The Destruction of Oxford
Telegraph | News | Oxford caves in on state selection
Oxford colleges are to lose their 800-year-old right to select undergraduates in response to Government pressure to admit more students from state schools and lower social classes.
Instead, admissions will be centralised to encourage applications from comprehensive pupils, who find the present arrangements "confusing and opaque", the university said yesterday.
Pupils will apply to the university, not a specific college, and will be interviewed and selected by the appropriate department, not by their potential tutors.
The university admitted that as a result, colleges will lose autonomy and individuality.
Yes it was bloody confusing working out how to apply, so many helpful guides I didn't know where to begin. But if you can't work it out maybe you aren't up to being an Oxford student! And the destruction of the Oxford system is not the answer when it isn't the problem.
This quote from
Andrew Adonis, Baron Adonis - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for Education and Skills. points the finger where the problem is:
"Modern mythology has it that the number of privately educated children at Oxbridge is on a steadily declining path. And indeed it was - in the heyday of the state grammar schools in the 1960s. By 1969 only 38 per cent of places at Oxford were awarded to privately educated children - a sharp reduction for the private schools even on their 1965 proportion. And yet in the 1990s, thanks to the destruction of the grammar schools and the consequent decamping to the private sector of many of the most able children, the figure now hovers around the 50 per cent mark"
Of course now he is part of the problem I wonder if he still agrees with those words?