Thickies at elite unis because of connections

It does, because several of the points which you previously presented as 'facts' are actually claims which are so hugely exaggerated (for example 'a kid who gets AAA at a comprehensive school has the same chance of getting into Oxbridge as a private school pupil with ABB', which is blatant nonsense) that they no longer resemble facts. That isn't to say you don't have a point about unequal chances, but a) that doesn't automatically mean it's the universities' fault and b) you're not exactly helping your argument by distorting the facts beyond recognition just to make them appear even more shocking.

Actually all I did was confuse "over twice as many" with "almost twice as many", which is pretty much semantics. Its still somewhere in the region of twice as many.

Just to confirm: 'a kid who gets AAA at a comprehensive school has the same chance of getting into Oxbridge as a private school pupil with ABB' is true, according to the Sutton Trust Report. They actually said "two grades lower", an example of which would be: AAA -> ABB.

If you dispute this claim, you should write to them and explain why they are talking "blatent nonsense" as your extensive research shows.

The report is based on data which is up to nine years old. Perhaps that's why the figures don't seem to be adding up now. If you have a look at more recent admissions statistics, though, you'll find that applicants from comprehensive schools accounted for 19.5% of applications and 19.6% of offers last year. Independent schools accounted for 31.6% of applications and 42.1% of offers (Table 1a). Which does add up to a much higher success rate, but the differences are nowhere near as extreme as you were trying to suggest. And if you scroll down to Table 3, you'll see that not a single student was accepted with ABB or less. So on the basis of those statistics, I think it's fair to dismiss the claim that 'a kid who gets AAA at a comprehensive school has the same chance of getting into Oxbridge as a private school pupil with ABB' as untrue.

an example of what the report was saying (seeing as you appeared to have misunderstood the point), not a statement of fact

To start with, one is an independent report, and the other is data you have cherry picked from Oxford's own carefully massaged figures to try and "win" an argument on an online forum. Hardly going to be unbiased is it?

One is an independent report which is based on old data, and the other is the most recent admissions data, for which I have no reason to believe it has been 'massaged' (in fact, the Sutton Trust report was partly based on data provided by the same source) - if you have any proof that it has, though, I'd be very interested in seeing it.
I only chose Oxford's statistics because the discussion seemed to be mainly revolving around Oxbridge and those statistics happened to include the figures which are relevant in this context.

You're the one clutching at strawman arguments here, because you were trying to back up your argument about Oxbridge admissions with the report. The Sutton Trust report is actually based on admissions data for 13 universities, though, and the 'two grades lower' thing is quite clearly referring to the other 11 universities (i.e. Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham, York and the like), because successful Oxford and Cambridge all have more or less the same grades and offers to people with anything lower than AAA are extremely rare, regardless of which type of school they attended. You were taking it out of its proper context.

Actually, the report is from 2007. Unless I have been asleep for 6 years, I do believe that that is only 3 years ago?

Prince Charles. Dismal A-levels but got into Cambridge. Wikipedia says he got a B and a C (no third A-level), then graduated with a 2.ii . . . all that inbreeding.

The report is from 2007. But naturally it had to be based on data which was older than that, and it even says so right at the end of the report (on page 42): 'numbers of university applications and accepted university applicants each year during the period 2001-2006 for each school and sixth form college registered on the UCAS database'. It doesn't explicitly state that the Oxford and Cambridge admissions statistics which they used referred to the same period, but it would have made little sense not to.

Again, if I may refer you to page 42: 'Two sets of figures for applications and accepted university applicants for each school were provided - those for all higher education institutions and those for a group of 13 research-led universities known as the Sutton Trust 13. The 13 universities are: Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Imperial, LSE, Nottingham, Oxford, St Andrews, UCL, Warwick, York'. So 'top universities' or 'leading universities' refers to all 13.
As a bit of a side-issue, the whole thing about 'over-achieving' and 'under-achieving' schools is actually quite a messy and complicated affair, and not as straightforward as that quote is implying. It seems to be based on average A-level scores achieved at those schools and an 'expected' success rate of schools calculated on the basis of those average UCAS scores, rather than the results of individual students, and straight after the findings there's nearly a page of caveats, i.e. additional factors which weren't or couldn't be taken into account (p. 18).

My 'agenda' as you call it is that I don't think you've actually read the report you're citing, so you're misrepresenting its findings. So no, I don't have a problem with the data, I have a problem with your inaccurate reading of it.

I tried to put your claims into context by looking at actual admission statistics and the Sutton Trust report which was cited in that article, and found that I couldn't, presumably because you only read the article but not the actual report. For which I don't actually blame you, because it's lengthy and not a terribly exciting read, but I think that's the reason why the example you cited was inaccurate.

There's no need to get quite so aggressive, really... OK, I'll spell it out for you: you do have a point about the Sutton Trust report, but you misunderstood a couple of crucial points, probably because you only read the summary provided by that Guardian article and didn't look at the actual report and its methods. And as a result, your claims were way off. Yes, the findings of that report were alarming, but nowhere near as alarming as you appear to think.

Alright, I suppose that's technically fair enough. I must admit I did just quote him directly from the article, taking as read that the grauniad weren't misquoting him. There really wasn't any need to be quite such a pedantic ass about it though, was there? Whatever point it was I was originally making is still valid even if I should have said "top 13 universities" a couple of times instead of "Oxbridge".

OK, I admit that I may have overdone it a bit on the pedantry because I was annoyed that you seemed to be reducing a genuinely important report to 'Oxbridge prefer mediocre private school applicants to top state school applicants'. Sorry.

That still leaves the problem of the spread of grades, though. One of the reasons why a disproportionate number of privately schooled A-level candidates apply and get accepted is that a disproportionately high number of them get the grades which are necessary to apply. So ideally you'd also have to aim for a situation in which the percentage of students achieving AAA or higher at a state school is roughly equal to the percentage of students achieving the same grades at a private school.

That's a bizarre argument. For one thing, the group of people you refer to as 'they' obviously hasn't remained the same over the past 50 years, so it's ridiculous to claim that 'they believe what they believe' and therefore things can't have changed just because the university is 800 years old. And for another, an awful lot of things have changed at Cambridge over the past 50 years - and as it happens, that includes radical changes to the way admissions work. There were no conditional offers in the 1960s, because people still had to sit the entrance exam, so yes, there would have been other people at Oxford and Cambridge with those kind of grades.

I don't really see why people always make such a big fuss about Prince Charles in this context anyway. After all, we're talking about someone who has by definition been a special case all his life, which makes him an extraordinarily bad example to use if you want to illustrate a general phenomenon. Prince Charles is really no better suited for illustrating Cambridge's admission policies (either in the 1960s or today), than he is for illustrating the challenges faced by unemployed over-60s in the UK.

Prince Charles. Dismal A-levels but got into Cambridge. Wikipedia says he got a B and a C (no third A-level), then graduated with a 2.ii . . . all that inbreeding.

My mum got the same as him and went to Nottingham Trent

admissions in cambridge today is not so different from 50 years ago. the same purpose, to cream off the smartest. the entrance exam was a good device for this: but as could be argued socially discriminatory decided to make more use of A levels. but even in 60s i do not think many folk in cambridge with prince charles's grades.

I wouldn't be so sure of that, but I suppose unless one of us can actually dig up some old statistics for A-level grade distributions 50 years ago, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

No. If anything, Prince Charles' admission shows that 50 years ago, Cambridge dons who belonged to an entirely different generation of academics from today's were willing to bend policies. It tells us precisely nothing about what the situation is like today, though, because one thing which definitely has changed is the people making the decisions. You can't just talk about 'Cambridge dons' as though they were some kind of ageless institution. Stuffy old dons die and get replaced.

I didn't call him exceptional, I said he was an exception - big difference.
Anyway: the big bribe / small bribe thing doesn't follow at all. Taking a bribe is a pretty high risk, because of the large number of people involved in the admissions process, both at college and at faculty level, and the repercussions of being caught would be considerable. Small bribes carry exactly the same amount of risk, but for far less gain. Under those kind of circumstances, you'd be extremely careful about it and only accept a bribe if you thought it was big enough to make it worth the risk. Accepting a large number of bribes would just be asking to get caught.

I specifically didn't say 'rich guys over 60', I said 'unemployed'. And in all fairness, one thing Charles probably doesn't get to do a lot is sit about - he's far too busy getting photographed and going to all kinds of openings and events to shake hands with complete strangers and pretend to be interested in them.

As far as I know that is dead in UK Universities.

mr. hobnob, i think you might be smarter than the average tsr cat.