Charlotte Pritchard
speaker
152 appearances
15 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Nov 2012
Charlotte Pritchard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Students can identify themselves as black Caribbean, black African or black other, not to mention those who identify themselves as of mixed race or those who don't answer the question about their ethnic background.
So if you add the black categories together, you find Oxford accepted 27 students who describe themselves as black and Cambridge 34.
Yeah, that's right.
David Lammy went on the news channel to argue his case and made the point that there are hundreds of black students who have the qualifications to get into Oxbridge, but they're not getting the chance.
That seems to be a pretty good question.
Let's look at the students who got three A's at A level, not including the General Studies A level.
That's the standard offer for Oxbridge entrance.
According to the university's admission service, UCAS, in the UK around 27,000 white students achieved this in 2009, compared with about 417 black students.
Now, not every three A student applies to Oxford or Cambridge.
But just comparing these raw proportions, we see that 17% of white students with 3As at A-level win a place at Oxbridge, and 14.5% of black students with 3As do.
And there is another factor.
Oxford University points out that black students are disproportionately likely to apply for the most sought-after courses, like medicine.
It may explain part of the difference, but there's still certainly a problem here that can't all be blamed on dons at Oxford and Cambridge.
If you look at the entire population of 18-year-olds in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, we've excluded Scotland where they sit highest, white students are more than twice as likely as black students to get 3As at A-level, excluding general studies.
If Oxbridge recruited the same proportion of black students with 3As as white students with 3As, the number of black students would rise a bit, from 61 to 78.
But if Oxbridge changed nothing and the education system was able to deliver the same proportion of black 3A students as white, the number of black students accepted at Oxbridge would rise from 61 to 130.
So the numbers suggest that improving A-level performance would more than double the numbers of black students at Oxbridge.
More or Less was presented by Tim Harford, the FT's undercover economist.
The producer was Richard Knight and the editor was Richard Varden.
It was made in association with The Open University.
Showing 121–140 of 152 · page 7 of 8
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