Attacking our top universities for being elitist solves absolutely nothing

I do not usually speak or write about my days as a student at Cambridge university. For one thing, it all feels like a lifetime ago.

For another, I’m not likely to be the one who brings it up in conversation. People’s reactions to it make me feel awkward.

But there is a third reason: attendance at a top university is, perversely, becoming an increasingly maligned achievement, with the fine universities of Oxford and Cambridge, together with London’s finest universities and a handful of other Russell Group names frequently being blasted for elitism. Oxbridge gets it worst of all.

Here is the latest example, but this story from BBC News yesterday may well have been an almost complete copy and paste job from a whole raft of similar stories before.

They take a similar tone. First the grievance: this time it’s back to the doom merchants’ favourite of advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds. This time the focus is on supposedly affluent and less affluent regions, in a bid to give this whinging tripe a varnish of newness to coat the same old gripe. Statistics are given, with outraged comment.

Then comes the inevitable rallying cry: universities must do more! Perhaps they should increase places, no matter the financial implications, implications for the quality and standard of teaching or infrastructural challenges.

Otherwise, they should socially engineer a different social make-up of their intake, because, apparently, discrimination on grounds other than ability is fine to pass on to international students or the hard-working white young man from London who happens to have a nice postcode and a degree-educated lawyer and doctor for his mum and dad.

The outreach work of these universities is never acknowledged. The perspective of students who don’t fit the stereotype is never sought. Nor is it ever suggested that constantly telling those whose face doesn’t fit that the door is already slammed shut, probably puts a great many bright and capable students off applying before the universities even have a chance to meet them.

I’m thoroughly sick and tired of seeing my university and others constantly being accused of unfairness and elitism. I’m sick of the lazy reporting of these statistics as though they present anything more than a very partial picture.

Why? Because I went through it, and because I have a truthful, authentic and different story to tell. If I’m going to change anything, maybe I need to start telling it. Yes, I do want to change things because no, it wasn’t elitist at all.

You could say that I was an exception. I may herald from the south east of England, but I had a working-class background, a state education and a significant disability that placed huge barriers to accessing education. We could stop here by saying I broke the mould, pat me on the back and then write the next story on the evils of elitism.

I see it rather differently. The culture didn’t shock me. Neither did it shock my family, who visited me regularly and continued to provide me the same practical and emotional support that has made me the person I am today.

The opening lines of the welcome pack I was given (which the university had ensured was brailed) read: “I’m at Cambridge! Surely there’s been a mistake?” The gist of the answer was “No, we know what we’re doing.”

How could they not! When I applied, I threw away every letter that offered me a coaching session for £300 and a practice interview for a further £200. Expecting nothing, I turned up for an experience, armed only with the words of belief from those who loved me and my zest for knowledge and debate, so devotedly nurtured by my wonderful teachers.

It does take a healthy slice of luck no matter your talent: the ratios of applicants to placements make that inevitable. But I was going to be me, and see where it got me. To my complete surprise, a few months later I found out that this experience would continue for the next 3 years of my life.

As we left Cambridge that day, my dad commented that it felt like they were interested in where you were going, not where you had come from. Those 3 years would prove the correctness of my old man’s wise gut feeling.

Of course, it was nuts in many ways. The punting; the lectures and talks by extraordinary people that all formed a normal morning’s work; the port and cheese parties (many thrown by flamboyant chaplains or study directors who one could never imagine existing outside “the bubble”); the fascinating conversations over dinners formal and informal; the weird rule that only senior members could walk on the lawn as though their golden boots didn’t make scuffs like the rest of us paupers’; even the robing up for a graduation that was entirely in Latin and involved a few of us at a time walking forward whilst holding someone’s finger as he apparently assured someone else that we were scholarly and of good moral character.

But it was fun. It was an adventure. IT didn’t matter who we were, we’d all been thrown into this bizarre and surreal world together. There was kindness – if the purpose of this piece were my personal thank yous, it would be a long one indeed. There was interest in each other. There was the feeling of our way together. There was willing each other on. There was hardship and tough times for all of us; thrilling highs and crushing lows were a part of life in the bubble. There was the chance to learn and to grow as people, no matter our starting point.

I would summarise it simply: I broke no moulds because, no matter what obstacles I might have faced through no-one’s fault at all, I was completely accepted. I was surrounded by people that impressed and inspired me, but who crucially were also just like me.

I am, truly, nothing special. The point is, I never had to be. I should have found the door shut and felt like an outsider, but I didn’t.

If these statistics speak of anything, it isn’t of elitist universities but a wellspring of doubt and lack of self-belief. The top universities don’t hold the key to changing that which is why, as the story makes clear, it is hardly changing.

We all hold that key. If we don’t tell our stories, reach out to the underrepresented groups and show them the tough love to tell them that they can make their face fit with grit and determination, things will not get better, or we will engineer the principle of reward based on merit out of our best institutions.

It isn’t just these news stories that tell disadvantaged young people a self-defeating, disempowering story. A couple of years ago I sat quietly waiting for a training course to start, next to a couple of colleagues who quickly entered a lively discussion about the entitled attitude of Oxbridge people.

Maybe they forgot about my background, forgot I was there or didn’t think I or anyone else present would see themselves in their comments. They certainly meant no unkindness to me. But that’s how prejudice works.

What if everyone that cheered me on, bolstered by a feeling in their gut that I just might do it, had told me a different story? What if they had absorbed the message and tried to put me off to avoid disappointment?

I hope it will be some time before I again write about a chapter of my life that I keep very private, but I think it takes the privilege of having done it against the odds, first to encourage others not to be told that they can’t, and second to say that enough is enough!

Attacking our top universities for being elitist solves absolutely nothing!