Student review [#28621] for Economics and Management
at University of Oxford

Yes. I hated it. Although academically it wasn’t hard for me to do well, I was constantly depressed because I couldn’t feel I fit in the local partying culture and never understood the “Oxford is so darn great and magical” mentality. Looking back it opened doors for me as well as closed some others. As a foreign student it was expensive, that it forced me to think I must take a high-paying job soon just to earn the money’s worth, rather than pursuing my passions. The only people who I know were totally happy about going to Oxford are those who are conventially successful, finding high-paying and high-status jobs quite quickly in their chosen paths. If you try to do anything else, people try very hard to make you feel like a failure.

I am sure if you ask 100 people you will get a hundred different opinions. But for what it is worth, I frequently wonder if they do more harm than good.

The trouble with having not one but two global elite universities in your country is that they suck all of the oxygen out of the room. Britain is stuffed full of excellent universities, but few people know or care about them because they are so obsessed with the Oxbridge duopoly. In the US lots of people have different ‘dream schools’. In the UK, in the vast majority of cases, the dream school tends to be one of those two.

It also creates problems for the universities themselves. My family have a fairly long association with Oxford over the years, and I can’t tell you how many times people tell me about Oxford as a bastion of privilege, full of upper class twits. Now, attending Oxford is a privilege but not a very bastion like one. Upper class twits are happily a relative rarity. Like most British universities, Oxford is pretty hard left politically, and inverse-snobbery is a far bigger problem than the conventional variety. But the perception is very hard to shift.

The universities therefore become a lightning rod both for ambition and endeavour, and also for criticism: both on a scale that is entirely out of proportion with reality. Gordon Brown (a rare British PM who went to a university other than Oxford) loathed Oxbridge. He would obsess over it as a hive of class privilege of discrimination which had to be dealt with. But for some reason he just couldn’t give two monkeys about what went on at Imperial, or UCL, or Durham, or Edinburgh or a host of other excellent universities. To him, they didn’t matter. What mattered – all that mattered – was what happened at Oxbridge.

It just isn’t healthy

Pedro …