Opening up Oxbridge
Last week I went to see the brilliant theatre production Hamilton in London. The cast perform eight shows a week and tickets are sold out months in advance within hours as soon as they are released.
Imagine if they cut half of the productions and closed their doors for half the year, it would be madness! But that’s exactly what’s happening in Britain’s elite universities. The actors in Hamilton don’t take six months of holiday so why should we settle for less when it comes to the UK’s best academic institutions?
Oxford and Cambridge Universities currently operate three terms consisting of only eight weeks each – a total of 24 weeks throughout the entire calendar year. These colleges exist purely to educate first and foremost so there is a huge missed opportunity here to diversify the student body and double the number of undergraduate places across 48 weeks of teaching – with four weeks of holidays still to spare.
To me, this seems an obvious solution to a growing problem at Oxbridge recently highlighted in a report by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI). The report shows that many other leading universities have grown rapidly, some by more than half, while the number of students at Cambridge has risen by only 4% and Oxford’s own figures suggest an even more modest increase of 2%.
This comes at a time of growing scrutiny on Oxford and Cambridge’s applications process following freedom of information requests to uncover the number of undergraduates from disadvantaged backgrounds. The figures show that between 2012 and 2016, six of Cambridge’s 29 undergraduate colleges admitted fewer than 10 black British or mixed-race students, while eight of Oxford’s 29 colleges accepted fewer than three black applicants in the past three years.
In the report, Nick Hillman, director of HEPI, published his ideas for diversifying Oxbridge’s student body. He argues that opening new colleges is the preferred solution. However, Professor Graham Virgo, pro-vice-chancellor for education at Cambridge, disagrees. He claims that the university’s “biggest problem is convincing people they should apply and making it clear to them that they are welcome here.” He questions “what message about inclusivity would be sent out by setting up a new college for this purpose?”
With Cambridge dragging its heels and Oxford releasing its own statement that it has “no plans to expand overall undergraduate numbers or create new colleges”, there seems to be something of a stalemate.
My solution would double the number of semesters, effectively increasing the number of undergraduates two-fold without even having to lay another brick.
Resistance may come in the form of academics who use the time for research projects or from businesses who use the space for commercial reasons during the holidays. However, there is legitimate cause to argue that the colleges should instead refocus their priorities on education.
It is well known that Oxbridge is oversubscribed – with more than 19,000 people applying for around 3,200 undergraduate places at Oxford alone, there is certainly the demand for this; and by hiring twice as many academics or offering significant pay increases to those willing to double their workload, the supply can be raised to meet the demand and make more of the existing university infrastructure.
But the opportunity isn’t just limited to income for the universities. The extra capacity created would provide more students with access to the high-quality education they and our society needs. My view is that this could greatly improve opportunities for poorer British students and ethnic minorities and would help to redress the imbalance at the core of Britain’s best universities.
The difficulty is that there’s no single decision point. There’s no one realistically with the power to implement this kind of change. Let’s make it a national priority to educate and let’s make high quality education more accessible to all.
Few organisations in the world have the good fortune to be able to double their income through a single change to their business model. I’m sure the producers of Hamilton wouldn’t pass up such an opportunity, so why should Oxbridge?
I help B2B technology firms grow revenue profitably and sustainably, using disruptive strategies, lived experience, and empathy for customers & colleagues.
6 年My first reaction to this article was “the writer does not understand how Oxford works”. Then I saw that he has an Oxford MA on his profile. So now I’m perplexed. My personal experience of Oxford is that students are actively studying at least 30 weeks per year, and that academic staff do the bulk of their research and publication work outside of term time. The proposed “simple” change to the Oxbridge business model feels quite complicated to me.
Design Engineer at Alstom and Student Methodist Minister
6 年Have you even considered the issue of funding? Many students in other universities take part-time jobs to afford their studies but Oxbridge students are not permitted to work during term. For them 8 week terms [1] are a benefit as it leaves longer vacations in which to earn - if you stretch the academic year to 48 weeks only those in wealthy families can afford to study. You seem to be proposing opportunities for more student places which are not accessible to poor students since they can't fund themselves. I also think Cambridge would dispute the "colleges exist purely to educate". Learning is their main focus, but learning is much wider than teaching. The World-class researcher are the same people who teach and tutor the students. Their research time and academic conferences largely happen outside the teaching terms. Preparation for teaching will be mainly before term starts and research projects generally have students in the laboratories, libraries and so on outside of teaching term. 48 weeks of teaching will rapidly mean no research progresses. It's a Lose-lose situation you propose. [1] The 8 week term is a fallacy - a mis-understanding of the terms system. There may be 8 week cycles of lectures, but students are generally resident for a 10 to 11 weeks, the same as other Universities. Tutorials, projects and any number of other Educational activities fall outside the Lecture term
Chief Accountant at FreeAgent Central Ltd
6 年As a Cambridge graduate, my question would be, what about the supervisors and lecturers? Are you planning to recruit twice the number of them? They need downtime too, in order to carry out their own work and to recharge their batteries. And before you say "nobody needs that much holiday", I can confirm that after a short-but-extremely-intense Cambridge term, it was always at least two weeks before I felt remotely recovered - I usually spent the first week of every holiday lying on the sofa at Mum and Dad's...
International Business Advisor and Mentor
6 年All true James - but how to persuade the colleges to give up their lucrative out-of-term conference/summer school income??
District Councillor at Teignbridge District Council
6 年On the face of it, James, what you have here is a unicorn wishlist. It ignores the significant amount of time a lecturer/professor/don spends researching, reading and marking students work, outside of those 24 weeks. On the subject of capacity in Oxford for instance, perhaps you will explain how to insert the extra 16000 per year into a city with a capacity for accommodation already at breaking point, and with house prices matching London because of demand v supply issues already? It would be better to seek the knowledge and learning available in Oxford and Cambridge being translated to other universities elsewhere. That still leaves the issue of overcoming the elitism of Oxbridge in this country, where a first in Newcastle for instance is viewed as less than a third from Oxford. Start addressing that first would be my priority.