funding and how much effort and resources are spent on it, which varies by university: https://2029.ref.ac.uk/about/what-is-the-ref/

So a good UK university cannot profitably offer education for UK students.

So for some of the best they'll focus on non UK students. These students aren't subject to a capped price we can't afford, so we can gouge them to make up for the lost revenue from home students.

But the usual "I'm not racist but..." people of course hate foreigners. How dare any of these people be different in any way. And so while some of them will pretend their hatred only extends to some foreigners it's always the same exact people who are aggrieved and want yet another excuse to hate foreigners.

This results in government efforts to make it harder to study here, and more expensive to teach students here. That way they slightly appease racists who weren't going to vote for them anyway and they feel justified.

I assume eventually this will collapse, and judging from Brexit nothing whatsoever will be learned by the supporter/victim class, the same gullible morons will keep falling for lies from the same people who feed off them. Certain that somehow it must be somebody else's fault their lives are shit while the leaders they're feeding are doing so well.

> Durham University improved by 30 places year-on-year in its students’ evaluation of teaching quality, which was the main driver in securing its third place in the overall university league table

Which isn't quite the same as 30 places in ranking as OP suggests, however I agree with their point that moving 30 places on that metric could be fairly suspicious.

For example - when I was at university in the UK we got a speech telling us basically that we were going to get sent a survey from the times, and the higher we ranked the university, the higher the universities ranking would be, and that would make our degree more valuable. If the main reason they jumped from 7th to 3rd could be a metric that is potentially 'influence-able' by the university, it could be more of a change in comms-strategy than actual university quality.

It's the daydream sequence from series 10 episode 7, 'Lisa Gets an "A"'.

I think you’re confusing a statement about ranking in a small set (Ivy League schools) for a statement about a bigger set. This isn’t uncommon – iirc there was some big furore a few months ago about admissions to US schools where much of the disagreement seemed to be downstream of different people thinking about different numbers of top or acceptable universities (and then sometimes having a big difference between the intuitive percentages of possible university options and the actual percentages they made up)

I think it’s still the case that people who describe themselves as having gone to an Ivy League school mean a school like Brown. If you went to Harvard then either say it directly or mumble something about a school in Boston – why say something that sounds similarly fancy to the truth but that could also be interpreted as something less elite? Saying you went to school in Boston is much lower in fanciness than Harvard or Ivy League except that most people know what it is code for.

When I was at Cambridge in the early noughties, supervisions for maths and computer science (and physics I believe but I didn't go to any of those) were 2 students in 4 1-hour sessions per week (1 per 24 hour lecture course). [Edit: hmm, actually maybe it was just 2 per week.] In maths, if there were an odd number of students then one would get 1 to 1 supervisions, but I'm sure that depends on the college. For computer science, I was put in a 3 person supervision when they had an odd number (and I wasn't happy about it at the time!)

I later did teaching at UCL and Imperial and the difference was huge. When they get to it, I would advise my children to go Oxford or Cambridge in a heartbeat. (For reference, my parents were too poor to even consider university.)

Wouldn't league tables like Norrington and Tompkins be more important for them?

I remember during my Britishphilia phase in HS and imagined doing a CS Tripos at one and then a BCL at he other before I removed the emotion and realized the services and network was inferior to a good UC like Cal or UCLA or a B10 like Mich, I was concentrating more on the College itself, not the Uni as a whole. Like being at Harris Manchester College, Oxford wouldn't open the same doors that Balliol College, Oxford would, and it was Oxbridge, Imperial, UCL, LSE, or bust.

At the undergrad level, Oxbridge is college driven and not all colleges are equal even if everyone is in the same faculty.

It's not like Yale or Harvard where you are randomly assigned a house, and the overwhelming majority of education services are provided by departments.

The only people applying to those from the UK are the wealthy.

If by "very top" you mean "richest", then maybe. But I'm not sure we care about that?

Do you have a source to back this claim?