Oxford University selecting by race - according to Guardian data analysis from FOI

Chinese oligarchs send their children to private secondary schools in the UK so that they can learn English and apply with A levels rather than the widely known to be corrupt Chinese secondary school transcripts. They would be considered home applicants for the purposes of these statistics. And no one said "all" - this is simply lazy debating; my point only requires these things to be true on average and I doubt you seriously dispute that they are.

That's interesting. I suppose it just adds to the list of reasons why the system is inherently unfair, it's just sickening how easy it would be to change it.
Im lucky enough to go to a private school and I received a lot of help with my application, but they weren't keen on predicting A*s unless they were pretty sure you would get them (over 90% UMS). But I can imagine some schools wouldn't be so cautious.
The other factor they don't account for is the "old boys network", which despite being less of a presence than it was even 5-10 years ago is still around. Especially in the more prestigious private schools.

And also there's the whole private school buys confidence thing. When I was up for interviews there were kids who were clearly SO certain they'd get in and so confident there, I have no doubt they performed better at interview than I did.

I'm still sore about not having got any actual interview feedback other than statistics about how competitive the course was.

That's a bit OTT - Asians at Oxbridge are the children of "Chinese oligarchs"?? Many are just high achievers from all kinds of backgrounds. For sure some are from British private schools, including many on scholarships and bursaries. Also some aren't.

Yes I see that. But the conclusion then is they only actually found any evidence in two subjects, both the most oversubscribed by ethnic minority candidates, and one with major objective selection criteria that they did not consider. So they actually only found one subject with any clear evidence of racial bias, and it's one where there is a huge ethnic imbalance in applications to start with. We then have the problem that Oxbridge have always been completely open about using subjective selection criteria like interviews in addition to objective grades, and it's impossible to quantify those.

But that isn't what the headline says. The headline says "Oxford University" [ie. all of it] is racist in selections.


Chinese oligarchs send their children to private secondary schools in the UK so that they can learn English and apply with A levels rather than the widely known to be corrupt Chinese secondary school transcripts. They would be considered home applicants for the purposes of these statistics.

And no one said "all" - this is simply lazy debating; my point only requires these things to be true on average and I doubt you seriously dispute that they are. Britain has had very little "traditional" economic migration from China of poor people moving to poor areas, because only the political and financial elite in the PRC are able to leave and there is no Commonwealth connection that was important in permitting African, Afro-Carribean and Indian Subcontinent immigration in the past.

I don't think "asians" in the UK as an ethnic category includes Chinese (although it does in the US), who are a separate category.

But my point is that if we're trying to separate Oxbridge discrimination (ie. "you are just as good as the next man but I don't like browns so I'm giving it to him") from unfavourable socioeconomic conditions growing up, it makes no sense to lump Chinese (probably superior to whites in quality of schooling) with blacks (statistically a lot worse off than whites in quality of schooling).

Then you have intangibles that may fall on racial lines but which are not inherently racist. Eg. if I choose people for a Political Science course partly based on who is the better debater at interview, is it racist to systemically disfavour Chinese who have come from a non-expressive, learn-by-rote primary education system? Or because they don't speak as good English as a native? Or someone from East London - who is disproportionately likely to be black or [south] asian - who doesn't speak RP and doesn't use as many complex words in day to day life as someone from a private school? These things are almost certain to be factors in an interview-based system but they're not intrinsically racist, ie. they are judging on the basis of some ability that is both relevant and may be really worse among ethnic minority applicants.

What we could do is adopt the system of the Indian Institutes of Technology and Management, where you simply have an exam and the top x people in that exam are admitted. The Guardian is implying that if our selection system is not racist, its results should match up with this approach almost exactly. But we choose to have a somewhat subjective system with an interview component so we accept that these intangibles are legitimate bases for selection.

I see the phrase: "over-subscribed by ethnic minority candidates" floating around this thread. But I ask you, where is your evidence for this? Actually, what does that phrase even mean?

The study is about how those non-quantifiable variables are being used in a discriminatory and racist way.

You practically said all, let's be honest here. Liverpool has one of the oldest Chinese communities in Europe, I don't see them driving around in Porsches though.

However, I was suggesting that you don't go around saying that all Chinese students in top universities in this country are the children of oligarchs, it's a ridiculous assertion.

All those reasons don't defend Oxbridge, but implicate it further.
a) "ethnic minorities are more likely to attend underperforming state schools, giving them less competitive GCSE results" - The study uses A level statistics, all members of the sample went on to achieve 3 A*s at A-level. Compare these two candidates:
Candidate A - went to an under-performing school and achieved 3 A*s and 8 As at GCSE, well above average for their school, in fact, they were the top-performing candidate. Then, despite going onto sixth form at the same school they worked unbelievably hard and achieved predictions and results of 3 A*s at A2. Unfortunately they were rejected.
Candidate B - went to a successful private school, achieved straight A*s at GCSE and A level. Received extensive interview and application coaching from their teachers. Receives an offer.
How is that system fair in any way?
b) 'The admissions tutor or interviewer might not click with the "inner-city youth" (use this term in a very broad sense) and he might not be what the tutors look for in a student, due to his background' - You have just described racism and classism very successfully, well done. I really don't need to say any more.

On the British census and I guess most official forms you will see in this country asking for ethnicity, "asian" means Indian subcontinent and "Chinese" is a separate category. I think Japanese/Korean/etc have to tick "other", but then we never had significant populations of those ethnicities unlike the US.

It's dramatically more common. In fact foreign-born Chinese are the second largest ethnic group at a lot of private schools.

On the British census and I guess most official forms you will see in this country asking for ethnicity, "asian" means Indian subcontinent and "Chinese" is a separate category. I think Japanese/Korean/etc have to tick "other", but then we never had significant populations of those ethnicities unlike the US.

EDIT: "The first thing to note is that all the figures relate to UK applicants – international are excluded – who provided information on their ethnicity on their UCAS forms (around a third of all applicants choose not to provide this information)."

This also seems like a huge elephant in the room. Presumably most people who chose not to disclose their ethnicity are white.

You genuinely think you can defend the view that all foreign ethnically Chinese students at British private schools are the children of "oligarchs"? How exactly are you defining the term "oligarch"?

If all the figures relate to UK applicants then your Chinese oligarch theory is completely nullified. All applicants in the study either live in the UK long term, as do their parents or were born here.

Why is that presumed? Also, if they chose not to disclose their ethnicity they would be more likely to be non-white, wouldn't they?
They also aren't included in the study, so don't affect it. As we don't know which ethnicity they are, they are equally likely to be white or non-white (the two categories that matter here) so have no effect on the result.

It's irrelevant that China is "visibly part of Asia" as a geographic continent: in the UK, Asian refers to people with backgrounds in the Middle East and the subcontinent. It's an arbitrary classification, and there's no reason linguistically to prefer one over the other -- but that's how it's used in academia as well as what people use it to mean in everyday discussions. The questions would be more "wrong", in that sense, if they used it to mean something else.

As he has already pointed out, you're arguing against a strawman here -- no one is saying that they are all children of oligarchs, but it is certainly true that a very high percentage of them are, particularly if you're talking about foreign-born Chinese students and excluding BBCs.

Uhmmm, pardon me, but we are discussing racism here and not fairness in education. The guy with 8 As at GCSE was rejected because he didn't have stellar grades, not because he's black. Yes he went to a bad school, yes it's not fair, but it's not racism. He was not rejected because of his race. I never claimed the system was fair, read my post again.
And you do realise that many choose to attend better state sixth form colleges and schools after their GCSEs? Most of the highest achievers at my (very comprehensive) school got accepted into grammar schools or good sixth forms at other schools for their A-levels.

Point B is 'classism', yes. But once again, we are discussing racism here. No, it's not racism. A very middle class Jamaican person has as much of a chance at Oxbridge as the middle class English person, and an ''inner-city'' white person as low chance as an ''inner-city'' black person. You do know that ''inner-city'' is not a race right?

I've lived and live in urban deprived areas and attended poor state schools and I'm an ethnic minority myself, but ignoring real problems in favour of made-up ones is not a good move.

Edit: And yes, I know they used A-levels. That was my main point of criticism, the study did not look at GCSEs, which is likely to be lower for ethnic minorities as they are more likely to attend state schools. Not racist, just capitalism.

Because people believe the only reason this information would be used is to institute some kind of 'affirmative action' policy like in the US that would discriminate against white applicants.

Excluding these people would be ok if they were selected to be excluded at random but they are clearly a self-selecting sample and probably not one that is proportionally representative ethnically.

You are wrong about the census/ONS definitions. Check out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_ethnicity_in_the_United_Kingdom

- you will see Chinese is included in the category "Asian" on the census forms.

The change occured in the 2011 census. S/he is right otherwise, before 2011 'Chinese' had a separate category to Asians.
I think it's fairly established that 'Asian' in the UK refers to south Asians, at least in colloquial speech. You wouldn't consider Turkish people Asian, would you?