| Topic: | Reality check | |
| Posted by: | Birna Helgadottir | |
| Date/Time: | 11/11/10 19:27:00 |
| I remember the 'free higher education' of the 1980s, around 10% of school-leavers went to university. Where they the 'elite'? Socially and financially yes, intellectually no. You had to be a lot smarter to go to university if you were poor and common - and you couldn't afford to make a single mistake. Posh kids meanwhile went up to university expecting to have fun, make nice useful friends and do not very much work. Those who couldn't quite make Oxbridge went to places like Bristol instead where a lot of them spent three years stupifying themselves with drugs and drink. Then there were redbricks like Manchester and Sheffield - students partied hard in a less Sloaney-druggy and more egalitarian-druggy way and so the rave scene was born. The social mix was probably a bit more healthy, but just like the posher unis, very few people worked that hard. Then there were the polys - for the clever poor. Did those students work harder? Probably, but no-one cared, because polys didn't count. Now, the polys are new universities and they get ridiculed for peddling pointless 'mickey mouse' degrees by the kind of people who want to see a return to the old higher education elitism of all the posh kids, morons and all, getting a return for their private school fees with a carte blanche entrance into university, but of course a few token clever hardworking working class boys and girls chucked into the mix to make us all feel like we're keeping things real. The thing is, if you are posh and privately educated in this country, you get countless chances to fail and screw up that ordinary comprehensive kids never get. You can mess up at school and somebody will put in a good word for you and you'll get in to an ok university. Students work a damn sight harder these days than they did in the 80s - I know this for a fact. But what still hasn't changed - a comprehensive student still needs an immaculate record from GCSE onwards to get into an elite university. So basically, even though HE participation rates have gone up, in terms of being able to get into the top level unis not much has changed at all. Do you know how many Afro-Caribbean students got into Oxford last year, out of an intake of 2,600? Just one. |