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Are there still “gentlemans’ colleges”?
To Oxford then, and to widespread coverage of a slight fall in state school undergraduate entrants.
The university you now apply to if you can’t get into Imperial publishes annual admissions statistics. We get the choice of some whizzy tableau dashboards or an old school PDF – neither of which provides the data in a usable form for those looking to perform their own analysis.
This, of course, doesn’t stop me (it just slows me down and makes me more annoyed). What I wanted to look at was admissions students from deprived backgrounds (I used free school meals eligibility as a proxy), and whether colleges that did better on this metric did worse on outcomes. Are there, in other words, still scholars’ colleges and gentlemans’ colleges? Or (to pose the more popular – but equally silly – question) do contextual admissions come at the expense of excellence?
Oxford has been using student outcomes as a performance measure long before the Office for Students thought of it – and this being Oxford the process has a very silly name. The Norrington table is a weighted ranking of colleges by student outcomes, as a shockingly recent innovation dating from the 1960s. The methodology is both complex and ridiculous, but the only thing you have to remember is that a bigger number means better student performance.
Here’s the plot:
As you can see, there’s no obvious relationship between admissions policy and outcomes among Oxford colleges. If one were forced to criticise, the proportions entering with FSM eligibility are tiny – there are only two colleges (Worcester and Mansfield) that have more than one in ten UK students with a history of FSM eligibility. For the sector overall, the proportion is 13 per cent according to UCAS.