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pg thinks this is because of letting in poor people: https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1969334665375813679 https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1969334665375813679

• growse 1y ago
  > Kids worrying that Oxford and Cambridge will discriminate against them are among the smartest in the country. pg's lack of awareness that this has basically always been true smacks of naiveté.
  • adw 1y ago
    Target Schools was a thing in the 90s. This isn’t even slightly new. (And last I checked the Target Schools students had, if anything, slightly better outcomes than the main pool.)
  • rcxdude 1y ago
    To add to this: Oxford and Cambridge always get the smartest in the country, and they don't struggle to identify them. From what I know of the admissions process, there's three fairly obvious groups of applicants to oxbridge: people who are obviously ludicrously smart and driven and will not struggle at all with the course, who are obvious accepts but are not nearly enough to fill a year group; those who are obviously not cut out for it and are rejected outright, and those who are probably going to be OK but it's not a slam-dunk. The main challenge for them is picking those with the best chances out of the third group.
    • growse 1y ago
      Interestingly, some colleges tacitly subdivide these groups further. Christ's Cambridge famously used to hand out "2 E" offers to those in the first group who they know would put the effort in anyway, but "3/4 A" offers to those in the first group they thought might just coast with a 2E offer. A "2E" offer was certainly a mark of prestige. (You get your offer in around December time, but sit your A levels in the summer).
• afavour 1y ago
  > Middle class students, knowing they'll be discriminated against, are now applying to US schools I can't take that seriously. Middle class students in the UK would not take on the level of student debt required to study in the US, the sums of money required are vastly, vastly different between the two countries. Sounds like PG has a hobby horse he very much wants to ride no matter what the facts show.
  • ceejayoz 1y ago
    Not to mention the US administration’s a) war on said schools and b) immigration mayhem.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • geremiiah 1y ago
    In British English, "middle class" refers to the well off professional classes or merchant traders. In American English, if I understand correctly, everyone who works is considered middle class.
    • walthamstow 1y ago
      I think I read that US middle class are people who only have to work one job
      • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago
        Yeah having a single full time job but not being part of the executive class is a decent definition. It's much more wide than the UK's usage for sure.
    • toast0 1y ago
      In America, we have a classless society and everyone claims to be middle class.
      • 1y ago
• ceejayoz 1y ago
  The comic in https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-wants-your-cookie-aba1c536b0d8 https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w... is, as ever, very relevant.
  • AlexandrB 1y ago
    This is basically 100% backwards. In Canada it's large corporate lobbies pushing for more immigration. Why? Because it lets them keep wages low and makes unionization impossible. See also, Bernie 10 years ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0&pp=ygUVYmVybmllIG9uIGltbWlncmF0aW9u0gcJCeAJAYcqIYzv https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0&pp=ygUVYmVybmllIG9... I don't know at what point people were convinced that the push against immigration is some kind of billionaire plot, but is has been great cover for said billionaires.
    • rayiner 1y ago
      You also end up with a voter base that demands relatively little from their political leaders. The left-wing parties can win elections just using some feel-good measures targeted at recent immigrants and promising to make it easier for their co-ethnics to either immigrate legally or stay if they have immigrated illegally. That enables them to move right on economic issues to capture the politically powerful knowledge worker class.
    • croes 1y ago
      Do you think billionaires care whom they exploit? It’s a distraction and divide et impera to prevent that immigrant and lower class local workers join forces. Some kind of employment ping pong. At the end it‘s always cheap labor
    • bakugo 1y ago
      > I don't know at what point people were convinced that the push against immigration is some kind of billionaire plot Much like most other leftist rhethotic, this belief is not based on any real logic. Basically, the entire process went like this: 1. Corporations want more immigration to suppress middle class wages and workers' rights 2. They run propaganda campaigns targeted at the left and their virtues ("the poor immigrants are suffering and need our help! only racist nazis disagree!") 3. Said leftists, desperate to virtue signal and avoid being seen as racist or xenophobic, immediately move to support the cause unconditionally 4. They see the world as purely black and white, good vs evil, so when they ask themselves "do billionaires want immigration?" the thought process goes "billionaires=bad and immigration=good, therefore billionaires hate immigration"
• patanegra 1y ago
  This is extremely unfair framing. Oxford University has been discriminating people from independent schools for a while now. To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools. That's not "letting in poor people" as you framed it. It's letting in dumber people, worse students. Lots of that is mainly based on classism (against people from middle class), racism (against white people). Oikophobia is a cancer, and Oxford getting worse ratings is the direct result of that.
  • ceejayoz 1y ago
    > It's letting in dumber people, worse students. Is it? Maybe a kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder than, say, Prince Charles with his private school and dedicated personal tutors.
    • happytoexplain 1y ago
      The context is explicitly statistical, so yes, of course - but your point is valuable to keep in mind to avoid subconsciously painting individuals with the same brush as the big picture.
    • AlexandrB 1y ago
      Maybe. Unfortunately it's very hard to measure that. Moreover, how hard you have to work doesn't necessarily correlate to how good you are. The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".
      • afavour 1y ago
        > The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers". I think the point the OP is making is that getting 4 A*s when you benefit from exemplary schooling and personal tutoring doesn't necessarily make you the best nor the brightest.
      • hilios 1y ago
        >The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers". Maybe they are supposed to do this, but let's not act like the filter doesn't quite apply the same way if your parents are rich and or well connected. They're however very effective in filtering out bright kids whose parents can't afford the tuition and aren't lucky enough to get a scholarship.
• seper8 1y ago
  Not familiar of Oxfords admissions, but if they apply affirmative action as done in other universities in the US, this take of Thomas Sowell is very relevant: https://youtu.be/7AyhaYkikCs?t=57 https://youtu.be/7AyhaYkikCs?t=57
  • StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    1. They don't. 2. As usual, the question doesn't really make sense in the context of the UK. The UK is far less diverse than the USA as a country: 80% of the population is ethnically white followed by 9% of Asian from former colonies. 3. Without affirmative action, Oxford is already noticably more diverse than the UK overall because it attracts applicant from all over the world. It's mostly true for Asian students but remains true for black students.
• fillskills 1y ago
  While your link is helpful, he did not say that. He specifically mentions changing the admissions standards. Specifically having different standards for different social classes. I have second handedly seen the effects of such discrimination in other societies and it really is crippling to the economy. Be wary of any kind of discrimination specifically one that lowers expected grades.
  • curiousgal 1y ago
    > Now they have lower standards for applicants from poor families or bad schools. As a result Oxford and Cambridge have sunk to fourth place in the latest Times Good Universities Guide. He did say exactly that.
    • hnhg 1y ago
      He also provided no numbers or evidence - did his children fail to get in or something?
      • blitzar 1y ago
        Yes, eldest was rejected
    • WrongAssumption 1y ago
      Your link bolsters the point of the person you are responding to. The lowering of standards is the relevant portion. It would be relevant if they lowered standards for any group, just happened they lowered them for poor families.
• soared 1y ago
  Is pg generally aligned with this line of thought or is this out of character? Not what I expected but also not unexpected given most powerful tech bros slides into that side of politics
  • alephnerd 1y ago
    > Is pg generally aligned with this line of thought Yep, but this is a fairly common take I've noticed in England (not as severe in Scotland). The air is thick with a semblance of classism, and I've found the business culture to be horrid due to this "old boys club" mindset. Imagine an America where the only way to open doors to the upper echelons is to attend only an Ivy. And I say this as an Ivy grad. To a large extent I feel this is because the British economy is so heavily tied to legal, financial, and media services, and as such the "Magic Circle", "The City", and the media consolidation in Greater London has such an outsized impact. Ironic too because there are fairly decent clusters of engineering research like DefenseTech in Southwest England (which tbf is fairly posh) and Robotics and HPC in Edinburgh.
• IshKebab 1y ago
  > [LSE's] stellar academic performance was boosted this year by improvements in teaching quality and student experience. The list is semi-bullshit and not just based on student performance, so I'd say he's talking out of his arse. None of my Cambridge uni friends would have applied to go to America because of contextual admissions criteria. In any case taking someone's background into account is actually the logical thing to do. Who do you think would do better: an Eton student who scored 50% on the test, or a comprehensive student who scored 49%? The answer is pretty obvious and they're right to try and get the best students; not just those that score best on admission tests.
• dan-robertson 1y ago
  My prior would have been brexit-related changes reducing the number of smart but non-rich students coming from the EU, but I don’t actually know how the numbers there changed. Also, what are the rankings based on? When I was applying, I think it was lots of stuff like: - grades of incoming class (the changes 'pg alleges could lower those grades even if th actual quality of the incoming students don’t change. Balance by subject can affect this too as eg science students tend to have more UCAS points. Private school students may also have more UCAS points because their schools are more likely to do things like putting students in for extra A-levels or GCSEs (taking those exams costs the schools money)). Alternatively, university funding is in a dire state in the U.K. (though less so for Oxford and Cambridge given their endowments?) so maybe they can trade prestige for letting in a larger number of international students who pay full fees but who would have otherwise not met the bar. - research output metrics, which seem quite unrelated to undergraduate selection – there is a high lead time and if you get the selection wrong you can still hire researchers from elsewhere. These metrics also seem somewhat gameable - metrics around outcomes for graduates. I wonder how biased these are by subject mix (ie how much is this just a measure of what percentage do courses that lead to good programmer/finance jobs) and how much they are affected by students perusing further education. I think to some extent this can also be affected by class mix because more privileged students may find themselves in better jobs (either because of parental connections or just class filters in hiring though one would hope that the university would train students to be able to pass such filters) I recall being sceptical of these league tables when I was applying many years ago for reasons like these (not that it stopped me from applying to highly ranked universities). Though comparing to American schools, I do think there are reasonable advantages to going to the US – you’re much more likely to work in the US (and therefore likely to get paid a lot more) if you go to a North American school. If you’re trying to compare Oxford to Harvard (with offers) and the financing works out either way, it seems to me Harvard would obviously be a better choice today and 10 years ago before the ranking changes. I’m not sure what the quality of US school is where you prefer Oxford. One other thing: Oxford and Cambridge delegate a lot of admissions to colleges so I’m not sure how much one can claim that it is a global shift in attitude, though there are some ‘second chance’ mechanisms and schools that send many students to oxbridge will have better recommendations for which colleges to apply to, and the policies between colleges can still move in a coordinated way even if each college does its own policy.
• lwhi 1y ago
  If you replace 'middle class', with 'upper class' .. you get a much more realistic reading of this thread; which is undoubtedly an apologia for upper class paid education. I felt the original thread wasn't recognising the social disparity authentically.
• KaiserPro 1y ago
  I love how logic escapes PG. If it was because of the poor people, then Oxbridge would still be winning, as they are the only ones that have entrance exams & weird interviews still.
  • notahacker 1y ago
    Yep. The beneficiary of this ranking update, for those who take it seriously, is a place where the same comprehensively educated kid that disgustingly and outrageously get a place at Oxford with three As after also passing additional selection hurdles in the form of an entrance exam, a special application form that certain schools are very good at teaching their kids how to pass, and an interview with a probably privately-educated Oxford don gets an offer of 3 Bs based on the vanilla UCAS application, and might well get in if they miss out if the course isn't oversubscribed, especially if they have a good story about going to a bad school. Also, nobody thinks gaming a teaching quality survey ranking (something traditionally focused on more by much less academically selective universities) to jump up the Times list means that Durham is on average outputting more elite students