LUNCHTIME READING: Two responses to the HEPI paper on centralising Oxbridge admissions

“Two weeks ago, HEPI published a paper by Charlotte Armstrong, which argues it would be Fairer for All if undergraduate admissions at Oxbridge were to be centralised at each of the two institutions. There has been a lively debate on the proposals since, and two alternative views from expert voices at the University of Oxford are provided below. Please feel free to join the debate in the comments section below. The first response is penned by Joseph Conlon, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford This piece is written in response to the HEPI Report Fairer for All: Towards a centralised model of admissions and access at Oxford and Cambridge . A central argument of this document is that undergraduate admissions decisions at Oxford and Cambridge should be taken by the departments not the colleges. I think this is a bad idea and I want to explain why. I am a physicist at Oxford: I have done undergraduate admissions interviews for 15 years, have served three years as the departmental admissions coordinator for my subject (Physics) and have sat on all the main Oxford admissions committees. To understand the logic, it is first helpful to summarise the overall Oxbridge collegiate system. Undergraduate teaching occurs both in the departments and in the colleges. In a subject like Physics, the large undergraduate lectures and laboratory courses all occur in the department; the tutorials, in groups of 2 or 3 students, take place in the colleges – where the students also live and (mostly) have their primary friendship groups. The exact structure of undergraduate admissions across subjects is a variation on a theme, although I use my own subject as a specific example. Oxford Physics gets about 1,800 applicants a year for about 200 places. To reduce the 1,800 to a manageable number for interviews, we use a test to cut the 1800 to 500. These 500 applicants then receive three interviews, two at one college and one at a second college. Using all information about the candidates, each college’s Physics tutors decide who to offer their places to. The department is not uninvolved. It coordinates the process. It is responsible for the admissions test. It (in practice, the admissions coordinator) arranges the reaIlocation of applicants from colleges which are blessed with many strong applicants that year to those that are not. The department produces numerical rankings that guide, but do not control, college tutors in their decisions. It produces a database which contains all information on all candidates, allowing college tutors to see the full field of candidates and ensuring that strong candidates can get places irrespective of which college they originally applied to. It promotes a collegial culture where the tutors at Hogwarts College and St Trinian’s College trust each other’s interview marks. The final decision meeting, bringing all the college tutors together to determine who ultimately gets places, is held in the main lecture theatre in the department and is chaired by the departmental admissions coordinator. But the final, actual decision on which students will be offered a place to study Physics at Hogwarts College belongs to the Physics tutors at Hogwarts College. The department – in the form of all the other tutors at the decision meeting – can exert moral pressure, but the decision belongs to the Hogwarts tutors. And this is right and proper and correct. Why? Good decisions happen when power and responsibility align. We are incentivised to take good decisions when we, personally, feel the consequences of not doing so. It is a feature of the Oxbridge college system that tutors at a college will spend a significant amount of time teaching their undergraduates in small tutorials. With good students, this is one of the most rewarding forms of teaching imaginable. The Physics tutors at Hogwarts will be spending a lot of time with the students they admit; they have a vested interest in choosing well. The Hogwarts tutors also have the best information about marginal candidates. It is easy to accept the excellent students and reject the weakest. It is in the marginal decisions where most attention needs to be paid to individual detail. Was the weak first interview just nerves or was it a lack of knowledge? How do you weigh promise and talent against demonstrated achievement? With an excellent test and not-so-excellent interviews, which represents the real candidate? Such decisions are never easy. Those best placed to decide are those who have interviewed the applicant and have closely read their UCAS form – the college tutors. Anyone has who been involved in job searches with large numbers of candidates knows the perils involved in reading hundreds of application forms: it is inevitable that any departmental committee would fail to do as thorough a job here. In Oxbridge, the colleges are, both in theory and practice, distinct bodies from the two universities. While the universities and colleges thrive symbiotically, it is the colleges have primary responsibility for their undergraduates – for housing, for food, for teaching, for welfare. So long as this survives – and its longevity is a testament to its fundamental good sense as an educational model – it is right that the final admissions decision lies with the body with primary responsibility: the college. The second response comes from Dr Helen Carasso, who edited UK higher education – policy, practice and debate during HEPI’s first 20 years (HEPI Report 161) I read Charlotte Armstrong’s Debate Paper on equity in Oxbridge admissions with great interest, as she writes with the benefit of insider knowledge, unlike many critics of the workings of England’s two oldest universities. And here I should make my own confession – I was the (final) Director of the Oxford Colleges’ Admissions Office (OCAO) for over a decade so wrote and delivered courses for academics new to Oxford on how to enshrine fairness into Oxford’s undergraduate selection process. I still volunteer as one of the greeters welcoming potential applicants to the City and University on Open Days. So I think it is fair for me too to claim my own insider knowledge, albeit of ‘the other’ collegiate University to Charlotte, before I debate the points she makes about widening participation activities, the perspectives of applicants and the selection process itself. It is only right though that, with the experience I have cited, I discuss these in relation to Oxford alone. One of the most striking facts that Fairer for All presents is the scale of effort that is put in to access and recruitment by Oxford’s undergraduate colleges; for a group that collectively admits some 3,250 undergraduates annually to employ 80 staff working on widening participation , this translates to one outreach officer for each 40 freshers. And that is before you count the university teams working on national programmes, regional collaborations and large summer schools. So is this inefficiency or commitment to increasing equity in higher education overall and widening the pool of young people who realise that Oxford could be for them? Should Oxford seek to work with young people, their schools, their colleges and their families across the country, raising aspirations and breaking down perceived barriers? Or should it concentrate on more local activities such as its long-term membership of the regional UniConnect partnership (covering Oxfordshire and adjacent counties) and support for a learning centre in Blackbird Leys, one of the most disadvantaged areas of the city? As a national institution that is also a key element of its local community and economy, I would argue it has a responsibility to do both. No doubt, there would be savings to be made on the balance sheet by bringing all these activities together, but there would also be losses in areas such as the breadth and depth of experiences offered, undoubted enthusiasm of outreach officers and access to physical resources that together paint a fuller picture of life as a student at Oxford. And then, of course, there is the fact that colleges are independent chartered institutions, so they could not be ‘taxed’ for compulsory contributions to any centralised model; nor could they be barred from running outreach activities entirely independently. So while there can be some duplication in effort in the current model, it presents clear points of contact for schools and colleges who do not know where to start building a relationship with Oxford and it has the capacity to engage with many thousands of potential students annually. This independence of colleges does, as Charlotte points out, mean that the body which submits Oxford’s Access and Participation Plan to the Office for Students for approval – the University – does not have the means, on its own, to deliver everything within that Plan. This is something that Vice-Chancellors have been well-aware of since the University signed its first Access Agreement in 2005 and is why these documents are written in close collaboration with the undergraduate colleges. As annual Monitoring Reports – and the response to them from the regulator – show, these Plans represent a shared commitment within the collegiate University to supporting young people from all backgrounds to recognise and achieve their potential. Underpinning this is the understanding that everyone loses if Oxford does not seek out potential and ability wherever it is to be found. When it comes to the admissions process itself, a similar close collaboration lies at the heart of Oxford’s Common Framework for Undergraduate Admissions . The priority, during my time as Director of the OCAO, was to ensure that our undergraduate admissions systems and processes were fair and transparent and operated reliably as the number of applicants grew steadily (they have almost doubled over the past 20 years). Our Office was not part of the University, instead it was a joint venture operated by the undergraduate colleges, albeit working closely with the University. It was increasingly clear though that a step-change was needed in the way that such a crucial and time-sensitive process as undergraduate admissions operated as it scaled up. The task therefore, was to establish a shared understanding of the roles and responsibilities of all those involved in admissions and ensure that we had everything in place to support those activities. This understanding is laid out in the Common Framework – a statement of a way of working that has served Oxford well for two decades – and the replacement of the OCAO with a new department within the university’s central administration (hence my role as the final Director of the OCAO), Undergraduate Admissions and Outreach (UAO). Measures are taken to smooth out peaks and troughs in the popularity of different colleges before interviews, all interviews are conducted online and training is given to tutors to ensure consistency of the selection processes and decision making. With measures such as this in place, tutors across Oxford’s 30 undergraduate colleges can all play their part in the complex process of determining who among over 23,000 applicants (the large majority of whom are very well-qualified) will receive an offer for one of around 3,250 places. They are supported by information-sharing systems operated by UAO, meaning that those in different colleges can work effectively as a single-subject teams, assessing candidates against a shared, and published, set of selection criteria. As Charlotte points out, some 20% of undergraduate offers come from colleges that were not chosen by the candidate – both because of pre-interview reallocation and following an open application. However, over my 25 years of professional and academic involvement with Oxford, I have never heard an undergraduate saying they are unhappy with their college, let alone requesting that they ‘migrate’ elsewhere. The admissions process that Charlotte recommends is, in fact, close to that operated by Oxford for taught postgraduate students (PGT). Successful applicants receive an offer from their academic department and are told they will hear separately from the college that has accepted them. In part, I am sure, because the rapid growth in PGT numbers has been driven by the university, with colleges following in its wake, I have certainly encountered PGT students who are highly conscious of the pros and cons of their own college compared to those of their course-mates. So, yes, there are differences in the financial positions of the various Oxford colleges, and hence the direct material support they can give to their students. However, Oxford’s core – and very generous – undergraduate bursaries are operated on a University-wide basis (as part of commitments made in its Access and Participation Plan). However, it is the crucial sense of community and individual support that their college provides during their years at Oxford which makes it where, as graduates, alumnae links are forged and maintained. Get our updates via email Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. 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