Private school pupils turn to universities overseas because of rejection by Oxbridge, research says

Wednesday 9 December 2009

Dr Brooks interviewed 31 people in their late teens and early twenties who were either considering studying as undergraduates abroad or who had recently completed a first degree abroad. Most came from a privileged background and 19 had attended private school.

Many of those privately-educated said that they would have preferred to study at Oxford or Cambridge, but after rejection were applying to or had studied at universities abroad, her paper in today’s [December 9] Sociology journal, published by the British Sociological Association and SAGE.

This was not because they wanted the experience of living abroad but because they needed an equally prestigious alternative to Oxbridge. They often had offers from top UK universities such as Durham or Bristol, but did not see these universities as impressive enough.

Dr Brooks, Reader in Social Policy in Surrey’s Department of Political, International and Policy Studies, found that for most undergraduates interviewed 'overseas education was seen to offer an opportunity to gain access to an elite university that had been closed off in the UK and, thus, a second chance at what they perceived to be ‘success’.

“Many of these young people had been educated at private schools within the UK where almost all students progressed to high status universities and where they, themselves, had come to believe that only an ‘Oxbridge’ education was good enough for them.

“Most respondents had been keenly award of status differentials and had considered only those institutions with an extremely good reputation.

“For the majority of respondents in our study, enrolling at an overseas university was not seen as a better option than remaining within the UK, but as a means of compensating for perceived failure within the domestic system.”

The universities they had studied at, or wanted to study at, were almost all in the US and Canada. This accorded with recent statistics which showed that fewer British students were applying to Europe, perhaps because of declining foreign language skills among pupils.

Dr Brooks’ paper, ‘A Second Chance at “Success”: UK students and global circuits of higher education’, notes that privately-educated pupils and students had advantages because their parents could afford to pay their tuition fees, living expenses and travel, and they sometimes had family connections abroad. American universities sent recruiters over to British private schools to give talks about applying to them.

Dr Brooks said her findings supported the idea that social classes in Britain tend to go to different types of universities: those who were privately educated to Oxbridge or elite institutions abroad, the state-educated middle-class to redbrick universities and the working-class to the former polytechnics.

One sixth-former in a private school who had failed to get straight A grades in her A levels told Dr Brooks: “Everyone always assumes that you’re going to apply to Oxbridge, they talk about which colleges you are applying to. I didn’t really think of applying to America until after my gap year, sort of because of my grades.”

Dr Brooks said there was evidence that the number of British students studying for degrees abroad was increasing.

Although small, the sample Dr Brooks interviewed was diverse in terms of men and women and people from ethnic minorities. She also interviewed 54 young people who were applying for, or had just completed, a postgraduate degree and found that their motivation was different as they were more interested in how good was the department they were applying to, or because they could get funding for this abroad but not in Britain.

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