Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What BBC boss Tim Davie gets wrong about Oxbridge

Oxford University (photo: iStock)

As a first-generation immigrant, my mum’s greatest ambition for me was to get into Oxbridge. For her, it was clear that these world-leading universities would be a passport into a better world. So she’ll be aghast to learn of BBC Director General Tim Davie saying the BBC can’t ‘just take people from a certain academic track’. By which he means, according to BBC sources who have elaborated to the newspapers, that ‘it’s about not fishing in an Oxbridge gene pool’.  The assumption is that these two universities are hotbeds of inherited privilege.

Davie went to Selwyn, Cambridge, in the 1980s. Back then, most students were (like him) privately educated. But I’d contend that he’s misunderstood the situation on the ground now. This year, almost 70 per cent of Oxford’s intake was from state schools, and that proportion continues to go up. Take my case, for example.

Despite her expectations being made clear to me at an early age, I’d still disappointed my tiger mum by failing to get into the local grammar school at the age of 11. (In my defence, we moved to the UK from China only one year previously, and my English just wasn’t good enough.) Private school was considered, but that would have buckled the family finances: though we’d gone from farm to city in a generation (a product of China’s economic miracle), we weren’t nearly that well-off. At that stage, our family of five still lived in a two-bed flat. In the end, I went to the local comprehensive, and we managed to upgrade to a three-bed house nearby.

I tried again for the grammar school for sixth form, and this time I was lucky. While there, a teacher who’d gone to Oxford inspired my all-important application. The rest is history: a few years later I graduated from the university with an average but respectable 2:1; and went back for more to do a master’s degree the following year.

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