Admissions tutors all over Oxford will no doubt be thanking whatever deity presides over them that it wasn't them that refused to let in Laura Spence to study medicine.
Once the Daily Mail gets its teeth into yet another story of the way in which southern, snobbish, class-bound Oxford rejects northern, working-class talent, the first thing to fly out of the window is common sense. As Thomas Jefferson might have said, a slander on Oxford is half-way round the world before truth has got her boots on.
Laura Spence thought she had been turned down because she hadn't come across well in an interview. I've no idea if that is true, but I am, unusually in Oxford, utterly opposed to basing admissions decisions on interviews. Unless interviewers are carefully trained, they are suckers for charm and liveliness. The process gives the students impolitely described by one researcher as "middle-class bullshitters" a flying start. And when a tongue-tied student comes to life in an interview, it's likely to be sheer luck that the interviewer has hit on a question that has finally sparked the student's interest. Tutors like interviews because they can see whom they're going to teach next year, but interviews are a much worse way of detecting ability than written evidence. Yet Oxford and Cambridge (not to mention London School of Economics, Imperial College, and University College London) have problems with using A levels and GCSE results alone. Laura Spence's headteacher made a great to-do about her having 10 A and A* grades in GCSE; but every candidate for admission has 10 A and A* grades in GCSE and almost all of them will go on to get a minimum of three A grades at A level. You need some way of picking the one applicant you can take from among the three or four who look equally well qualified on paper.
Oxford got rid of entrance examinations because it was thought that it would make life easier for applicants from state schools; and now it seems that interviews are the trouble. Short of offering places by lottery to anyone who shows up with 10 A or A* grades in GCSE, it is not obvious what the critics suppose we might try. (There is, in fact, something to be said for a lottery for half the places; the top 10 or 15 percent of applicants would walk in under any system, and the bottom 15 percent are, for all sorts of reasons, not going to thrive at Oxford. What happens to the middle 70 percent is already closer to a lottery than most of us like to acknowledge. An open and above-board lottery might actually cause less misery than the present system).
There are many things about Laura Spence's case that myth-making reporters are not very likely to notice. One is that critics of Oxbridge chronically confuse qualification and entitlement. Just about everyone who applies to Oxford is "qualified". That is, all but about 15 percent could cope with the courses they want to take, and they'd get out at the other end with an upper or lower second. But teachers and journalists talk as if being qualified was the same thing as being entitled to a place, and it simply can't be.
In most subjects, three perfectly good applicants are turned away for every one that can be taken. In medicine, it can be as many as six or seven who are turned away. Indeed, throughout the country, there are thousands of students who have not been accepted at medical schools. Are they bad students? Not a bit. They are simply the ones that tutors working with the limited evidence at their disposal think would do less well than their competitors. The situation at Oxbridge and other elite universities is very much like the finals of the Olympics. To call a sprinter who is edged out by two hundredths of a second "slow" is perfectly crazy; to think that students who are edged out of an Oxford place have been declared "inadequate" is equally crazy. Who, one might ask, do the reporters and Laura Spence's headteacher suppose should have been refused a place so that she could go to Oxford?
Why do teachers from state schools think they are discriminated against? The answer is depressingly simple. It is a matter of numbers. A school such as Winchester or Manchester Grammar has dozens of sixth-formers applying for Oxford and Cambridge every year. And every year lots of their pupils are turned down by Oxford and Cambridge. Give or take the occasional indignant letter from an outraged teacher who thinks that some dark combination of stupidity and malice can account for a college's failure to take some dazzling pupil, they put up with the fact that Oxford's judgment on its pupils is not always in line with their own. After all, dozens of their pupils do get in.
Leaving aside extraordinary places such as Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge, which is a powerhouse very like few others, most state schools will not send many applicants to Oxbridge each year. Once you have very small numbers of applicants, a school's hopes are bound to be more invested in them than would be the case than if there were hordes of them. If three students apply and two are rejected, it looks like a terrible snub.
So, what of the fact that Oxford says no to a young woman to whom Harvard says yes? And what of the fact that Harvard apparently coughs up £65,000 so that she can take up the place? A Harvard education costs more than £20,000 a year; four years of that comes to £80,000. Harvard University as an endowment of some $14 billion. It is an institution that promises every student who applies that, if they are accepted, Harvard will ensure they can afford to go. This is what is meant by "need-blind admissions", practised by every Ivy League university and by most of the best liberal arts colleges.
It is a very good system, but what Laura Spence has been offered is what any US student from a modest background would get from Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and the rest. It will be a means-tested award, and some of it will be in the form of loans, and some of it will be in form of work on campus. So, far from being something glamorous, extraordinary, and a slap in the face for Oxford, it is exactly what a few hundred English students will have been offered this year, along with many thousands of Americans.
And although Harvard is perhaps the best large research university in the world - just as Princeton is quite clearly the best small research university in the world - its standards for undergraduate admission are lower than Oxford's. They have to be. US students leave school a year earlier than English students, and American high school courses are less academically demanding than A level. American deans of admission sigh over students from Britain, Hong Kong and Singapore and murmur phrases like "so intellectually mature". Laura Spence has been lucky in having an American headteacher who knew how to apply to Harvard. She will have a very good time at Harvard. And, with any luck, she will while she is there learn the sort of respect for the complexity of the truth that will make her a good doctor - but which would have killed this silly story in its cradle.
Alan Ryan is warden of New College, Oxford.
The Guardian letters page, 25th May 2000
Philosophers are supposed to be good at expressing their views clearly and succinctly, and Alan Ryan fully lived up to this expectation (Oxford Blues, G2, May 24).
Mr Ryan was given a whole page to defend Oxford University's rejection of Laura Spence as a medical student, but he could have stopped three-quarters of the way down his first column, the point at which, startlingly, the warden of New College conceded the worst suspicions of critics of Oxford's selection system
The interview process, he admitted, "gives middle-class bullshitters a flying start". Indeed it might have been better if he had stopped there. Then he would have spared Ms Spence, his readers and perhaps himself as he rereads it, his gratuitous and patronising swipe at her in his final sentence. "With any luck," he wrote, "she will learn [at Harvard] the sort of respect for the complexity of the truth that will make her a good doctor..."
Most people, glancing at Ms Spence's achievements, would assume that she has this respect already.
Donald Mackinnon
Yardley Gobion, Northants,
donaldmackinnon@yahoo.com
As the warden of New College, Oxford, is apparently unable to write good English, perhaps it is a good thing that Laura Spence is going to Harvard: "...it wasn't them that...", for goodness sake!
Dr John Baker
Cambridge
Alan Ryan is right to distinguish between qualification and entitlement, and also to note that private schools tend to supply candidates en masse. But, unlike the finals of the Olympics, selection for university is not a measurable, objective process and there are clear biases at work.
The reason state school teachers are resentful when their candidates fail is not because of their reaction to the individual event, as Alan Ryan suggests, but because of the disproportionate success of the private schools overall: with under 10 percent of pupils, they supply more than 50 percent of Oxbridge undergraduates.
Oversubscribed institutions such as Oxbridge and the medical schools have a choice: they can smugly recruit in their own image, or they can acknowledge a duty to devise recruitment procedures which recognise the full range of talent and potential in the society which supports them.
I do not write as a chippy outsider: 25 years ago I achieved my Oxford place as a result of a selection process which discriminated in favour of state school applicants, a brave and imaginative decision which clearly would not be made now.
Liz Fuller
London
Why did the Guardian give Alan Ryan a full page to justify the blatantly inequitable Oxbridge entry system? Why did you not ask Wheen to write instead? Why do so few candidates from northern comprehensives achieve Oxbridge places? We still have yet to be told.
Alan and Lesley Fowler
Wadsworth West Yorks.
Alan Ryan may be right that admission standards are lower at Harvard than at Oxbridge, but it's not because Americans leave school a year earlier - they don't. They generally start a year later, aged six, but presumably that's not the explanation either.
David Voas
Liverpool
voas@liv.ac.uk
Why are thousands of perfectly good applicants being turned away from medical schools each year? I thought we were short of doctors, and that's why junior doctors had to work such long hours.
Dave Hill
Tonbridge, Kent
The Guardian letters page, 26th May 2000
Clearly John Baker (Letters, May 25) does not know the Lord's Prayer. Or perhaps at Cambridge they only use the 1980 version. The Prayer Book, correct usage since 1662, asks us to forgive "them that trespass against us". Clearly the warden of New College, Oxford is familiar with this as good English even if Dr Baker is not.
Keith Thomas
Liverpool
keith@littlecrosby.freeserve.co.uk
The Guardian letters page, 29th May 2000
Not to hog your letters page - but, yes, I understood that what John Baker deplored was the use of an accusative pronoun in place of a nominative pronoun. "It wasn't me, miss," was what we said in primary school, and I see no reason to abandon the demotic of the 21st century when addressing Guardian readers. To the extent that there is such a thing as correct English usage, "it isn't me" and "it wasn't them" is part of it, and "it isn't I" and "it wasn't they" verges on the pedantic. God, of course, uses the English of the King James Bible, but that's His business.
Alan Ryan
New College, Oxford
alan.ryan@new.oxford.ac.uk