The Week Magazine 28th October 2017 Back Issue

STUCK IN THE PAST? OXBRIDGE'S DIVERSITY PROBLEM
University College unveiled a plaque to Christian Cole this month. Born in Sierra Leone, the grandson of a slave, Cole became, in 1873, the first black student to study at Oxford, and went on to become the first Black African to practice law in Britain. Alas, the trail he blazed is one few other Black students have followed, said Labour MP David Lammy in The Guardian. As I discovered after submitting freedom of information requests to all Oxford and Cambridge colleges, our top two universities operate a form of “social apartheid”. More than 80% of their offers go to “the top two social classes, the children of barristers, doctors and CEOs”, many of them privately educated pupils from the south-east. In 2015, one in five colleges at Cambridge and one in three at Oxford failed to admit a single black A-level student. Yet, confronted with these figures, Oxbridge has blamed everyone but themselves. It won’t do. “If Oxbridge can’t crack this,” why should taxpayers go on handing them £800m a year?