You Are Where You Hire From
How structural racism happens without us realising it
Let’s say you’re in charge of hiring for your company. In the UK, you could do a lot worse than focus your graduate recruitment program on the Oxbridge universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Many employers do indeed invest more effort into hiring from the top universities. And why shouldn’t they?
Well, the trouble is that focusing on so-called top-tier universities harms your ability to hire a diverse workforce.
Cambridge recently celebrated admitting 91 Black students (a ~50% year-on-year increase), taking the total to 200 out of about 20,000 undergraduates. Oxford’s recent admission also had about the same proportion (roughly 3% of their intake) of Black people in a single intake. Compare this against national demographics: 13% of the UK population is Black.
In 2018, a report showed that Oxbridge universities admitted more students from eight schools than all the rest combined. When hiring, employers give disproportionate weighting to students coming from those universities. The reasoning is that students from top-tier universities are more likely to succeed. But your ability to get into top universities is limited by where you attend school, which, in turn, is limited by which socioeconomic and racial group you belong to.
