Be Excellent To Each Other

That's entirely the point.

Politicians are saying "You should be letting more poor people in, so that you are a meritocracy, not a posh person's shop"

This academic is saying "Well letting more poor people in wouldn't make it a meritocracy, it would make it a positive action shop"

What no-one is saying is "Are universities supposed to be a meritocracy?"

No you missed my point.

I had always kind of assumed that if two students presented with the same grades then the one who went to Eton or somewhere would stand a better chance.

I don't know if that's true or not, but depressingly I suspect it is.

I think people who go0 to the right schools are more likely get in to Oxford or Cambridge at least in part due to the tradition of the school, the experience of the teachers with those sorts of applications and the willingness of schools to coach the students before hand in the interview techniques and so on. There's probably a bit of an aversion to applying in some schools, due to the image of upper class toffs in blazers and boaters.

You're all missing the point. The reason to go to the one of the top universities is so that you can network, and later use every ounce of nepotism and clique-ness that you have, to lurch sideways into some unfitting career that you can bungle your way through, safe in the knowledge that you've amassed quite a bit of wealth in off-shore accounts, and that no matter what happens, you can always just retire to your house in the caribbean. I mean, why not? Who's it going to hurt - your poorest employees? Well, so what, they'd have done the same thing to you, given the chance...ah.

That's sort of what I'm getting at, from where I'm standing it seems like the height of hypocrisy for anyone at Oxford or Cambridge to wibble on about meritocracy.

There are poor smart people, as well as rich thick people.

I grew up on a council estate in East Lancs, near Burnley. I suppose the definition of "latchkey kid" as my mum had to work in the evenings* - she divorced my dad when I was six - and I helped look after my younger brother. My brother has no qualifications. I left school with 8 GCSE grade A's. I didn't revise for a single one of them. I was top or at the top of every class all the way through secondary school. I was doing bits of A-level maths at 13 for fun. I got told off for being able to spell "loquacious" during a spelling test when I was 11 - the teacher accused me of cheating.

On leaving school I... went on the YTS. Noone had a frickin' clue how to help me get a career in either computers (preferably astronomy) or journalism, the two things I wanted to do. At least the careers people knew the answer when some kid tells them they want to be an astronaut. The local college had one day a week for a computer studies course and I had taught myself it all anyway. Getting to university? Never, ever, ever a chance of that.

Every time some bastard says they don't want to help people from disadvantaged backgrounds get into university, I want to shake them warmly by the throat.



* Stop sniggering. Collecting insurance for the Prudential.

No, this isn't really the case at all. I've someone who does admissions sat about 8 feet from me now.

The reason Labour want to get people into university is that there are no jobs left for 16-18 year olds. I'm not advocating kids leave school at 16 and go work down t'pit for 50 years, but the notion of an apprenticeship into a career actually producing something was smashed by Thatcher and continued since. The idea that kids who can't do high level sums but are good at making something got lost somehow.

When I was growing up, less than 20 years ago, university was somewhere smart people went to in order to further the sum knowledge of humanity. To research and create. Now it is just another step on the road to "work". Gordon Brown endlessly bangs on about "working" and "productivity". The education system is designed to stop people being creative and, I would argue, actively punishes it.

Of course, this happens more and more now given that roughly 98% of students are getting 43 A* grades at A Level.

[/curmudgeon]

I went for an interview at Cambridge. They were a lot less interested in my grades than my ability to think on my feet, reason outside what I had been taught, and grasp the concepts of what I knew as opposed to what a book had told me. It's perfectly possible to pass science exams by knowing how to answer exam questions as opposed to understanding the science. The four interviews I had there were designed to check whether I knew stuff because I had read it, or if I knew stuff because I actually understood it.

I aced two of the interviews (IMO), did fairly poorly in one other and totally messed up the maths one entirely as I couldn't really understand the limp-handed professor to any great degree... which in fairness was largely down to the way that I had been taught - had he asked me to differentiate something I could do it, but he asked me about a practical application with finding out localised maxima and minima, and I mostly sat there going, "Huh?".

I actually trust their judgement as much as I trust the exam boards. I don't deny that there will be some nepotism and favouritism, but I don't think it is as rampant as believed. Certainly the tabloid stories about "This person got 5 As from a poor school and didn't get in to Cambridge!" are all bollocks, as the person probably interviewed badly. They might as well complain for not being allowed in due to sex/race/religion/hair colour.

Boo-urns to that, says I.

Not sure I can agree with that, mate - I left school at 18 (ten years ago) and became a builders apprentice, where I showed an uncanny knack for driving JCBs and ended up digging up Her Maj's highways - there were plenty of apprentice places on the sites I worked at for people that actually wanted them, and, more tellingly, bothered to show up to work.


Dear God, does this ever need to be remembered.

That sort of skill has never been appreciated over here. For some unfathomable reason being even a mediocre lawyer or a doctor carries with it more status than being a brilliant engineer. In Germany Engineer is used as a title in the same way that Doctor is over here.

I'm really not, though - see below.



Actually, it sort of should be.

Definitions of meritocracy:

"Rule by those chosen on the principle of merit. The principle of merit is consistent with liberal theory and assumes equality of opportunity and occupational advancement based on achievement rather than ascription."

"Meritocracy is a system of government or other organization based on demonstrated ability (merit) and talent rather than by wealth, family connections (nepotism), class privilege, cronyism, popularity (as in democracy) or other historical determinants of social position and political power. "

A proper Doctor or a person that fixes broken people?

A doctor like you.

Not what they would have been able to demonstrate had they not been held back by their upbringing.

The idea that everyone should go to university is a fucking stupid one. There are some jobs for which it's a bloody good idea - notably in the sciences, politics, law etc where the basis of the job is knowledge. There are a fuck of a lot of other, equally important jobs where learning on the job, or having a vocational apprenticeship, is a much better idea. Why the hell did I go to university to do an IT degree? I would have been much better off learning by doing - problem is, the employers demand that I have the magic bit of paper.

I ent no doccytor.

Hell, if you post a DICTIONARY DEFINITION to back up your point, I'm allowed to then grab it to back up mine.

Unlikely... I went to a fairly decent grammar school. It would be pretty fiendish for them to have done it, and either way, I know a bunch of people from my class who would have known what he was on about. I was always just very lazy and coasted through education on my charm, wit, intelligence and good looks. Well, on one of the four anyway.

Also, MrChris:



That's not really applicable here though, is it? In places where we're specifically talking about those from backgrounds that are not equal, you can never have a true meritocracy.

Given that you cannot 'normalise' the background of an individual, you are left with the rest of the definition - "based on achievement", which favours those with a better 'education'.

When I asked around my uni at the people on my course, we all we given widely different target grades to get on the course. One guy needed to get 3 As, and one guy only needed to get a B and 2Cs (me). The Guy that needed to get 3 As went to a private school (can't remember which one), I went to a crappy inner city school that used to be a very good grammar school, but had fallen on harder times (about the time they oppened their doors to children south of the Thames - there's an argument right there to be made about the poor/thick rich/clever debate*). I put the difference down to how our interviews went, but maybe it was due to expectations (my entry requirements were exactly what I had been predicted to get - I ended up with ABC) based on what type of school I went to. Or maybe they just went with "If he does better than what his teachers think he'll do we'll have him". As far as I know when I left Imperial College (for that is the establishment in question) the entry requirement was 3As across the board.

Malc

*I went to Westminster City School, which is obviously in Westminster (but not to be confused with Westminster School or Westminster Cathedral Choir School) , and would have taken people from all the posh parts of that area (with the not so posh kids going to Pimlico School). When they started talking kids in from south of the river (Balham, Brixton, Clapham, Streatham and so on) the school got progressively worse. Those areas on the whole are much poorer, and much more culturely diverse.

There are probably other factors at play here too, before I joined the school, in my last year at primary I had to take a test, and you were put into 3 groups 1, 2 and 3 based on how well you did in the test, with group 1 being the best (might have been A, B and C). The school would then take 25% 1s, 50% 2s and 25% 3s, no doubt when the school was a Grammar school it would have just taken the 1s. Also we have the period of time when I went to school: 1986 to 1992, the time when schools were selling off playing fields and the like, just to have enough money to pay the teachers.

So, perhaps then it's a cycle. Increase the number of poor kids and drop the teaching standards, which produce children who are both poorer and thicker than before, let that go through the rinse a few times and you get to where we are now.

Oh and one of the big motivating forces of where I am now (having moved from London to Exeter and now Ivybridge) is to make sure my kids go to a better secondary school than I did (My primary school was excellent). I am sure London has some very good schools too, but I just couldn't afford to live in those areas. I felt my education wasn't very good, and that I had a natural "talent" that could have been encouraged so much more than it was (only the Maths department was good at this, but then if you were not good at maths, it left you by the wayside). I don't my Kids to have to say the same thing.

Hmmm, this has gone off track a bit. Sorry.

Then we have nothing remotely approaching a meritocracy - what's the difference between what you describe and a non-meritocracy where the richest can afford the best education and get into the best universities, get the best jobs and repeat the cycle over and over and over?

My problem is that it's entirely mendacious of Mr Charlton to suggest that the lack of poor people at university is in any way a result of a meritocracy in action. It isn't. We don't have a meritocracy at all.

I thought you had a PhD. Huh.

At which point, surely we just shrug and realise that there's nothing we can do to change this big, bad world into one where every single child gets the exact same standard of education?

Nothing? Nothing we can do to even move into that direction?

University admission is meant to be a meritocracy, not LIFE. The idea is that the admission into university is based on who is the best candidate AT THE POINT OF SELECTION. That means that yes, better off people tend to have a better chance, because at the age of 18, they tend to be the better candidates.

Yes, this is a bad thing, but the solution isn't to increase the admission into university of poorer candidates, it's to improve the schooling of the poorer candidates so that they are able to compete for university places on a level playing field.

Of course we can move in that direction, starting with primary schools, but that takes us further and further away from the point that the University Admissions peoples should base their decisions on the merits of the candidate AS THEY ARE RIGHT NOW, and not on their background.

I wasn't suggesting universities should necessarily be doing anything. The point was that Charlton was wrong to suggest that the current set-up is a meritocracy in action and therefore nothing needed to be done at all. It isn't and it does.

Given my experience of both Manchester Uni (costing zillions of pounds and supposedly 'good') and the Open University, I can confirm the OU kicks the balls out of any kind of teaching I ever got at 'proper' uni. The material is bespoke - not just lecture notes but proper textbooks, written by the OU themselves. On the basis of this experience I'd seriously consider employing someone with a decent OU degree over someone from a classical Uni.

From the point of view of the University, it is as close to a meritocracy as they can possibly achieve, and it is not their place to fix it. So if he's saying that about the Universities, I'd agree with him.

If he's saying it about all education and life in general, then it's wrong, but not something easy to fix.

Hurrah!

Now, go and do your ECDL test. What? You're too busy teaching the public how to ue computers and the internet because none of the people with ECDL in the building know what to say to them, or, for instance, that deleting desktop icons does not "delete the internet"? You're fired.

Or something.

No.

But I get that a lot.

I reckon the thing is this: IQ may not be hereditary but inbreeding does leave you with a somewhat dim bunch a couple of generations down the line. Now, where is the inbreeding in the UK? Amongst the very rich, who don't socialise with anyone else, and the very poor, who never fuck anyone who doesn't live on their estate (generalisations, but bear with me). The rich inbreds can afford to go where they want and don't need to be that bright, while the poor ones can't buy their way into university and probably wouldn't ever think to go in the first place, as their environment doesn't encurage them to think that way. I used to have a job getting the lads form the biggest council estate in europe (as was) into employment, training and education. There's been about two to three generations (which come around quick in Hull) of dole families on there since the fishing industry curled up its toes, and they've no concept of doing anything different, to the point where they consider anyone and anything not from round their way to be 'gay and shit yeah'. There are of course a good many exceptions to this rule, but they'll find a way forward because they are smart cookies, and have the strength of character to overcome adversity.

So I tenatively subscribe, with the caveat that low iqs are not the sole preserve of the impoverished, rather the extremes of the wealth/class scale are rpone to inbred stupidity and only one end finds that stops them getting into a university they don't want to go to anyway because it it full of twats who are gay and shit yeah.

My reckoning might be way off though, numbers wise. But this is certainly what I've lived to see and I trust that as much as any report someone has paid to make happen.