<p>BBC</a> News - Oxbridge dominates list of leading UK people</p>
<p>Predictably, the discussion in the UK seems to always center around the idea that Oxbridge fosters "elitism".</p>
<p>What people don’t consider is that the UK’s brightest and best go to Oxbridge, and those people are always going to do well. </p>
<p>In many cases, an Oxbridge degree isn’t the cause of success, it’s more that the Oxbridge degree is a symptom of innate brilliance, if that makes sense. </p>
<p>HOWEVER, one of the best indicators of how well you will do at school in the UK is parental income. This means that Oxbridge is dominated by the well-off, because bright kids from working class backgrounds are less likely to do well enough at school to get a place at Oxbridge.</p>
<p>well put, boomting. In the U.S. we have the same issue. Kids whose parents have money will be put in the best private schools and will then go on to attend Harvard, Yale, and the rest. While kids with poorer parents will get stuck in poorer school districts and, even if highly intelligent, just won’t have the same probability of getting into top schools. There are always a few that buck the trend, but the correlation holds pretty well.</p>
<p>It’s far worse in the USA, with legacy admissions and huge price differentials between universities.</p>
<p>@keepittoyourself - that’s true. At least once a working class UK student has got the grades at school, the financial support is automatically in place (well, after some forms have been filled and means testing applied) for them to attend any UK university - and because of the bursaries, which are given to everyone with a household income below a certain level, the best universities are actually the cheapest to attend overall. Plus, fees are the same almost everywhere (£9k per year max) and the loan repayment terms are really quite generous (you pay 9% of any income over £21,000 per year, which is quite a good wage, and anything left over is written off after 30 years).</p>
<p>Wow! That’s a great education policy on the part of the UK.</p>
<p>^^^ Not really - higher education in the UK used to be free! (Well, funded out of general taxation.) There used to be no tuition fees and students were granted a stipend for living expenses. </p>
<p>OTOH, very few people actually went to university so it was affordable to do this. Now around 40% of UK high school students go to university so it’s not doable without greatly increasing taxes. I would prefer to increase taxes and enable students to graduate without debt.</p>
<p>I agree with you, though UK student loans are not like other forms of debt.</p>
<p>@Laylah - I can see your point. From the U.S. perspective it still seems pretty enlightened. I’d favor a mixed approach where students and the public both share some of the debt load. Seems to me that the current UK policy strikes this sort of balance. But like you say, if your expectations of what is “normal” has been no debt at all then a 9,000 pound per year debt just for tuition will seem extraordinarily one-sided.</p>
<p>Oh I know - keepittoyourself is completely correct of course, UK student debt is much more favorable than ‘normal’ debt. I’m not old enough to have benefited from free tuition or a living stipend myself so I’m definitely biased by the fact that I have debt to pay back!</p>
<p>I am a tax-payer though, and genuinely I would be happy to pay more taxes to fund higher education. </p>
<p>I guess what I would like to see is an ethos of general public appreciation for higher education, in the same way that there is for primary and secondary education. The difference is that everyone goes to school regardless of ability and not everyone gets to go to university - but I feel that society as a whole benefits from having highly educated citizens and should therefore shoulder the burden of paying for their education.</p>
<p>We can’t all be doctors - but we all benefit from having them around!</p>