Socioeconomic status and elite university access: What’s fair?
An Oxford University college principal speaks; but is it nonsense?
A college principal at Oxford University, Helen Mountfield of Mansfield College, wants her university’s intake to reflect the fact that 90-odd percent of people are educated in the state sector. She says:
“I believe academic aptitude and intellectual interest are widely spread in society, and so I would expect universities that are fairly identifying talent to end up with about 90–95 per cent of their home students being state school educated pupils, because that is broadly reflective of where students are educated.”
Actually, there isn’t really much disagreement amongst psychologists that this is not true. Better off pupils score better in IQ tests and these in turn are fairly good predictors of who performs on average better in state exams then at university.
Whether this social difference is due entirely to the effects of variable levels of resources, or whether genetics plays a part, at one level makes no difference. The simple fact is that if IQ tests have predictive validity, which they do, and if state examinations do their job, which they largely do, then because they have on average higher IQs better off pupils will generally do better at examinations.
Recent extensive research at Kings College, London, suggests that in the UK at least pupils’ grades aren’t really affected by the kind of school they go to. The message here is that if you send your child to a private school to get them higher grades then you’re probably wasting your money.
If true, this means that for Oxford University to get its intake to reflect the private/state divide, then, it will need to discriminate not only against private schools, but also against those with higher IQs. This can only lower standards; there seems no escaping the logic.
Some people accept that there is a social IQ differential, but says it’s all a function of social inequality. This doesn’t solve Oxford’s (and other elite universities’) problem, though. It simply confirms that Helen Mountfield is wrong about the distribution of intellecutal capability while requiring us to accept that change can only come very slowly, likely over generations.
Finally, the idea that being more intellectually capable is not in any respect a function of genetics seems to verge on science denial. Pretty much every animal trait is a function of the interaction of nature and nurture. An unevidenced denial that this is true in the case of intellectual capability, in the face of plenty of evidence to the contrary, seems more a matter of dogma and politics than anything else.
If genetics is involved, then, we might say that people hardly somehow deserve success in life just for the luck of being born with a high-ish IQ. Nevertheless, it would seem a weird way to want to run an elite university.
Maybe Helen Mountfield’s plan is for Oxford not to be elite at all? But if so, you have to wonder why she went to the trouble of attending Oxford, then choosing to be a college principal there. Just to knock it down to size?
Here’s an irony, though. Mountfield went to comprehensive school. Her broad narrative, then, is that her success alongside privately educated folk is all the greater for overcoming those odds. But maybe if she spoke to her colleagues in the psychology department (she’s a lawyer and historian), she’d find that she didn’t overcome odds at all; that she simply did well because she has a superior IQ and the school she attended made little or no difference?
Dang, that would shoot two foxes at once. First, the idea that IQ is evenly spread and genetics plays no role; second, the personal narrative of success against the odds…….
