Cambridge admissions are “skewed” towards students from London and the south east, the university’s vice-chancellor has said as she launches a diversity drive.
Prof Deborah Prentice said she wants to encourage more students from “all backgrounds” to apply to the university, including from across the north west of England.
Cambridge tends – tends – to admit from certain socioeconomic classes. Which are concentrated in London and the SE. That’s where the successful professional classes are, after all, that’s where their kids will grow up.
It’s not that Cambridge (or Oxford) has a geographic bias, it’s that the target classes are biased in their geography.
That means that it’s not getting more students from different geographies that matters, it’s getting them from different classes.
@Tim
I think that you mean “targeting” rather than “target” classes 🙂
Cambridge has pushed fairly hard in recent years to diversify at least by taking a higher proportion from state schools. But you are right that those pesky aspirant professional class-parents keep sneaking their children in around the edges, e.g. by sending them for two years’ finishing to state sixth-form colleges like Hills Road (in, err, Cambridge)…
This policy sits well with the new diktat whereby selecting the best qualified candidate is a microagression.
I wonder which Unis are most suitable for youngsters whose immediate aspirations exclude waving palestinian flags and marching for trans ‘rights’?
I was talking to a recently-retired Cambridge academic last year. She is impeccably high-minded and I would guess that her politics are well within the Rusbridger/Toynbee zone. She told me that she was retiring a couple of years earlier than intended, due to increased pointless admin tasks, a surge of time-consuming mental health issues among students, and – here she glanced over her shoulder to check that she couldn’t be overheard – “the place is absolutely heaving with Chinese students these days”.
D’you they check to make sure Chinese students also come from poorer regions like Yunnan and Guizhou?
They check that the Chinese students come from backgrounds which can afford the fees. Which are annual tuition fees of £25k (humanities), £28k (maths), £33k (music, architecture) £39k (engineering), £67k (medics and vets). Plus college fees in the range £11-12k, depending on the college (accommodation not included).
I’m told that this provides a necessary subsidy for the home students, who pay £9k tuition a year and no college fee.
(All numbers rounded down)
What does it matter? As long as one takes care never to employ any of the useless cvnts or let them near anything important, what’s the problem? It’s the output not the input needs to change.
But how much of uni just a waste of time and money to poorer students?
Roughly 20-30% of degrees are applied. You do veterinary medicine and fix up Fido. You do pharmacy and work at Boots. Probably worth a poor kid going to uni to study pharmacy. But art history and marine biology? Probably not. You’re going to get middle class kids doing these degrees.
Frankly, I think most people would be better off self-teaching computer science now. Build code, get better at it. Read lots of articles, watch lots of videos. Earn money and save £30K of tuition.
Cambridge Maths Guy
Was out drinking in my alma mater on the Fens. We were discussing Allison Pearson’s bemoaning that ‘English students don’t get a look in’ which featured an utter failure to diagnose cause and effect. As long as courses are fee capped at 9K then they will have to prioritise fee paying students from abroad. The solution is to uncap the fees and allow a lot of inadequate universities such as those that employ the likes of Richard Murphy to go to the wall.
The likelihood of the current political class implementing such a solution is on a par with Sadiq Khan clamping down on Palestinian protests.
The greater South East has almost the most of the population of the UK, consquently, the admissions ANYWHERE will predominantly be from the greater South East. London+SouthEast+EastAnglia is about 35% of the UK population. Don’t they do sums at Cambridge?
Build code, get better at it. Read lots of articles, watch lots of videos. Earn money and save £30K of tuition.
Go through thousands of job adverts that insist on 2:1+ degree qualifications and four years’ paid working experience…..
….for a job changing toner cartridges and resetting passwords…..
“Cambridge has pushed fairly hard in recent years to diversify at least by taking a higher proportion from state schools.”
Oh, since the ’80s, at least. I remember my whole year being told to more or less forget Oxbridge because we were an independent school. The exact difference in grade requirements has slipped my mind over the last 35 years or so, although I do remember that the Scottish Higher/A-Level equivalency formula didn’t apply to us.
When I did Cambridge admissions interviews (oh yes I did) I gave not a hoot about the youngsters’ class or location or race or school or the like. I wanted bright enthusiasts; little else mattered except that (i) I could understand their English, and (ii) they seemed sane.
On the other hand one of my co-interviewers wanted to reject a boy because it had emerged in interview that his parents took The Telegraph.
What the Admissions Tutor decided I don’t know; I had already explained why I would not be interviewing for that college again.
@jgh
There must be an oversupply of people capable of doing the jobs. Not surprising. IT was vastly oversold as a career choice. Go do something else. But don’t start from the position of what you would enjoy doing. Look round for what people would enjoy getting & aren’t. Learn how to make it possible for them. Flog it to them. Sit back & count the money.
That’s all I’ve ever done. If I’d have stuck with my first career I’d have retired poor from some dead end office job. If I was lucky. What I did doesn’t exist any more. But before then I’d gone. Not everything I’ve done is pleasant. You’ll find any number of people who want to do pleasant things. The money may be made out of things that are unpleasant to do. It’s why people can’t find anyone doing them & get the things they want. Unpleasant can mean piles & piles of luverly dosh. The counting of it is extremely pleasant.
Not any more. Dinner ladies expect to be paid bin-men wages, without having to do hard physical labour, outside, in all weathers, or getting up for a 5am start. Nowadays, the money is made by shrieking “sexism!”, although to be fair, it’s the lawyers that get to count up all the luverly dosh.
I remember my whole year being told to more or less forget Oxbridge because we were an independent school.
Hills Road Sixth-Form College in Cambridge, mentioned about, gets about one student in fifteen into Oxbridge. The Perse, the most selective fee-paying school in Cambridge, manages about one in five.
My guess is that the admissions process gets it about right in discounting the extra polish afforded by an expensive education.
Don’t they do sums at Cambridge?
Nope. Maths is racist, innit.
jgh,
It’s one route. But another one is getting an office job, automate your workload. Or, prove you can do it, find a small company. Or do some freelance work in it. Or go and do the Microsoft certs.
My problem with comp sci degrees is that I don’t want computer scientists. I don’t want people who have spent their time learning what a CPU is made of, or doing ethics, or a load of discrete mathematics. I want someone who has spent their time building solutions and writing code. I view this thing like cookery. You go to technical college and spend 6 months to a year on the theory and then you go work in a kitchen and get better at it over time.
I got a free education in the ’80s. In some of the IT jobs I’ve been in I’ve worked with new-grad 20-year-olds with 40-50-grand of debt, who, after seeing what employment their “degree” has opened for them have left to work stacking shelves in supermarkets.
Yes, BiS, there is a YUUUUUUUUUUUUGE oversupply of everything computer related, from software developers all the way to assembling a table to put a printer on. (It’s a table with *IT* on it, it’s an *IT* job!) Don’t beleive the employers shrieking about shortages, they are lying.
You will note, BiW, I specifically said look round for things people want & can’t get.
But regarding the two things you’ve mentioned. They never last. I can tell you being “on the bins” is no longer the sinecure it was. All the bunce & the fiddles went. My old mate Albert & his mansion out in Hertfordshire is unlikely to be repeated. “Dinner lady” was never as pleasant as you think either. But you’d need experience in bulk catering to know that. And how many places have now contracted out the service to a sweatshop on an industrial estate?
My tip for the future is clerical admin. Vastly over paid. What it actually is, is distributed data processing with each clerical administrator being a processing node. About 90% of the actual work is communication between the nodes to coordinate the processing. The meetings! It’s made for AI. Of course every little clerical administrator will say he/she’s irreplaceable. Just you wait & see!
WB: Yes, this. One of my hobby horses is pointing out that Computer Science != Programming. CS is *using* computers, the equivalent of learning to drive a car. Programming/Development/Software Engineering is “automotive engineering” – *BUILDING* the stuff that other people use.
By the time I went to university I’d been doing exactly that for about six years, designing and building computer hardware and software, plus three summers work experience designing and building medical sensing computer hardware and writing software to control it. (A couple of decades later I once found the ultra-slow chart recorder republished in a magazine a couple of years later, with of course attributed to somebody else)
I, and everybody around me, naturally thought this was called “Computing”, so naturally sought out “Computing” at university and did a Computing Science course. And then spent three years wondering when we’d do some actual “computing”. While all that time doing my own “computing” in my own time, designing and building hardware, designing and building software.
It was only years afterwards that I realised that “computing” was nothing to do with building/writing the stuff, and that bizairly I should have been looking for “electrical engineering”. yerwot???? I want to be programming computers, not wiring up houses.
And it is still going on. Universities and politicians brainwash people into thinking that “computing” is high-tech high-skilled stuff, gateway to loads of money. NO! “Computing” is for the 21st century what “being able to manipulate a pencil and paper” was for the 19th.
I just do whatever people are prepared to pay me to do, while spending my own time doing the coding and hardware interfacing that I actually have an aptitude and skills for and enjoy doing. Nobody will pay you to do what you enjoy being good at, do that in your own time, get people to pay you for whatever they are prepared to pay you for. Being Alive Costs Money. You cannot let your affection for the work get in the way of actually being able to afford to be alive.
BiS: The vast majority of “IT” is clerical admin. Instead of scheduling meetings, coordinating absences, making sure there’s enough pencils in the stock rooms, it’s scheduling meetings, coordinating absences, making sure there’s enough toner in the printer. And as far as employers are concerned, it is just that “grunge” chore work that just has to be there and clutters up the place, like the annoying need to have a shit in the morning.
Having to teach Chinese students is no fun; it’s a qualitative decline in the job.
Academics want to teach interesting people, and to build long-term academic & industry connections. Teaching Chinese students gives you very little of that.
I picked that example for a reason: https://dailysceptic.org/2024/02/25/is-equal-pay-going-to-bankrupt-local-government/
I want to be programming computers, not wiring up houses.
I can assure you. The money’s in wiring up houses. Try & find a decent sparks!
Like I said, it’s not what you want to do but what people want doing puts bread on the table.
in my own time, designing and building hardware
It’s not a rare talent. First PC I ever had was ordered as components from an electronics mag. Put it together on the kitchen table. Then taught myself to get it to do something better than hum, since my only IT experience had been 60s mainframes. Currently I’m swapping out a failed PSU on the desktop. While the back’s off I’ll upgrade the RAM & swap in the bigger SSD I fortunately cloned the drive to before the PSU fainted. I am by no means a computer engineer. Wouldn’t pretend to be. But it’s hardly rocket science. It’s something pretty well anyone could put their hand to, if they wanted. Which is the problem. So many people did.
Try learning to wire up a car from first principals. Because that’s the way to fix electrical faults with them. And you can charge 100/hour for doing that, any day of the week.
“Hills Road Sixth-Form College in Cambridge, mentioned about, gets about one student in fifteen into Oxbridge.”
Around twenty years ago I saw an interview with the Headmaster. He was asked how many of his Oxbridge-bound students had had a private schooling before they transferred to Hills Road. Answer came there none.
@ jgh
” One of my hobby horses is pointing out that Computer Science != Programming. CS is *using* computers, the equivalent of learning to drive a car. Programming/Development/Software Engineering is “automotive engineering” – *BUILDING* the stuff that other people use.”
My Computer Science degree in the early 90s consisted of some of what you describe as Electrical Engineering (logic and VLSI/CPU design), Operational Research, Numerical Analysis, Parallel Processing and compiler & OS design/internals along with more general programming & software development.
It was more than “learning to drive a car” which I’d class as “Computer Studies”.
Your analogy of Programming as “Automotive Engineering” doesn’t really hold up. Whilst you are building applications that people use, it’s not down in the hardware (car). Maybe a better analogy is a fancy taxi controller (like Uber) which makes use of the cars to provide a level of service over them.
Sometimes its interesting to see the perspective at work here.
Britain is the size of a medium-big US state, 80% of the population is concentrated in the London area but these people talk of Scottland like its so far away and so different that the people there need special consideration when its, like, a days drive across the whole country from far south to far north. Half the land-mass is within 200 miles of London.
@Agammamon
How much of that is because the UK has such dreadful transport infrastructure? It’s something one notices living in Europe. Any distance is three times as far in the UK.
It’s been said before:
British people think 200 miles is a long way, and Americans think 200 years is a long time.
Your “fancy taxi controller” is still “radio *user*” versus “radio *BUILDER*”.
I can assure you. The money’s in wiring up houses. Try & find a decent sparks!
Like I said, it’s not what you want to do but what people want doing puts bread on the table.
Yeah, wiring houses *was* how I earned my money with my computing science degree, until my knees went. At the moment I’m desperately trying to find a decent chippy to repair/refurbish my shop display windows – somebody who knows what they’re doing and won’t try and destroy the value of the building my insisting on ripping them out and sticking plastic in. Where are the people who not only know how to do stuff, but are prepared to get off their arse and actually do the stuff?
Currently I’m swapping out a failed PSU on the desktop. While the back’s off I’ll upgrade the RAM & swap in the bigger SSD I fortunately cloned the drive to before the PSU fainted.
That sounds like assembling, not designing and building. Here’s an RS catalogue, order the components needed to create a parallal/serial I/O port, the stripboard to solder it to, the header sockets to connect it into the computer system, and write the driver to drive it. How many 74l00s will you need? Should you used a doubkle-NAND clock divider, or an SJ flip flop? Does the data bus need buffering? Is the W/R synchronous or do you need to include waits? You’ve changed the bulb in the headlights and are calling it “automotive engineering”.
My Computer Science degree in the early 90s consisted of some of what you describe as Electrical Engineering (logic and VLSI/CPU design), Operational Research, Numerical Analysis, Parallel Processing and compiler & OS design/internals along with more general programming & software development.
You’re lucky to have even had that superficial contact, my Computing Science course in 1987-1990 was barely above “how to type”. In The Very Last semester I did some very basic electronic design and construction – stuff I’d done ten years previously by then – and wrote a PDP11 assembler – similar to stuff I’d done four years previously. The youngsters I work with today who come stumbling out blinking into the working world appear to not have fared much better.
How much of that is because the UK has such dreadful transport infrastructure? It’s something one notices living in Europe. Any distance is three times as far in the UK.
Yeah, I’m without a car at the moment. Tomorrow I will have to get up at sparrow fart to do an eight hour journey, which if I miss the first bus means the *entire* journey is wrecked and I have to start again the next day, to do a journey that takes me two hours in a car.
@jgh
There’s certainly some Vero around the house, odd capacitors, diodes,resistors. I’ll solder up something if I need it. if I don’t know how to do it I learn.
The automotive electrics wasn’t changing headlight bulbs. Back in the late ’70s there was a craze for kit cars. Mostly people swapping out engine & drive chain/suspension from a donor vehicle into a chassied shell. For some reason people who tried this never seemed to be able the hack the electrics. The loom from a 4 door saloon really doesn’t go into 2 seater sports. So I found myself an opportunity. Buy abandoned kits. Trailer them home. Wire them up with a few reels of cable & appropriate parts. Often more suitable than the donor heap’s. Trim them out properly. (Another thing escaped constructors’ capabilities) Flog them. Buy another & repeat. Make anything from 1k to 5k a car. Few took more than a couple of weeks.
The wiring was learned from studying wiring diagrams & learning what everything did & how it did it. Anyone can learn anything if they put their mind to it. After all, some thickhead did.
@WB, I object against the mentioning of marine biology as somehow equal to “art history”…
Actual marine biology studies critters and processes that function under conditions well outside our terrestrial surface habitat.
Besides being crucial for the Grokking of how this “Life” thing actually came to be, I think you’ll find that without the discipline there would be no modern detergents, or none of that whole understanding, let alone manipulating of DNA, or for that matter a long list of technical and/or chemical processes we use for just about everything.
Like many “Life Sciences” subject fields, it’s been …invaded… by “Ecologists”.
But most of them are barely able to handle basic Math without using their fingers and toes, so they, like Monbiot, are an irritant, but don’t represent the actual field.
Here’s an example of UK transport madness. Today I set off 3 hours earlier than I would normally, but the mismatching connections mean I get to my destination less than 1 hour ahead. Madness.
I’m only doing this today as an emergency, otherwise I would have taken the later, shorter, cheaper route.