Well, first of all a big thank you to Dr John Green for the blogs he’s written for us over the last three weeks, they’ve been a great insight. There’s certainly plenty to think about for prospective university applicants, their parents and teachers. The relevance of his reflections for those considering applying to Oxbridge are particularly striking.The reports our users generate are specifically designed to help students make the right decisions about what college and course to apply to at Oxford and Cambridge, but that means more than just the age of the college or the male:female ratio on a course! We have full admissions and historical data on EVERY course and EVERY college at both Oxford and Cambridge for the last 10 years. No other site holds all this data in one place and no one else has collated the data in a way that allows users to make meaningful comparisons and examine trends over time, all tailored to their specific choice of metrics.So, how can all that help you, in light of the anticipated changes that Dr Green has outlined how should you create your reports to bear those changes in mind? One of the most striking messages from the blogs was that every student for every degree, regardless of ability, needs to be prepared to fight for their university place and know its value. Let’s look at these two issues in detail:Restricted funding to universities results in reduced places for students -As Dr Green pointed out the number of students achieving top grades at A level is now close to 5 times the number of places at Oxford and Cambridge universities. The level of competition for places is higher than ever before and it stands to reason that the greatest increase in competition will be for the most popular colleges and courses. But our data has thrown up some interesting revelations. For instance, in 2009 only 22% of applicants for Oxford’s joint Classics and English degree gained a place, whereas nearly double that amount gained places on the Classics and Modern Languages or the stand-alone Classics courses (at 48% and 41% respectively). Similarly less than 30% of maths applicants to Christ's, Downing, Magdalene, Pembroke and Robinson eventually gained a place at Cambridge, whereas over 50% got into St Catharine’s, Corpus Christi or Selwyn (or elsewhere via the pooling system). Have you considered looking at related degrees to your current chosen subject or colleges you’d not thought of before? There are plenty of examples of this variance between related degree subjects and colleges but the data the universities present to applicants makes them difficult to see.Fees of £25,000 per year at Oxford and Cambridge are not out of scope within the next few years -One of the near-inevitabilities that Dr Green highlighted is that all students will be paying more for their university education. At Oxford and Cambridge where small tuition groups and close supervision are the norm it is expected that fees will be even higher than the rising costs across the board. As fees rise so does the level of your investment. Students (and, indeed, their parents!) need to be sure that the money they are investing is going to pay dividends. Obviously, an Oxbridge student will be a diligent student, otherwise they wouldn’t be there in the first place but is that all that goes in to achieving a top-class degree? According to our data, last year 87% of Oxford physics students graduated with a 2:1, whilst only about 77% of engineering students achieved the same level of distinction. As Dr Green pointed out, places on graduate employment schemes are getting tougher too - would the knowledge that the degree you’re thinking about applying for is less likely to result in one of the top tier grades that they look for alter your decision to invest?These are just two examples of the way our data can help inform your application to Oxbridge, there are many, many more - limited only by how you chose to compare the data we hold. The decision of where to go to university and what to study is one of the most important in a young person’s life and we at myOxbridgeChoice think that students deserve to be equipped with all the information to make the best decision possible.
There is no question that competition for university places is fierce and getting fiercer - this year 660,000 students applied for UK university places, up 12% on last year’s record breaking figure. The number of undergraduate places has increased but David Willetts, the Universities Minister has warned that it will still not be enough to stop high-achieving students missing out on places. When a place at university becomes a lottery for top students, parents and students will lose faith in an education system which fails to reward effort and the crisis in university funding will be matched by a crisis in confidence in the education system. How did we get here? ‘And how are the coalition government going to undo the crisis in British universities? And what does this mean for the Oxbridge applicant? The Labour government set a target that 50% of 18-year-olds should enter university. No-one ever explained why that was deemed a sensible, let alone an achievable, target but as the number has crept upwards (it is currently just above 40%) there has been a related devaluation in the value of a degree and a growth of expectation that anyone should have the option of a university place, almost irrespective of ability. With headlines like "250,000 to miss university places this year" the media can at times seem intent on portraying university as a right of passage, not necessarily earned through ability. Recently the new Universities Minister, David Willetts has launched the idea that people will not necessarily undertake their university education at the age of 18 to 21 but could embark on it at any time up until they are 30. One can see that this might defuse the expectation of an 18 year old and help to re-establish the idea of a university education as being part of the skill-set for a working professional life. However, one wonders whether the idea doesn’t also represent a much-needed (in terms of the government’s coffers) method of restricting university places, cutting funding to the universities (mature students are more likely to enrol on part-time courses) and generally curtailing the currently overstretched market.Whilst there is a hierarchy of universities with Oxbridge and other high-status universities providing overall higher standards of education and teaching, as evidenced in the league tables and by student surveys, these universities are increasingly finding it hard to select the best students given the qualification framework which has developed. Changes since 1992, including the 1992 creation of an integrated polytechnic-university sector and the use of GCSE, A and AS level examinations to determine student ability, have proved challenging. One might ask how a single exam system can possible be used to accurately determine the ability of the 50% of 18-year-olds whom the previous government determined should have access to university? Alongside this, the examining bodies have agglomerated and become commercial entities charged with delivering profits to their shareholders - in many cases the universities themselves. In fulfilling this pressure they have inevitably made the examination system more profitable through modular exams, retakes etc – all of which increases their income but makes it harder to judge the quality of the results. The number of students achieving top grades at A level is close to 5 times the number of places at Oxford and Cambridge universities. Inevitably and understandably top universities have introduced A* requirements and their own tests (BMAT, Law, TSA etc). Whilst such additional criteria may be good differentiators they also make the examining system more complex. And in being more complex they become more inaccessible to those who are from under-privileged backgrounds. Once again we are beginning to move towards an imbalanced socio-economic profile of university applicants.All universities claim success in providing a needs-blind admissions process. Indeed, large sums of money have been allocated by government, philanthropists and by universities themselves in order to provide bursaries and support to ensure that education is accessible to all. However, in the face of all this support, very little quantitative evidence-based evaluation has been undertaken to establish universities’ claims. Of the many millions spent by both Oxford and Cambridge on “Access initiatives”, it is hard to see just from the small changes in entries and applications from state schools whether this money has been well spent. We still do not know whether state school pupils stand a lesser, equal or even greater chance of getting a place at Oxbridge than their fee-paying peers. And much of the money to widen access has been spent in a pepper-shot, unfocused way too – many Colleges focus on just one geographical area in which to promote applications, but within those geographical areas there are often huge disparities. Few of the universities or colleges use freely available public data to evaluate who they should target to achieve change in their access statistics, let alone how to evaluate the success of initiatives.
