Oxford

j4 has been posting a series about how she ended up at Oxford, and this seems an interesting exercise, so I'm copying her idea.

( fairly undramatic )

If you have that political inclination, it's easy enough to read this and conclude that I only got into Oxford because I had a whole bunch of privileges in my life up to that point. Certainly I did have many advantages that made Oxford seem attainable and desirable. But when I got there, I found that the place was not at all filled with people like me. I met people of every different background imaginable, different countries, different social strata, different ethnic background, different ages and life situations, you name it. And you simply couldn't tell someone's background by how they took to Oxford society; the people from conventional middle-class backgrounds and private schools with lots of extra coaching weren't all mediocre but confident beyond their ability, and some of the most appallingly posh tweedy, braying types actually came from poor backgrounds and schools that didn't believe in sending their pupils to university, they just chose to adopt that persona and social set.

It seems plausible that there are some people who are at least as objectively "clever" as I am, who didn't go to Oxford because they came from the wrong backgrounds. But I think it's more likely that they never got to the point of applying in the first place, than that they were unfairly rejected because of not being middle class enough. At the same time, I did see direct evidence of unfairness, in the form of Christ Church telling MK that his inhumanly high Abitur scores were an obscure German qualification that didn't count for anything, and the way that the Merton medics were openly racist towards one candidate.

What it comes down to is that Oxford is going to end up with several uniformly excellent candidates for each place available, and almost any means of choosing between them is going to have the potential for unfairness. That doesn't mean that unfairness is a good thing, of course. But I don't think it's as simple as the system being rigged to favour people from posh schools.