Only one in four Cambridge colleges made offers to black British students in every year between 2010 and 2015. Of those, many made just one or two offers apiece. And each year over that period, a quarter of colleges failed to make any offers at all to black British applicants.
Hmm, OK, well, is this bad or is it statistical normality?
During this period, an average of 378 black students per year got 3 A grades or better at A-levels.
It’s not quite true that 3 A grades is the starting point for Oxbridge access because they will indeed take the potential not just the achievement to date into account. But, still, a useful starting point.
There are 38 colleges at Oxford, 31 at Cambridge (close enough anyway). Given that not everyone with that sort of level of academic achievement actually tries to enter Oxbridge then what do we think should be the offer rate to these Black Britons? It’s most certainly not 4 offers per college per year, is it? Or 6, or whatever 400 divided by 70 is.
Given the small numbers the stats are going to be weird anyway, but what is the number of total offers made by all colleges, related to the total number of people who get 3 A grades? Vriance from that would probably be a good starting point for us.
Lammy does however make a good point:
With this degree of disproportionately against black students, it is time to ask the question of whether there is systematic bias.
I’m certainly willing to believe there is. I am not deluded enough to think that Britain is perfect, nor its education system. But I would probably start with the thought that the bias is in the system that leads to the 400 not with the selection within it.
Or, in the vernacular, inner city schools are shite and that’s the problem. You know, the stuff already being done near exclusively by the State?
None of these excuses stand up to scrutiny. In 2011, 103 state-educated students in Sunderland got 3 A grades or better at A-levels, yet only four offers of a place at Oxbridge were made to applicants from Sunderland. Over the course of four years (2011-14 inclusive), 851 students in Wigan got 3 As or better – so why did only 29 get offered a place to study at Oxbridge in that same period?
Lammy laddie, how many applied?
And now, here, we see the game:
It is time to move away from the highly subjective college-based system and centralise admissions.
That’s what he’s really after. Move selection into a central bureaucracy and then it can be controlled in the usual SJW manner. We only need to look at HR departments in large companies to see how that works out.
Listening to the interview, it was very hard to work out if Lammy is a complete cretin or an evil genius determined to tell any lie to advance his views.
@Chris Miller
Why can’t it be both?
Or, in the vernacular, inner city schools are shite and that’s the problem. You know, the stuff already being done near exclusively by the State?
These would be the inner city schools that cost more than Eton? Come on. At least make a token gesture that this may not be a problem with the schools. Chicken or egg?
Or to put it another way, plenty of scholarships have been handed out to Black students so that they can go to places like Eton. Or, indeed, Ampleforth. How are they doing?
Racism is a non-issue. It does not exist. And schools set up for relatively law abiding White students do not do well when filled with non-law abiding not-very-White students.
In the 2011-12 academic year, the most recent year for which I can find the figures, there were 262,104 A-level candidates, of whom 12.7% achieved three grade As or better:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-level-grade-combinations/a-level-grade-combinations
Around 2% of the UK population are black, so we would expect 262,104*0.127*0.02 = 666 black students to achieve three grade As or better.
There are around 12,000 undergraduate places available at Oxford University each year, and a similar number at Cambridge University. That means that, proportionately, if we assume that all these candidates apply to Oxford or Cambridge, you’d have to be in the top 9.2% of A-level students to get an undergraduate place. If we assume an even distribution of black students across all grades, that will put the number who would be offered a position around the 480 mark. There are 69 Oxbridge colleges in total, so you would expect, on average, seven places to be offered to black students.
That assumes no bias anywhere in the system, and that every good student applies to Oxbridge, neither of which are true statements. The school system accounts for 44% of this problem, as 378 students are achieving three grade As at A-level (which isn’t necessarily good enough anyway with the advent of the A-level A*) instead of the expected 666. That cuts our expected intake from 480 to 272, or an average of 4 per college. We know, however, from more public statistics that English students living in the Greater London area and the North are less than half as likely, along with the whole of Wales, to apply to Oxbridge. More public statistics tell us that a majority of the black population of the UK live in Greater London so that we can chop our 272 down to around 131, or 1.9 per college. Around 40% of Oxbridge students are not British, so you can cut that expected number down further to 79 across 69 colleges – 1.1 per college.
The fact that three-quarters of Cambridge University colleges offered a place to a black student every year between 2010 and 2015 means that black students are disproportionately over-represented.
Lammy would do well to consider the issue of black under-achievement from the perspective of what successful blacks have in common.
I know two successful black people: one a doctor, one an accountant. What they have in common is coming from stable two-parent (though relatively poor) families of unskilled Nigerian immigrants with strong Christian moral principles and a belief in the value of education.
Clearly, not every sub-saharan has a room-temperature IQ, though most do on average. So black under-achievement could be reduced, if most black families were of the stable two-parent variety.
Oxbridge colleges try very hard indeed to admit qualified applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds.
As Tim suggests, the shortfalls lie in i) (relative) failure to be qualified, i.e. get the A-level grades; and ii) relative reluctance of the qualified to apply. There are still teachers who convey the message that Oxbridge is either a bastion of evil to be avoided, or at any rate “not for the likes of you”.
A couple of years ago, the Head of one small independent school was asked why it had a fantastic record of getting pupils into Oxbridge. He said, “it’s because we ask”…
Oxbridge is hard. Really fucking hard. After a soft half-term to allow students with various A-levels to catch up, the pace of acceleration is breathtaking, and they never ever pause to allow students to catch up. You have to do it all on your own.
Oxbridge doesn’t choose students with 3 As. They choose students who have developed the intellectual curiosity and drive to take control of their own learning. Because only those students will be able to survive at Oxbridge’s breakneck pace. And it so happens that if you’re that sort of a learner in your teenage years, you’ll get 3 As as a by-product.
It also happens that if you’re that kind of a learner in your teenage years, you’ll probably succeed relative to your peers. Because you’re that kind of person, not because you’ve got a degree certificate with Oxford or Cambridge on it.
And the Bank of England is going to be grilled by MPs to force it to explain its lack of diversity. So diversity should be the main aim of every business and institution in the land.
But MPs tend not to do this to surgeons in private practice.
“Hello Mr Lammy. Yes, the CT scans show it’s rather a large tumor in the left hemisphere of the brain. No, I’m afraid you can’t see Mr Devere . We have a new partner in the practice. Mr Devere acknowledged that we were too white, so we have recruited Mr Ubuntu who has a first class postal degree from Zimbabwe. To ensure impartiality, we are allocating patients on a rota basis. Mr Lammy? Mr Lammy! Come back here at once!”
David Lammy has been grinding the black axe and thumping the racial tub for some little time now.
He would be well advised to drop this particular gripe because his display of intellectual pyrotechnics on Celebrity Mastermind is a clue to why at least one black boy never made it to Oxbridge.
It’s a toss up as to whether Ms J Phillips or Mr D Lammy is the least intelligent (thick as mince). Not really a co-incidence that they are both MPs from the same party.
Mr Yan
I think you would need to look at some of the SNP contingent but otherwise your logic is sound. Lammy would struggle to peel an orange without recourse to the user manual. Unquestionably one of the dimmest MPs in recent parliamentary history.
Stupid MPs is definitely not a consequence of short listing ethnic minorities and women despite more suitable candidates being available.
(i) “There are around 12,000 undergraduate places available at Oxford University each year, and a similar number at Cambridge University.” No. They don’t admit 12k undergrads per year: their inventory of undergrads is about 12k.
(ii) Note the Jesuitical “black British students”. So he’s ignoring any bright Nigerian or Ghanian or Trinidadian that Oxbridge admits. Are they not black? If you prick them do they not bleed? (A second reason to ignore them is that they will often have attended public schools (English sense), the bastards!)
(iii) The college system is a strange device. But one of its real merits is that admissions decisions are spread across many academics, so that in total their various prejudices might cancel out.
(iv) On my own bias: I wanted to admit candidates who were bright as buttons and enthusiastic about the subjects they wanted to read. Otherwise they could have been black, white or polka-dotted for all I cared.
Wasn’t Joshua Silver (the Physics Professor) a Oxford academic? Wonder how many blacks he has on his course? Perhaps he should be reported to the police for his racist candidate selection?
Back in the 1950’s and being of the people, so to speak, I did not want to go to Oxford or Cambridge to be banged up with a pack of men in a town with limited amusements and worse beer, especially after National Service. So I tried and got into a London one. It may not have had the status and it was far more fun and with all that theatre and music in walking distance. We of the rugger club quite pitied the posh boys with their limited experience of life and living.
To continue: I still visit one of my old colleges. There are plenty of black faces in Hall. Maybe they are mainly postgraduate but if the place were imbued with anti-black racism why would it be racist about 18 year olds but not twenty-somethings?
Further: the quotation in the Guardian is “one in three colleges failed to admit a black British student with A-levels in 2015”.
Admire the Jesuitical manoeuvre – candidates who took IB exams don’t count. Why might that be, I wonder?
Anyway, a challenge for Mr Lammy: would he care to name the white, brown, and yellow students who should have been refused entry to make way for black students of inferior promise?
@aaa “Oxbridge is hard. Really fucking hard. After a soft half-term to allow students with various A-levels to catch up, the pace of acceleration is breathtaking, and they never ever pause to allow students to catch up. You have to do it all on your own.”
A soft half-term? Are you joking? In weeks 1 and 2 we did the whole of A-level further maths! Something like 4 or 8 lectures and 2 tutorials to catch up 2 years for those who’d not done it! It was a rude awakening, I can tell you. Your feet didn’t touch the ground for 9 weeks upon arrival (the 8 week terms thing is a bit of a myth – there’s 0th and 9th weeks too, and if you’re unlucky, 10th week.).
It would be odd for the colleges to be racist against black students but not against Chinese and Indian students. My Economics course at Cambridge just a few years ago was so heavily Chinese and Indian (>50% of students at least) that I would frequently be invited to (and attend) events for both the Indian Society and one of the (multiple) Chinese societies (the one that was for very British Chinese as opposed to slightly British Chinese and Chinese Chinese) as I hung out with so many of each society’s members.
These racial agitators try to imply that because the university has few numbers of black students that it is therefore fully white when in fact it is mainly yellow and brown (at least in any of the subjects that matter. Lefty subjects are pure white (English, History etc.))
@Rob Moss: A* for effort, but you lose marks because there are a total of 12k undergraduates at each of Oxford and Cambridge, reading a combination of 3 and 4 year degrees (maybe some even longer). Taking into account the few that drop out, annual intake will be around 4k at each. I think this actually reinforces your conclusion.
Lammy’s arguments are largely disproved by looking at the number of black Nobel Prize winners for sciences. Oxbridge don’t have a monopoly on science, so any would be academic is free to establish a career elsewhere. Turns out that black people have won one prize for economics, three for literature and eleven peace prizes, but none for physics, chemistry or medicine. On the other hand Cambridge admitted Diane Abbott and have probably regretted doing so ever since.
You did the whole of A-level further maths for your PPE degree course?
@Mr Yan – I did engineering, not some soft nonsense like “Pee Pee Eee”.
Take race off the application.
View people as individuals, not a race.
Eh. Looking at the maths and logic behind racial outcomes distribution is interesting, but missing the point. Lammy’s not really worried that Oxbridge is racist, or that Britain is racist.
He’s banking on them – and you – being so not-racist that they humour his bullshit.
The guy’s entire career is based around the bog standard racial narcissism you always get with black lefties.
Everything these folks do is either aggressive begging or shameless complaints that wypipo aren’t doing more for blacks in X, where X equals anything from “letting da yoof get away with street crime”, to “pretending wipypo racism is stopping blacks from becoming rocket surgeons”, to “making Midsomer Murders about hip hop and twerking”.
It’s all a racket, and it only works when gullible whites play along. The correct response is to observe how empowered blacks in South Africa treat white people, and disabuse ourselves of the notion that the Lammys of this world want equality.
Western civilisation is not a magic vending machine for the disbursement of free goodies to negritos, hottentots, and plate-lipped bushmen. If they don’t like it, they should build their own civilisation.
@Rob Moss: thats all just racist white man ‘facts’.
Why isn’t Oxbridge offering degrees in witchcraft, which as we all know is exactly the same as western science, if not superior, but suppressed to keep the black man down?
@ Jim
I thought Cambridge did – it’s just *called* Economics.
@aaa: “Oxbridge is hard. Really fucking hard”
Very true, but that is only half the story. I went to a school that was an Oxbridge hothouse, turning our 35-50 Oxbridge candidates every year. These days the number is a little lower not because of lower standards but because there are a substantial number of Far Eastern students aiming for US Ivy League colleges.
In my day the standard practice was to take O Levels at 14, then spend 2 years studying the A Level syllabus in 4 subject but not taking the exam, followed by a year of extra syllabus/coaching for S Level papers an the Oxbridge entrance/scholarship papers, at their of which students would take 4 A Levels, 2 S Levels at the age of 17, and the next term the Oxbridge exams. Compare that to Lammy’s candidates with their 3 A grades at A Level at age 18; not in the same league and barely playing the same sport.
One more selection effect: Blacks that do apply to Oxbridge do so to more the competitive courses (e.g., medicine, business/economics variations) as opposed to ones with fewer applicants (e.g., History, cf Diane Abbott) so the odds go down further for a successful application.
What they have in common is coming from stable two-parent (though relatively poor) families of unskilled Nigerian immigrants with strong Christian moral principles and a belief in the value of education.
Yeah, I made a remark to that effect on Twitter: most of the black boys going to Oxbridge will have at least one first-generation African parent.
Solid Steve 2: Squirrels of The Patriots – “It’s all a racket, and it only works when gullible whites play along.”
And speak of the Devil on queue Camila Batmanjellybelly blames us all for the collapse of her charity:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4998366/Camila-Batmanghelidjh-denies-blame-Kids-Company-demise.html
“Western civilisation is not a magic vending machine for the disbursement of free goodies to negritos, hottentots, and plate-lipped bushmen. If they don’t like it, they should build their own civilisation.”
Well that is hardly an option is it? If Black America broke off and became its own country they not only could not feed themselves, they would struggle to dispense an aspirin.
Alex – “Turns out that black people have won one prize for economics, three for literature and eleven peace prizes, but none for physics, chemistry or medicine.”
The Black contribution to science is pretty much 35 different types of peanut butter and the SuperSoaker.
What is worse is that there is no sign of this changing any time soon. Despite the massive amounts of money thrown at Black education – the two most expensive education districts in America are New York and Baltimore – despite the Court-imposed spending sprees aimed at pulling up Black scores in Kansas City, the needle has not moved at all. Everything has been tried to raise Black educational performance. Ebonics, Black empowerment, role models, everything. None of it has worked.
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-298.pdf
There is not even the smallest sign that anything is even beginning to work.
Pretty racist stuff, SMFS. I feel sure an American Blacktopia would be a leading exporter of rap music, not to mention the syndication rights to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Plus, if they hire all those wise, noble black scientists, judges, inventors and police detectives from TV, everything will be great.
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Solid Steve 2: Squirrels of The Patriots – “Pretty racist stuff, SMFS. I feel sure an American Blacktopia would be a leading exporter of rap music, not to mention the syndication rights to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.”
Well I am no Marc Peters but you don’t need to be a weather man to see which way the wind is blowing.
Speaking of which I see two small problems with this rosy view of MartinLutherKingistan. One is that according to the best insider knowledge I know, well, the biopic of NWA I saw the other day, exploitation by White people is a necessity for Rap artists. It is not as if there hasn’t been a long and very profitable alliance between White record labels and Black artists.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/Why-the-Jews-aren-t-screaming-about-Straight-Outta-Compton_19231533
The other is what is the plot of The Fresh Prince again? Oh. Right. A young Black man gets on the wrong side of some Black street thugs and so he has to move to a majority White neighbourhood in what was then a majority White state in order to, you know, live, finish high school, stay out of prison, that sort of thing.
“Plus, if they hire all those wise, noble black scientists, judges, inventors and police detectives from TV, everything will be great.”
And on the plus side, without all those Black astronavigators, when the day finally comes when we can send Matt Damon to Mars, we won’t be able to bring him back. I call that a win-win.
The Black contribution to science is pretty much 35 different types of peanut butter and the SuperSoaker.
Not true.
“He’s banking on them – and you – being so not-racist that they humour his bullshit.”
Zactly. The Left uses race not because they care, but because you do. It is a tool to get you to accept the march to socialism.
Well, Obama and Trump are clearly both science genii. One of them has a Nobel Prize too!
And Einstein was awfully Wurttembergian for an honest-to-Gott Yankee.
I think you would need to look at some of the SNP contingent but otherwise your logic is sound
Let me toss Anna Soubry into the ring.
The intellectual world David Lammy longs for:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&t=40&v=fmO-ziHU_D8
When I first saw this I assumed it was a joke, a parody. Monty Python could have come up with this. The best bit is the white female TV presenter pretending it’s all real.
You’re all right. Considering I read Mathematics at Oxford, I’m hanging my head in shame right now over such an elementary error.
Why are people not allowed to point out discrimination against black people. Without some reactionary bullies shouting abuse at them. Racism does exist. I am against jobs for the boys despite being a white male.They jobs for the boys types never helped me get on. So i will not stand up for white rich privilege.
Up with Glasgow Celtic FC.
What did the racists ever invent?
Richard, What did the racists ever invent? racism! allegedly or realism from my point of view.
Why are people not allowed to point out discrimination against black people. Without some reactionary bullies shouting abuse at them. Racism does exist. I am against jobs for the boys despite being a white male.They jobs for the boys types never helped me get on. So i will not stand up for white rich privilege.
Up with Glasgow Celtic FC.
Really makes u think.
It’s OK, Rob. We realise that maths isn’t as fact-oriented as physics or engineering.
“They jobs for the boys types never helped me get on.”
What makes you think Oxbridge graduated (a) don’t deserve to get on and (b) have it any easier in the real world than anybody else. They get on by working hard and often do well because they are good at what they do.
@Alex Whatever happened to S-levels, when did they cease to be a thing? To get into Oxbridge in my day (early 70s) you needed at least 3As plus a couple of S-Levels. Now you’ve just got A*s.
There was at least 1 BAME student at my college. IIRC his name was HRH Sultan Ghalib II bin Awadh al-Qu’aiti (a stalwart of the cricket first XI). Does he count?
@ Chris Miller
Blair happened to them. My 3 S levels counted more than my ‘A’ levels.
Black students – some of them were brilliant, the first one I met was so much better than I that he focussed on protecting me when we were sparring
“Why are people not allowed to point out discrimination against black people.”
Go ahead, point out some.
“What did the racists ever invent?”
On the basis the Nazis were bona fide racists, I’d say they invented space travel. Or at least Wernher Von Braun did.
A little googling suggests they also invented night vision goggles, methamphetamine and helicopters.
And I suppose based on the not unlikely idea that any Victorian Briton was not exactly a SJW, you can add anything invented by Britons before at least 1914.
Hows the list of great African inventions coming along?
Black culture innit?