According to Oxford’s outgoing vice-chancellor Louise Richardson, the rise in the number of state school pupils gaining places at Oxford is down to their own efforts and greater ambition rather than university policies.
Dismissing claims that Oxbridge is biased against applications from privately educated students, Richardson said more “smart students” are applying from the state sector and that creates greater competition, making those “who historically would have expected to get in” publicly complain when they get lost. .
“We were attacked for not taking in enough disadvantaged kids, and now we’re being criticized for not taking in enough privately educated kids. So no, we’re not discriminating,” Richardson said.
“The reality is that we have become a much more competitive place, we have many more people applying. So as a result more students are disappointed. And perhaps the students who historically would have expected to get in and are disappointed are more so.
“But it’s simply a matter of numbers – we turn away more people because we have more people applying and the number of places hasn’t changed.”
As she prepares to step down at the end of the year, Richardson said she was proud of the sharp rise in state-educated UK students now admitted to Oxford, as well as smaller but significant increases in the number of ethnic minorities or from disadvantaged environments. .
“There has been a change. We have gone from 56% enrolled in public schools to 68%. We have gone from 10% of children from the most disadvantaged environments to 23%, with a commitment to reach 25% next year. The number of black British students was low, but we have more than doubled it. And ours [black and minority ethnic] students are now at 25%.
“This is a very important change. I am proud of what we have achieved. And, I hasten to add, this is all without compromising our standards,” Richardson said.
When Richardson took office in January 2016, the university was regularly criticized for overlooking talented students from public schools, while faculty surveys found that a high proportion would not advise their students to apply to because of a perceived bias.
But things have changed to such an extent that Oxford is now accused on the front pages of some newspapers of discriminating against those from independent schools.
“I think smart students have become more eager to apply. And I think we’ve made a big effort with teachers, to encourage them to encourage their smart kids to apply, and not accept the shibboleth that we are not for them.
“We put a lot of effort into trying to convince kids and their teachers that we want all the smart kids who are passionate about their education to aspire to come to Oxford,” he said.
Richardson insists that Oxford’s offers of admissions are made on the basis of ability. “We are making decisions about the individual, not about a category, be it schools or any other category. We want smart, interesting kids with the greatest potential.”
Richardson was the first female Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, having been the first female Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews, and will be succeeded at Oxford by another woman, Professor Irene Tracey, serving one of Richardson’s personal goals.
“I think I’ve been the first woman in almost every job I’ve had, except as an academic. And one of my goals is to be succeeded by a woman. And the reason for this is that if a woman is not successful in a role, there is no chance in the world that she will be succeeded by a woman.
“Whether a man is a success or a failure in a role, I think his gender is considered irrelevant to his success or failure. I think if a woman is unsuccessful, her gender is often blamed, and that makes it much less likely to be succeeded by another woman. So that’s one of the goals I set for myself,” Richardson said.
Richardson has other reasons to look back on his time as VC with pride: overcoming a pandemic that made the university more internationally recognized for its research in the medical and social sciences, most famously in the development of the vaccine against the university’s Jenner-led Covid-19. High school.
Richardson points out that Oxford had a lot of historical experience dealing with plagues and pandemics for hundreds of years, while its “quite Byzantine system really kicked in during the pandemic”, with its 30+ autonomous colleges watching over his students, going out. the central university to make strategic decisions.
In Richardson’s first year, the Brexit referendum that led to the UK leaving the EU was a source of potential turbulence. But Richardson, who was born and raised in County Waterford, Ireland, said he overestimated the immediate effect Brexit would have on the university: “If I had to be completely honest, I’d have to say the impact has been less sharp. than I predicted or would have thought.”
The most serious impact has been a sharp drop in students from Europe. Richardson notes that before Brexit around 8% of undergraduates came from elsewhere in the EU, and that has now fallen to just 3%.
But warnings of an exodus of academics or difficulties recruiting researchers from Europe have not materialised, although Richardson notes that “we will never know who is not applying to come because of Brexit”.
Richardson now fears a slow-motion decline in ties with the EU: “I suspect that, rather than the kind of immediate impact that we foresee, I think it’s just a very gradual erosion of the depth of the connection with the rest of Europe , so that in 20 or 30 years we will turn around and say, ‘How did we get here?'”
British politics has been a major source of disruption, with Richardson saying she has had nine education secretaries and five prime ministers in her time as vice-chancellor. And although all five prime ministers had graduated from Oxford, Richardson said they were not doing their old university any favours.
But what accounts for Oxford’s remarkable track record in producing prime ministers? Since the second world war, all but one of the British prime ministers who graduated from the university went to Oxford. Richardson says it’s because of the self-selection of students attracted to Oxford because they are smart and ambitious.
“When they come here, they hone their skills through the tutoring system … they learn about meeting arguments, critical thinking, debate, all the skills that are useful in public life.
“And so a tiny, tiny subset of them decide to go into public life and they’re smart and they’re successful. So maybe it shouldn’t be so strange,” Richardson said.
The cavalcade of education secretaries and ministers has caused its own problems, with those looking to make their mark adding to the “convoluted” pile of regulation and bureaucracy Richardson said universities now face.
Richardson is highly critical of the Office for Students, England’s higher education regulator created in 2018: “I can’t point to any area where they have improved the quality of what we do.
“We are constantly being evaluated but no one assesses the impact of all this regulation. And I think the impact is mostly to waste funds that I’d rather spend giving scholarships to students or hiring more professors than people to fill the next set of dormant queries,” he said.
The government is also standing in the way of a controversy that has persisted throughout Richardson’s tenure: the statue of Cecil Rhodes, the infamous imperialist, which overlooks Oxford’s High Street from its enclave in Oriel College.
The Rhodes statue was a source of controversy even before the Black Lives Matter campaign. Richardson says there’s little that can be done: “We’ve got a situation where Oriel have said they’d like it to go down, the government won’t let them, so it stays here.”