Postgraduate

How Oxbridge PhDs became the preserve of the super-rich

Oxford and Cambridge have gone to great lengths over the last few years to increase the number of admissions of state-school educated students at undergraduate level – to varying degrees of success. As Robin Harman reported in Spectator Life recently, there’s still a worrying disparity between the number of offers made to disadvantaged pupils and the take-up of those offers, even though the number of offers made has risen steadily. Yet the most striking inequity in Oxbridge admissions occurs at postgraduate level – something that is barely mentioned in media or political debates around higher education, possibly because the privileged students who make up a disproportionate number of Oxbridge postgraduates