When I was at Magdalen College, Oxford, in the early 1990s, I’d often read ‘Bogsheets’ in the loos by the college bar. They were single pages of anonymous college gossip, cheaply printed off in those pre-internet days.
I remember one bogsheet clearly. The headline said, ‘Cheer up!’ And the standfirst said, ‘You’re at the most beautiful college at the most beautiful, most famous university in the world. This is the closest you’ll ever get to living in a country house in your life. Why are you so bloody miserable?’
I was feeling a little sorry for myself at the time. The bogsheet cheered me up instantly – it was spot on. Whenever I go back to Oxford now, I think, ‘Why on earth did you take this all for granted?’
As I write, offers to Oxford have just been made. Cambridge applicants have another two weeks. And those places will be just as much in demand as ever. In 2023, Cambridge made offers to just 21 per cent of applicants. Oxford chose just 16 per cent.
Oxford and Cambridge inevitably go on being alluring, even if some critics disagree. In the New Statesman, Bethany Elliott has said that ‘Britain needs to learn that Oxford and Cambridge are just universities’.
Well, yes, but they are different from other universities. They are different for the reason that wise Bogsheet editor put forward: they are the most famous, most beautiful universities on the planet.
And that has all sorts of knock-on effects. It means you will get huge competition to get in, as those admission figures suggest. And so you’ll get some very clever undergraduates to work alongside. Although they’re not all very clever: some of my dimmer Oxford contemporaries had learnt French as toddlers in their gilded parents’ Alpine chalets. They weren’t so much reading Modern Languages as reading skiing.
You will get some very clever tutors, too. Although… they weren’t all very attentive. Heading to a Greek tutorial at Magdalen one day to see my eminent classics tutor, I was surprised to see the note he’d left on his door: ‘Sorry – can’t make tutorial. Am at the BBC.’ I thought it was the undergraduates who were supposed to bunk off.
The academic work wasn’t that arduous then, I must admit. One or two tutorials a week, with oceans of free time to fill in between them, for only 24 weeks a year – and I was a bit of a swot. But even that was more work than most of my old schoolfriends were doing at other universities.
It’s like your world has been purpose-built for you as an undergraduate
Still, it gave you plenty of time to make friends – many of them friends for life, because of all those hours in each other’s company at such a formative stage of your youth.
Of course, that happens at all other universities, too. But it’s so much easier at Oxford and Cambridge because the cities’ ancient core is the university. Not only are you flung together for three or four years – but you are flung together in a tiny, intense world where everyone else lives less than ten minutes away, or less than five minutes on a bike.
It’s like your world has been purpose-built for you as an undergraduate. Well, in fact, it was purpose-built for you. In my three years living in college, I had a library, dining hall, bar – and deer-park – all three minutes from my bed.
We are all in a panic about something or other but some people have little havens of self-assurance. Brad Pitt never need worry about his looks. Elon Musk never has to think about a mortgage.
And, for the rest of their lives, Oxbridge graduates – whatever else goes wrong – need never feel insecure about where they went to university.
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