How Oxbridge PhDs became the preserve of the super-rich

Oxford and Cambridge have gone to great lengths over the last few years to increase the number of admissions of state-school educated students at undergraduate level – to varying degrees of success. As Robin Harman reported in Spectator Life recently, there’s still a worrying disparity between the number of offers made to disadvantaged pupils and the take-up of those offers, even though the number of offers made has risen steadily.

Yet the most striking inequity in Oxbridge admissions occurs at postgraduate level – something that is barely mentioned in media or political debates around higher education, possibly because the privileged students who make up a disproportionate number of Oxbridge postgraduates are mostly not from the ranks of the British middle-class, but rather from those of the international rich.

Around 64 per cent of post-grads at Oxford are international students, yet fewer than half of all postgrads have funding. This is particularly apparent at Masters level, where funding is scarcer than PhD and the fees often eye-watering: the cheapest post-graduate course at Oxford costs £7,730, while an MSc in financial economics costs £42,890.