Inside the cult of Oxford and Cambridge — and how to get in

Oliver Dobbs applied to study at the University of Oxford six times before he was finally offered a place. The 25-year-old had tried for courses including PPE — philosophy, politics and economy, the degree beloved of politicians — and English literature at colleges such as Exeter, Magdalen, Harris Manchester and Lincoln. He was finally accepted as a mature student of theology and religion at Christ Church in 2020. Interviewing him over Zoom during the pandemic, the admissions tutors may have been able to spot a bauble, dangling on the Christmas tree behind him, depicting Tom Tower at Christ Church college.
“Oxford is where I feel at home,” says Dobbs, whose sister is also studying at the elite university.
For more than a century Oxford and Cambridge — or Oxbridge, a term coined in 1850 by William Makepeace Thackeray in his novel Pendennis (he briefly attended Trinity College, Cambridge) — have been bywords for privilege, the golden ticket to a successful career in professions ranging from law to politics. It’s a world of summer balls, punting and high-table dining, of ancient colleges and gilded youth.
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Indeed, 24 per cent of MPs attended Oxbridge, as did 38 per cent of peers, 56 per cent of permanent secretaries, 71 per cent of senior judges and 13 per cent of police chiefs, according to Elitist Britain, the 2019 report by the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission based on a survey of 5,000 people. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that students such as Dobbs are willing to try for several years to get in.
And the obsession is not confined to students: many parents are determined to secure an Oxbridge place for their child, says Charles Bonas, the founder of the tutorial agency Bonas MacFarlane, which offers a three-year university preparation programme for £10,000 and extra help at £80-£120 an hour. The programme is also offered for free to about 100 teenagers who cannot afford the costs. Some children are as young as five when they come to him. “A lot of parents realise that the Oxbridge experience is different to anywhere else,” he says. “There is obsession.”
And it shows. The universities come top for reputation in the High Fliers 2023 survey of up to 15,000 students, followed by Imperial College London and the London School of Economics.
The reputation of both universities, like many, has also been dented by the marking and assessment boycott, part of long-running industrial action over pay by the national lecturers union. This left thousands of students unable to graduate on time this summer because exams and dissertations had been unmarked. Cambridge, where only 59 per cent of final year students graduated on time this summer, was one of the worst-affected universities.
Historically the application process has been viewed as one shrouded in myth and conspiracy and involving more than a little stress and hysteria. Students apply to individual colleges and for some subjects the university sets admissions tests such as the Thinking Skills Assessment, in which 50 multiple-choice questions must be answered in 90 minutes. Success in these opens the door to a face-to-face interview, usually held in December, with up to three tutors in each college. Stories of interview questions are legend: would you rather be a seedless or “non-seedless” grapefruit? Do you think you’re clever? Why are you sitting in this chair?
Bonas admits that winning a place has become more difficult for private school applicants in recent years because of Oxbridge’s “bias” towards state school students and the increasing prevalence of lower contextual offers. The figures support his assertion. In 2002 54.3 per cent of Oxford offers were made to state school applicants, compared with 68.1 per cent in 2022. At Cambridge the proportion has increased from 55.5 per cent to 70.8 per cent over the same period.
At Cambridge Dorothy Byrne, the president of the all-women’s Murray Edwards college and a former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, has said that “ideally” the UK student population at Cambridge would reflect the percentage of pupils at state schools, which is 93 per cent.
Byrne has also suggested that private school students from schools such as Eton might benefit from attending universities like Manchester and Sheffield, where they would meet a wider range of people, rather than being “obsessed with getting into Oxford and Cambridge”.
At Cambridge, 38.6 per cent of students applying to Murray Edwards College are successful. This is almost three times the share of those applying to Downing College, where 13.8 per cent are admitted.
Similar disparities in admittance rates are seen among Oxford colleges. The most competitive last year was Worcester College, where 11.7 per cent of applicants were successful. The least competitive was St Hilda’s College, where 30.2 per cent were admitted.
Contextual offers, now used routinely, take into account factors such as family background, whether a student is the first in their family to go to university and whether they live in an area of high deprivation, as well as the calibre of a school’s general exam results. Of the 80 schools that sent the highest proportion of sixth-formers to Oxbridge in 2021, 35 are private, 21 are grammars, 17 are sixth-form colleges, six are comprehensive or academies and one is a further education college. The fee-paying Westminster School tops the list, but the second, third, fourth and fifth places are taken by state sixth-form colleges, including Hills Road in Cambridge, Peter Symonds in Winchester and Brampton Manor in east London. Meanwhile the number of students admitted from Eton halved from 99 in 2014 to 48 in 2021.
The result? A rise in anti-Oxbridge sentiment among the upper middle classes and private school children.
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Joe Seddon, 26, who graduated from Oxford with a first-class degree in PPE after attending a state school in Morley, West Yorkshire, has helped nearly 800 state school students get into Oxford and Cambridge since 2018 through his social enterprise, Zero Gravity.
He says preparation for the tests is critical. “They are the pathway to the interview,” he says. “You should treat these admissions tests like an A-level exam – you need to prepare for up to 18 months in advance.”
Data points towards other strategies that can boost a student’s chances – to a certain extent it is a numbers game. First off, state schools need to persuade far more of their students to apply. Half of Oxbridge hopefuls come from a group of about 150 schools or colleges. Few, if any, students at most state schools and colleges apply. By contrast more than half of sixth-form pupils at some private schools do so. Similarly, at independents that rate in the top fifth of all schools for exam results almost a quarter of students try for a place, compared with only 11 per cent of those at comprehensives in the same high-achieving group.
Another factor to consider is that certain colleges and degrees are more popular, and therefore more competitive, than others. At both Oxford and Cambridge, the course with the highest applicant success rate is music, with 53.3 and 46.4 per cent being admitted respectively. Classics and modern languages are the second and third least competitive courses at both universities.
At Cambridge, only 10 per cent of economics applicants will enrol at the university, This is followed by architecture, and human, social and political sciences, both with an 11.3 per cent acceptance rate.
Computer science is the most competitive course at Cambridge, with only 5.6 per cent of students being admitted, the lowest of any course at either university.
Overall, your chances of being admitted are marginally higher at Oxford, where 19 per cent of students were admitted compared with 17.6 per cent at Cambridge. However, the figures for Oxford are across three years of applications and are for UK-domiciled students only, and so are not directly comparable.
When it comes to colleges, some of the richest — such as St John’s, Oxford, and Trinity, Cambridge — attract the highest numbers of applications. Combine this with a popular subject and the odds of securing an offer can seem even more daunting.
Yet Seddon advises against trying to play tactics to get simply any place — tutors are looking for students who have “passion” for their subject, so if you don’t you will be quickly found out.
Nadia-Angela Bekhti, a second-year biology student at Hertford College, Oxford, agrees: “Tutors have devoted their lives to their subjects so they want to see that enthusiasm in the young person that they are going to be teaching.” The interview is also a test of general intelligence, she says. “It’s all about thinking out loud, about showing them how you think and that you can work your way through difficult problems.”
Richard Partington, senior tutor at St John’s College, Cambridge, is clear. He says admissions tutors are looking for “genuine interest in the chosen subject, very high levels of academic ability, outstanding examination results and predicted exam results within the candidate’s educational context, a capacity for hard work with independent learning and strong reasoning and intellectual flexibility”.
Both universities publish the percentage of state school students at each of their colleges, and candidates who take this information into account could improve their chance of an offer. At Mansfield College, Oxford, for instance, 93.2 per cent of students are from state schools, suggesting that such applicants may have a slightly better chance of gaining a place here than those from fee-paying schools, all other things being equal.
For many state-schoolers, though, the worry of disappointment is simply too stressful and the cult of Oxbridge too sepia-tinted to be considered — or considered achievable.
Martin Birchall, of High Fliers Research, says that neither Oxford nor Cambridge tops its annual list of the institutions most targeted by employers, with Manchester, Nottingham and Birmingham taking the first, second and third spots. For the first time Oxford has not even made the top ten this year.
“Employers are pushing for diversity,” Birchall says. “Some are saying we do not need Oxbridge graduates, we may not even need upper second-class honours — we want students with the right skills for our jobs.”
For Dobbs, though, persistence has paid off. “Oxford is everything I dreamed it to be,” he says. “It’s easy to forget, however, that once you go through all the hard work of getting in, there’s still a degree to finish. It’s work hard, play hard.”
Additional reporting: Anvee Bhutani
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