Is Oxford University Racist?

That’s the question asked by David Lammy and the Guardian today. According to the paper 21 Oxford and Cambridge colleges made no offers to black, British students last year. At Oxford just one student of self-described “Black Caribbean” background won a place. Only 35 applied. The headline figures are pretty terrible and enough to give anyone pause.

But they are only headline figures. Virtual Economics argues that they don’t tell the full story, not least because the sample sizes are often so small. He has a point: if just 35 Black Caribbean students applied to Oxford last year that’s not much more than one per college. I’m not sure this is a large enough sample from which to draw too-firm conclusions. It’s also true that, as Oxford points out, 44% of ethnic minority students applied to Oxford’s most over-subscribed courses. 28.8% of black applicants wanted to read medicine, for instance, and only 12% of all medicine applicants were successful.