private school boys disadvantaged

White private schools boys are the new disadvantaged, according to Cambridge professor

Call Eton, I want a refund


According to a Cambridge professor, white private school boys are now the new disadvantaged when it comes to university admissions.

In a piece for The Spectator Professor David Abulafia argued private school boys are not getting Oxbridge places and instead have to settle for going to Durham, St Andrews and Bristol. How on earth will they cope?

He said: “At the moment the really disadvantaged candidates are arguably the white males from outstanding independent schools. If they are rejected by their first-choice college and placed in the ‘pool’ so other colleges can look at their application, they nearly all sink without trace. So they go instead to Durham, St Andrews, Bristol and other Russell Group universities.”

Eton College, via Maureen McLean/Shutterstock

Abulafia suggested school names should be left off university application forms as students shouldn’t be punished by their parents’ decision of where to send them to school.

He said: “School names should probably be omitted from application forms. Penalising applicants for their parents’ choice of school ‘strips the pupil of any agency’, to quote one distinguished head.”

Eton, he argued, had had its offers to Oxbridge halved between 2014 and 2021. Abulafia argued university admissions had “become another site for culture wars in which ‘white’, ‘male’ and ‘privileged’ are terms of disapproval, linked together to justify injustice. Imagined class must not determine admissions.”

Abulafia, who is a history professor at Cambridge, shared his views just after the Cambridge Vice Chancellor told The Times private schools needed to accept they would get fewer offers, as the university wanted to have students from a variety of backgrounds.

In his piece Abulafia said because of the lack of places of private school pupils many were attending Ivy League universities in America such as Harvard and Princeton and might not come back.

He said: “One head talked to me about a potential brain drain as some of the best and brightest head to Harvard and Princeton, maybe never to return to Britain.” What a shame.

Featured image credit via E4

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These are the private schools which dominate the Oxbridge offers