Making up scandals about Oxbridge admissions is always a fun thing for newspapers to do. The latest one is even more non-story-ish than normal: apparently, Oxford’s postgrad admission guidelines used to suggest that candidates with degrees from good universities should be favoured above candidates from ‘weak’ universities.
The fact that a rigorous academic course favours people with a rigorous academic track record is not shocking. Indeed, if Oxford were *not* to take the candidate’s previous university into account, that would be staggeringly remiss of it.
I assume the problem here is that the media world features far too many people with ‘degrees’ from ‘universities’ such as Luton and Middlesex (and shoulder-mounted chip shops to match)…
Oh I dunno … there are lots of numpty degrees from decent-name universities out there if you know where to look. For example, Oxford University itself doesn’t really offer a single economics undergraduate degree that would really act as a guarantee that you could hack a really top-quality postgraduate program.
and the post graduate program would be right to take that into account. duh.