UK Universities: Tolerating Diversity Statistics

A-levels 2015 black British students failed to be admitted to three colleges, and the Labour MP attacks university for it. The data shows that Oriel College offered only one place to a black British A-level in 2010. David Lammy, the former education minister, initially requested ethnicity data from Oxford and Cambridge in 2016, and the figures revealed that 1.5% of all offers from the two universities to UK A-level students went to black British applicants.

Lammy said that “This is social apartheid and it is utterly unrepresentative of life in modern Britain,”

Between 2010 and 2015, only three Oxford colleges and six Cambridge colleges made at least one offer of an undergraduate spot to a black British A-level student in each of the six years.

The higher education minister, Jo Johnson, gave support to Lammy's campaign on admissions, as he wrote: “Oxford must clearly do more to open up to under-represented groups.”

In response, an Oxford spokesman said that refining the issue would be “a long journey that requires huge, joined-up effort across society – including from leading universities like Oxford – to address serious inequalities”.

Furthermore, Cambridge released data showing that in 2016 it admitted 39 undergraduate black British students, and the number of black British students it admitted annually since 2016 has increased by 30%.

In a nutshell, UK universities need to face the global awareness of biases towards specified ethnic groups and initiate offering credible statistics of the admissions they accept and the offers they give to both international and local students belonging to diverse ethnic groups.