The Guardian is usually better than this. It advances neither the cause of improving the country's education system nor that of investigative journalism to publish David Lammy's data-mining exercise, in which he put forward his transparent anti-Oxbridge agenda by picking out a handful of superficially unflattering data points from the admissions statistics he apparently had to fight tooth and nail to get.
Read the article, since I am going to rebut it. As to his first point, that he had to jump through FOI hoops, those statistics are not hidden or even hard to find. They're published on the Oxford University website. They are, so to speak, just lying around. It is shoddy and sensationalist reporting to invent a conspiracy to hide information that has been published openly and in plain view.
Second, on his scaremongering about race, "just one British black Caribbean student was admitted to Oxford last year". Well, yes, that's true. If you cut the data so finely as to narrow it down to the group "British black Caribbeans" only one was admitted, of 35 who applied. Cut a large dataset down to this level and these are just the sort of things that will jump out - Portugal had a similarly low acceptance rate, getting only one student accepted out of 25. Separately 23 "black African", 3 "black other", 7 "white and black Caribbean" and 7 "white and black African", plus 35 "other mixed" and 9 "other" got in, but the article doesn't mention that. From outside the UK the university also admitted 3 Mauritians, 2 Nigerians and 1 student from Trinidad and Tobago (ethnicity in all cases unknown).
The scary "Oxford admits one black student" headline simply doesn't wash, and playing with the law of small numbers to show that some individual colleges didn't admit any black students is plain statistical illiteracy. There are 38 Oxford colleges. If the 221 "black Caribbean", "black African" and "black other" Oxford applicants had achieved the university's average acceptance rate of 26% there would still have been only 58 to go around. As it stands 25 achieved a place; even spread evenly throughout the colleges, this would have left 13 without a black student.
It is very easy to attack Oxbridge for being elitist, because it is elitist. The whole point of a meritocracy is to admit only the best. If politicians are concerned about the level of admissions amongst applicants who have gone to state schools, or from outside the south-east, or even from specific ethnic backgrounds, the solution is not to force Oxbridge to indulge in some fatuous social engineering experiment but to provide all of the children of this country with an education that would fit them for higher education. That the government fails to provide such an education in state schools, in the North of England and to ethnic minorities is an utter disgrace; but it is not a disgrace that can be fairly laid at Oxbridge's doors.
Update2: I recommend all readers take a look at the Royal Stats Society publication Significance, where Michael Wallace has analysed the college-level variation between black and white admissions and found it to be well within the expected range, the most interesting and important finding so far in this debate.
Update1: a response from David Lammy which I received by email and republish here with his consent. It appears unedited and without comment (although some of the formatting may have been lost in the transfer from email to blog, which is my own fault); I will be writing a follow-up post shortly.
...begins
"Have seen your blog, and wanted to reply to clarify a few things:
(1) Getting the data was a struggle – The information that the Guardian uses is not available on the Oxford or Cambridge websites, although the figure of 1 Black Caribbean student admitted to Oxford is, and it is seeing that figure that prompted further investigation into individual colleges.
The original request asked for the number of Black Caribbean applicants and offers made to those applicants from each college at Oxford and Cambridge. As anyone who knows the black community well will tell you, there have been palpable differences in attainment between Black Caribbean and Black African students in the past, so I felt it was important to appreciate the unique position of Black Caribbean students and where they were successful and where they were not within the University to understand why only one received an offer in 2009.
Their reluctance to provide this information, and generally being unhelpful with the handling of the requests, lead to me to question other issues, hence the requests made on school type by college (which has allowed me to group by selective v non-selective), social class by college and admissions by LEA (all of which they do not publish openly on either their websites or other publications). You can find copies of all the responses on my website –
www.davidlammy.co.uk.
2) Black Caribbean data is important – Again, there are palpable differences between Black Caribbean and Black African attainment, so it is important to disaggregate “Black” figures as they often hide where the real under-achievement takes place. The comparisons between Portugal and Mauritius etc. are clearly not valid as we are talking about public universities and their role as national institutions catering (or not, as the case may be) to British students of Black Caribbean origin.
As Oxford would not provide the data for Permanent Private Halls, the figures available concern 31 Colleges, of which 11 did not admit a single Black student (that is Black African, Black Caribbean or Black ‘Other’). I agree, this figure should not be an all encompassing theorem on racial discrimination at the university, that is why you will not find it in my article. However, what is interesting, and what is statistically significant, is that there are Colleges that admit significantly fewer Black students than others, even when faced with the same levels of applications.
Why is it that 25 of 84 Black applicants received offers from Keble College but just 5 of 64 Black applicants received offers from Jesus College over the same 11 year period? Why is it that at Robinson College Cambridge, Black applicants have only had a quarter of the success rate of their white applicants over 7 years when at St. Catharine’s Black applicants are marginally more successful? It is impossible with the data that has been collected to truly isolate race factors from economics (which is in part why I have collected data on socio-economic factors and geography), but the variations between colleges in their admissions statistics is a pertinent point and Oxbridge should be doing more to find out why such variations exist (after all, admissions are decentralised to course directors at each college - shouldn’t there be a method for them to be accountable as to who they admit?).
3) Schools cannot be the only factor - I agree that there are problems with some schools, but students who don't apply cannot be blamed entirely on schools. Surely Oxbridge have a duty to reach out to groups that are not currently applying? If so, why are 21% of their access events held in independent schools? Harvard and Yale do this much better than Oxford and Cambridge. Both employ officers in regions of every State whose sole job is to maintain a dialogue with under-represented groups, their schools and obviously the students within them. Yes, Harvard and Yale are private institutions, which Oxford and Cambridge are not. Surely the fact that Oxbridge receives public subsidy means that there should be tougher requirements on them to reach out to under-represented groups than would be the case with Harvard and Yale?"
...ends
(Disclosure: I studied at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1994-1997) (yes, the same one as David Cameron, but not at the same time and I've never met him)
(Picture from Ron Hann on Geograph)
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