The University of Cambridge has been accused of being a “bit racist” after it was revealed that it had initially blocked working-class white students from a post-graduate programme designed for students from underrepresented groups.
A post-graduate “participation project” initially barred white students from applying. The programme would offer free accomodation on campus for six weeks, as well as an intern’s wage for 35 hours per week while the students trained in research skills.
The scheme would culminate with students writing a 4,000-word essay in the hopes of providing them with “the confidence and skills to apply for postgraduate study and other research careers”.
According to a report from The Telegraph, lecturers at the university were told: “The programme will be advertised for second or third-year UG [undergraduate] students from Black, British Black, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or British-Pakistani, British Bangladeshi students studying at traditional research-intensive universities, who are planning to continue their studies in 2024.”
After being contacted by the newspaper as to why working-class white students were not included for consideration, despite significant under-representation at the elite university, the school ultimately reversed course, saying that it will now be “open to a wider group defined by socio-economic factors instead, including white working-class.”
Nevertheless, the attempt at excluding the white working class has been seen as revealing the left-wing biases of the university.
Professor David Abulafia of Gonville and Caius College said: “It’s good that the programme has been recalibrated so that the criterion is disadvantage rather than race. The racial criterion seemed to assume non-white students are automatically disadvantaged. Isn’t that a little bit racist?”
A Cambridge lecturer in divinity, Dr James Orr, added that, while the idea was excellent, “this kind of opportunity should surely be available to everyone on the basis of merit and need, not ethnic background. Undergraduates from ethnic minorities do not need a helping hand from the university to progress to graduate research. If it is the case that the decision has been reversed, the administration should be commended for doing the right thing.”
According to data published by The Telegraph, in 2021, white students of all backgrounds represented the most applications for postgraduate courses at Cambridge, at 38.9 per cent, followed by Chinese students at 23.1 per cent and Indian students at 8.8 per cent.
However, when looking at who is actually offered places in such programmes, mixed-race Caribbean students led the way with 75 per cent of offers, followed by Indians at 61.7 per cent, with white students in third place at 61.4 per cent.
Despite often being accused of benefiting from so-called “white privilege”, the Department for Education revealed last year that, for the first time in recorded history, white students lagged behind all other major ethnic groups in the country in terms of admissions into the United Kingdom’s top universities.
The DoE found that just 10.5 per cent of white students entered top universities last year, compared to 10.7 per cent of black students, 13.4 per cent of mixed-race students, 15.6 per cent of Asian students, and 40.7 per cent of Chinese students — ‘Asian’ being separated from ‘Chinese’ because the term typically refers to people of South Asian rather than Far Eastern heritage in British parlance.
The decline has been most apparent among working-class white males, only 13 per cent of whom are now entering university — the lowest percentage of any demographic group.
The number of white males entering into higher education has declined by ten per cent since just 2014, as the number of Asian males jumped by 26 per cent and the number of Asian women increased by 39 per cent.