University of Oxford accused of 'social apartheid' due to lack of black students

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The University of Oxford has been accused of “social apartheid” recently, due to the exposed fact that nearly one in three Oxford colleges failed to admit a single African British A-level student in 2015.

According to the data, the Guardian showed in the report on Thursday, 10 out of 32 Oxford colleges did not provide a place to a black British student with A-levels in 2015, while Oriel College made just one offer to a black British A-level student in the past six years. It was said this was the first time that the university had released such figures since 2010.

In 2016, David Lammy, the former Minister for Higher Education in the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills of the United Kingdom, first requested the ethnicity data from Oxford and Cambridge. While Cambridge provided the figures immediately, Oxford finally released part of its data on Thursday.

As partial data of the two universities revealed, only 1.5 percent of the offers went to African British candidates among admitted UK A-level students, and only three Oxford colleges, as well as six Cambridge colleges, annually recruited at least one black British A-level student between 2010 and 2015. Lammy said it was “social apartheid” and “utterly unrepresentative of life in modern Britain.”

According to the Guardian, ‍ten out of 32 Oxford colleges did not provide a place to an African British student with A-levels in 2015. /Photo via The University of Oxford

Although the new data represented an improvement compared with the one in 2010, Oxford’s 21 colleges had not offered a single place to African British students in 2009, and the same situation happened in Merton College for five years. It still suggested that elite colleges are against admitting black British students.

A spokesman of Oxford said students of ethnic minority backgrounds, including Asian British students, made up 15.9 percent of its 2016 UK undergraduate intake, higher than the figure of 14.5 percent in 2015 and more than doubled since 2010.

While a spokesperson for Cambridge said that its admission decisions were solely made on academic considerations, the university spent five million British pounds a year on access measures. “We assess the achievements of these students in their full context to ensure that students with great academic potential are identified,” the spokesperson said.