Cambridge’s Requirement that Entrants should have Stars in their As is Correct and should Not be University Challenged

Civitas, 17 March 2009

Amidst predictable howls of protest from those who will accuse them of doing so merely to reinforce still further the privileges of the already undeservedly more advantaged pupils of public schools, colleges at Cambridge University have today announced that, from 2010, applicants must have gained at least one A* grade at A-level.

Their stated reason is that A-levels have been made so easy that far too many applicants now have gained three grade A’s at A-level to permit them to select between them on their basis alone.

Some accuse Oxford and Cambridge of being elite bastions of class privilege who unfairly deny entry to them of equally as bright but less well A-level prepared state-educated schoolchildren in favour of no brighter, but better exam prepared public schools toffs.

If that accusation were correct, however, how come employers do not discount Oxbridge results and institute their own independent tests when recruiting graduates?

Is snobbery really going to prevail against shareholder interest, given how greedy the recent credit crunch has been claimed to have revealed the world of commerce to be by the same very people who level these accusations at Oxbridge?

On the other hand, if the fact of the matter is simply that, when deciding whom to admit, Oxbridge are primarily and above all looking for academic promise judged in terms of final degree results, and if public schools turn out a superior product judged in those terms, what is there to complain of if they admit a disproportionate number of undergraduates of public-school background, if they leave school holding out such better promise?

If a moral fault is anywhere exposed by this disproportionate recruitment, it lies not with Oxbridge’s admission policies, but elsewhere in the education or wider social system.

My impression is these days that Oxbridge are bending over backwards to recruit undergraduates of appropriate academic promise from within the maintained school sector, but rightly do not wish to compromise academic standards.

Maybe, it is unfair some children are advantaged in life as a result of the more affluent or cultured circumstances of the families into which they are born. But if there is any need on grounds of social justice to rectify such ‘cosmic inequalities of fortune’, surely the right way to do so cannot be by lowering standards in our elite educational institutions. To do so is on a par with mandating lobotomies so as to correct correspondingly ‘morally arbitrary’ inequalities in native endowment.

Some will say that there is a difference in these two cases in so far as differences in native endowment are natural, whereas those in academic potential at 18 are largely the result of differences in that endowment combined with a large dose of man-made, or at least humanly condoned and therefore preventable, inequalities between families into which children are born.

But can anyone not motivated by envy seriously wish to level all down by denying anyone the opportunity of greater than average financial rewards, or else by denying adults the right to raise their children in ways that will inexorably confer ‘undeserved’ advantages on the latter in terms of greater than average financial and/or cultural capital?

Those ‘undeserved’ advantages would even survive closure of public schools and the total comprehensivation of all secondary schooling. Such a course of action would be a recipe for educational disaster, and would even then not rectify the undeserved advantages that arise from the family circumstances into which children are born.

It was because of his acute appreciation of how formative were family influences upon children that, in his Republic, Plato demanded all children should be removed from their parents at birth and educated together, without fathers knowing whom their own children were. Plato also forbade the ruling class from being able to own private property, so that they would be spared all temptation to misuse their offices for personal advantage.

In Plato’s view, the joys of philosophical enquiry and intellectual contemplation alone should provide the ruling class with sufficient compensation for the ordeals of high office and for the long and arduous course of preparatory study needed to qualify them for it. They chose to rule despite those extra-political intellectual joys they would forefit by so doing because they knew or believed that, if others  less able than them ruled instead,  these latter would screw up so badly that they, the philosophers, would enjoy even less opportunity for philosophical enquiry and contemplation.

The more egalitarian-minded zealots in today’s Labour Party have seemingly been keen on implementing the first part of Plato’s proposals for bringing about an ideally just society, without being at all keen on implementing the second.

But then, all too often those keenest on equalising people by attacking families and private wealth have themselves been denied the benefit of the decent higher education needed to enable people to appreciate the life of the mind or the folly of what they are proposing in the name of equality.