To emphasise this point.
One of the industries that historically had this severe classism is the Legal industry.
Now the industry is trying to change and be more open. More and more solicitor firms are now actively trying to reduce their bias of hiring privately educated Oxbridge candidates.
One of the Magic Circle firms, the biggest “Clifford Chance”, led the way in 2014 by introducing a “CV Blind” policy at the post-CV stages of recruitment to specifically lower its Oxbridge bias. At these later stages, firms remove/omit the educational background (i.e. university and secondary school) of candidates from interviewers knowledge.
Now that the interviewers cannot know the background of the candidates, they are hiring with less bias and based on abilities presented to them. This dramatically changed the outcomes of the profiles of people being hired by top solicitor firms. Some are now hiring from universities like even Oxford Brookes and BPP.
Chamber Student website did a survey of the universities with the highest average Newly Qualified (NQ) solicitors’ salaries in the UK, i.e. those getting the top jobs from highest paying law firms, and here is the Top 20 UK universities in 2019:
- LSE £86.8K
- SOAS £81.0K
- Oxford £78.1K
- KCL £74.5K
- UCL £72.8K
- Cambridge £72.4K
- Warwick £70.2K
- Durham £70.0K
- St Andrews £69.1K
- Edinburgh £68.0K
- Oxford Brookes £66.3K
- Queen Mary £66.3K
- Bristol £65.0K
- Cardiff £64.1K
- Nottingham £63.6K
- BPP £63.0K
- York £62.6K
- Exeter £59.5K
- Manchester £59.4K
- Southampton £59.1K
Note: Again, the “Golden Triangle” dominates with SOAS being the breaker this time. Imperial is not in the list as it is a STEM university where its graduates rarely switch to law.
The London universities are now able to compete toe-to-toe with Oxbridge; and considering NQ salaries of UK Magic Circle and US White-Shoe law firms were at the ranges of £86K to £149K in 2019, it can be logically said that it is the students of these universities that are getting majority of the elite solicitors’ jobs. Oxbridge still gets about 28-30% of these types of elite solicitor jobs.
For the next tier of top law firms, Oxbridge, Durham, Bristol, Exeter and Warwick are the top feeders. Followed by KCL, UCL, Nottingham and LSE. With Oxbridge still getting about 22% overall of these types of near-elite solicitor jobs. (See: “Law firms’ preferred universities 2019” by Chamber Student)
This shows what can happen when classism is eliminated and abilities are judged based on merit and competition.
Yes, it would still be Oxbridge candidates that will dominate hiring [and rightfully so], but it would not be ridiculous hoarding like 50 to 90 percent of hiring for top jobs.
Just 2 universities? Come on!!! That surely is not an outcome due to only superior ability, it is an outcome of non-compete old boys network.
Unlike the US, the UK legal sector is split into Solicitors and Barristers. Barristers being the smaller pool of lawyers.
Unfortunately, Barrister chambers are still strictly engaging in classism. 80% of Barristers are Oxbridge graduates.