A.C. FAILING: Prof’s college only for Toffs.

Attempts to establish a new private college to rival Oxbridge have hit a major stumbling block as it has emerged that a whopping 66% of offers have gone to privately educated pupils.

The New College of the Humanities, which is set to open its doors in September, charges £18,000 a year and claims only to admit “gifted” undergrads. But its seems they need to be gifted and rich.

The figures released on Friday make a mockery of the claims of the self-appointed master, A.C. Grayling. He said he would look for “very bright people across the board”. The school’s staff have visited 130 schools in an outreach programme, but only 21 of those have been in the state sector.

Grayling’s for-profit college, which is not allowed full university status, is deliberately targeted at potential Oxbridge candidates. But Grayling’s “elite institution” seems to have missed the mark spectacularly.

Interviewed by The Tab in June, Grayling said “the key aspect of this has to be accessibility”, but with a cool 18 grand fee up front and only 7 full scholarships on offer, the philosopher’s money-maker surely has no chance of competing with its Cambridge ‘rival’.

Nearly 60% of Cambridge offers go to applicants from state schools, and the university spends over £2.7 million on outreach programmes each year as well as each college having its own outreach programme.

Cambridge students don’t seem to take the college very seriously. Sidney 2nd year Katie Estdale told The Tab that “it seems like a bit of a joke. The whole point of the place was to be an accessible alternative to Oxbridge, but it costs more and has no proper outreach.”

The figures come as a further blow to the college after it emerged earlier this month that one if its much-vaunted ‘celebrity’ professors, geneticist Steve Jones pulled out of the project after he found out how much it would cost students.