Today's Sutton Trust report showing 100 schools, mainly private, account for nearly a third of UK entrants to Oxbridge has put hard numbers on the pervasive suspicion that the UK's top universities are reinforcing class privilege rather than breaking it down.
I don't think any university, including Oxford or Cambridge, needs telling by the government to try and widen their intake - most academics would agree in principle, however elitist they are, when it comes to maintaining academic standards. But they seem to indulge in more hand-wringing and nice-sounding outreach programmes than practical action.
So what's to be done? Sir Peter Lampl, founder of the trust which aims to broaden access to "top" universities, not just Oxbridge, pin-pointed low aspirations. He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning that 80% of teachers at comprehensives said their pupils "would not fit in" at Oxford or Cambridge.
He also blamed the current system under which students have to apply before they know their A-level results which he believes favours schools where there is a tradition of sending pupils to Oxbridge. "If you're at a school where nobody goes that's a problem because you don't know whether you're going to be good enough."
Sir Peter pointed out that students from the schools highlighted in the report - most of them independent - acquire a knowledge of the subject wider than the A-level syllabus and have more outside activities. They also have the social skills to express themselves which is important when it comes to interviews - crucial when it comes to medicine as well as Oxbridge.
Comments on our blog yesterday would back up his views. One poster said: "As someone from a state school who went to Oxford on a full grant and no money to influence anyone, I must admit to spending most of my first year waiting to hear that there had been an admission error committed: at any moment I was to be asked to relinquish my place."
One student from an FE college felt he flunked the admission interview - "I'd never really spoken to academics before. What interviewers seem to forget is that state school applicants (I was from a FE college) don't necessarily come from classrooms where face-to-face discussion is the norm. Being one of 1-2 A grade students in any of my classes, keeping your mouth shut while the teacher explains the basics to the C-D grade people is the common course."
Will the Sutton Trust's report and other research prompt action from top universities - if only to justify raising the £3,000 cap on tuition fees in a couple of years' time? Oxford, for instance really needs to explain why candidates from independent schools make 34.1 of applications but secured 43.4% of acceptances as the university reported in 2006.
We might question the Sutton Trust's rather arbitrary definition of a top 13 institutions - Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Imperial College, London School of Economics, Nottingham, Oxford, St Andrews, University College London, Warwick and York. Why not Manchester or Newcastle, for instance? But the trust has raised an important point.
Perhaps it's time for the government's widening access funds to go to the universities that do actually take students from poor backgrounds and underperforming schools instead of the ones that just talk about it?
