Why is going to Oxford being held against me?

Should going to Oxford be held against you? In my experience, some employers think it should. A month before the first lockdown of 2020, I attended an interview with a prestigious company in London. With nearly 1000 applicants for each place on their internship scheme, the stakes were high; making it to the interview may have been a success in itself, but now it was time to impress the recruiters in person.

After a frantic journey on the underground, I arrived at the interview location. Having spent the previous few days researching the interview process, I expected an hour of rigorous intellectual interrogation, followed by a brief case study assessment.

What I didn’t expect, however, was that in the first five minutes I would be told the odds were stacked against me. Despite my low-income background, my status as a student at Oxford meant my chances of success were diminished; the interviewers informed me they had quotas to fill, and to increase their social mobility credentials they had been urged to recruit students from ‘other’ universities.