I know nothing of the English social system or Oxbridge admissions, but I do like what I hear about the focus the latter maintains on the purely academic. If there are lower-SES left behind in that process, then, as in America, I would favor the application of preferences to help those groups enter the arena. That is a different issue than the one we are discussing here. Mom’s observations about Oxbridge are relevant to whether athletics and ECs generally are needed as hooks for the purpose of netting certain non-academic types as needed to insure future high achievement of the graduates of the College. Her point is that those hooks are not needed at Oxbridge. Why are they therefore needed at Chicago? Other schools may have other objectives, but the objective of a Chicago education has always been academic first and foremost - the transmission to its students of the best of the intellectual traditions our world has to offer. You can do and be many things with an education like that, but you must first want the education and be capable of handling it.
Please be careful about generalizing and holding up Oxbridge as the perfect examples.
Their admissions process is inherently transparent and in outcome exclusionary, not one to be emulated. It seems like the US in the 1960’s before we started broadening admissions.
Oxbridge has been roundly criticized for perpetuating classism in England.
Here for example:
“Data released … under the Freedom of Information Act shows that 82% of offers from Oxford and 81% from Cambridge went to students from the top two socio-economic groups in 2015, up from 79% at both universities five years earlier.”
“An average of 43% of offers from Oxford and 37% from Cambridge were made to privately educated students between 2010 and 2015, while just 7% of children overall are educated in private schools.”
"Oxford accused of ‘social apartheid’ as colleges admit no black students
Lammy, who has campaigned for greater ethnic and socio-economic diversity at Oxbridge, said he was appalled that the universities were moving backwards on socio-economic background measurements. “This data clearly shows that a privileged background is still the key to getting through the Oxbridge admissions process,” he said.
"Nearly one in three Oxford colleges failed to admit a single black British A-level student in 2015, with the university accused of “social apartheid” over its admissions policies by the former education minister David Lammy.
The data shows that 10 out of 32 Oxford colleges did not award a place to a black British pupil with A-levels in 2015, the first time the university has released such figures since 2010. Oriel College only offered one place to a black British A-level student in six years."
They may say they are focused only on academic achievement, but the results as noted before me don’t speak to that.
@arbitrary99 , if you’re simply wanting to critique Oxbridge for being racially or socially invidious, be my guest. If that is so - as to which I am agnostic - the remedy would be some form of preference in favor of lower-SES and minorities. It is a non-sequitur to jump from there to a preference in favor of athletes and EC activities, many of which would be just as correlated with high-SES as simple academic achievement. No one here is even saying that all colleges must be solely focussed on academics. The Oxbridge case is being cited only to make the point that a very eminent institution can be so focussed with no detriment at all to its eminence. Those of us making that point are not thereby required to sign on to every feature of these institutions or their admissions policies.
Perhaps.
What I am suggesting instead is that you are believing their boiler plate that it is only academics that matter, and that they gave a system that can objectively identify such candidates. (I may disagree with having only that as an objective as I believe there are other objectives as I identified but set that aside).
I would suggest we look at Their “acta non verba.”
It’s eminence is no more so than our top schools, UChicago included. If it was solely academics one might thing they should be more eminent academically.
They rely on A levels, which are tutored and highly correlated to wealth, like our SAT/ACT tests) and interview, which again are coached and prepared for by those with the means, and selected by a decentralized set of tutors out of those same 8 elite prep schools.
Do you really think they are picking the best academic candidates?
Doesn’t it seem suspicious with regards to their class statistics?
Isn’t this like the “personality” score Harvard used in their admissions?
From my own experience, the students are less diverse and no more academically qualified than those I went to college with at Stanford.
So yes, in theory perhaps you are right that they would like academics only. I think identifying and educating future leaders could be more important, along with integrating further. Extracurricular can be very important for that. Debate champions, science fair winners, community organizers, non profit starters, etc. And yes, athletes.
I’d also assert that their system pretends to take the most intellectually gifted and confuses it with many factors indicating wealth and privilege. I’m sure it is their intent to be solely academic but it takes rigorous systematic (and I’d argue centralized) effort to effect that change.
I just don’t believe they are intellectually honest in picking out the most qualified candidates nor are they effecting needed social integration.
I think I’ve worn my welcome out on this topic so I’ll move along now.
Well, that’s actually a good argument for the Oxbridge model.
Those two schools together matriculate just over 6000 students per year. And do so from a population that is about 20 percent the size of the USA. In other words, to scale it up to the USA population, they would be admitting a total of 30k students, considerably more than the top 10 universities in the USA combined.
And despite that, their students are as strong as those from Stanford? That’s impressive.
Exactly! They dont need explicit preferential treatment for (rich) alum’s kids because what they have is worse.
And lets not pretend that they use academic merit as the ultimate measure. All they need is something like 3 A Levels. They only have to be taking them… they dont need to be stellar at them. There’s “bazillions” of those every year in England, and yet the outcomes are obviously unworthy of the word “meritocratic” because if one did the simple math the distribution of acceptances should never be as concentrated.
One more thought on all this…
Having read the sincere thoughts of an obviously very devoted group of alums, parents, etc, many of whom have rationale thoughts on how UChicago admissions can be improved or tuned, and contrasting that with other styles of admissions, it’s clear that UChicago has done and is continuing to do an amazing job. Nondorf has clearly mixed many important priorities and objectives into a coherent class. I think we should celebrate that. It is a much harder job than I initially realized based on all our comments. What a fabulous institution.
The main determinant of admissions to Oxford or Cambridge is the interview, conducted by members of the faculty in the major for which the candidate is applying. Thereafter you are given an offer conditional on your passing grade in your A levels. There are 6 pass levels, A, A, B down to E. An offer for a STEM degree could be two A and one A. The nearest equivalent to an A* score is a 5 on a AP test. Simply passing an A level gets you nowhere.
These are the grades you need to obtain in A levels for different majors, assuming you are offered a conditional place. The pressure is on until the end of the school year when A level exams are completed. http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/entrance-requirements/level-offers
No, Arbitrary. First you say that Oxford admits a lot of students because they are legacies. Because that indisutibly false, you then say that Oxford admits a lot of students from a small number of elite public schools, which is true enough. But that’s not because the parents of those students went to Oxford, but because those students are academically highly qualified.
That they are highly qualified because they come from backgrounds that prize education and because their families have the wherewithal to provide extraordinary educational opportunities and resources to their children is true. Those facts certainly make elite higher education in the UK “elitist”–which, again, is not what you initially argued.
But you are of course mistaken to believe that elite higher education in the U.S. is not “elitist.” My kid is going to Chicago in the fall. From 2017 to 2019 his secondary school sent 22 kids to Harvard (a lot more this year), 30 to Yale, 35 to Columbia, and 34 to…University of Chicago (more than any other school save Columbia). Look up how many current Chicago students attended the following secondary schools: Horace Mann, Trinity (NY), Phillips Exeter, Stuyvesant High School, Bronx Science, Harvard-Westlake, Phillips Andover, U of C Lab School. The total will make up a significantly disproportionate number of the total U of C student body. The same goes for other elite US universities, of course. In fact, according to the Harvard Crimson:
“one out of every 20 Harvard freshmen attended one of the seven high schools most represented in the class of 2017—Boston Latin, Phillips Academy in Andover, Stuyvesant High School, Noble and Greenough School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Trinity School in New York City, and Lexington High School.” (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/making-harvard-feeder-schools/)
Arbitrary and Stratford–your understanding of Oxford admissions is incomplete and misinformed. The process starts with A-levels. Applicants then have to sit a subject test in the field that they plan to study. That test is carefully designed to test general aptitude, not specific knowledge (in English, for example, applicants will have to write essays comparing different passages, previously unseen, in different genres of literature). Shortlisted students are then invited to interview at specific colleges. Those interviews are solely conducted by faculty members (college tutors) in the specific subject. Contrary to Arbitrary’s assertions, those interviews do not assess “personality” or clubability, but only “raw aptitude” (to quote Oxford) and intellectual originality and curiosity (and Arbitrary’s assertion to the contrary, Oxford tutors are disproportionately state-school educated). For instance, candidates to study history or English will be given a passage from document or work of literature, and then the tutors will discuss and analyze it with the applicant). Oxford is wholly transparent about its admissions process, including interviews. Here are some of many videos of mock Oxford (and Cambridge) interviews:
http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-oxford/guide/interviews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FstDtDntCo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FstDtDntCo
Of course, academic aptitude, intellectual curiosity, etc. are largely culturally determined. No one is suggesting that applicants to Oxford–or to Chicago or to Harvard–represent anything like a perfect cross section of society. But you consistently fail to address my point, which is that even if a school relied solely academic merit in its admissions decisions, it would still produce great athletes, actors, writers, and “leaders”–as Oxford has.
Finally, a lot of posters who celebrate athletics and other non-academic qualifications in college admissions seem to be curiously ignorant of the origins and foundational purposes of the elite college’s emphasis on those qualities. No expert disputes that elite colleges began to stress “well roundedness” and athletic ability–and the importance of those qualities in choosing individuals and in building a class–specifically to exclude the number of Jews who would otherwise be admitted to those schools (see for instance, Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel’s 700-page book, “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton”–https://www.amazon.com/Chosen-History-Admission-Exclusion-Princeton/dp/061877355X) . The insidious–and, to the rest of the world’s universities, bizarre–stress on athletics and other non-academic factors in American elite education has a truly dark (and patently “exclusionary,” to quote Arbitrary) history–and I say this as the parent of an incoming Chicago undergraduate who happened to play varsity football in secondary school. The University of Chicago heroically stood apart from the practices of other elite colleges–and, some would say, as a result, engendered a uniquely rigorous academic environment.
PS–when I say “the process starts with A-levels,” I mean that the subjects in which an applicant is specializing, and for which his/her secondary school gives a prediction of exam results–actual exams aren’t sat until after the admissions process (admission is conditional on applicants achieving their predicted exam results).
…and read “indisputably” in first sentence. Finally, as for historic continuity: Elite colleges’ emphasis on athletics and “leadership” in admissions decisions was designed to exclude Jewish candidates. Today, as the voluminous documentation in the Harvard lawsuit demonstrates, the same emphasis effectively keeps down the number of successful Asian candidates.
Thank you.