Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Owen Eastman
As an academic institution, Oxford University holds a weighty place in pop culture that few other colleges enjoy. Memorialized as “that sweet city with her dreaming spires,” as poet Matthew Arnold put it in his 1865 poem Thyrsis, countless movies, books, and plays in search of a medieval-tinged backdrop have been set on the campus. The university’s history and grand architecture place the area in the unusual role of “academia as tourism” – 9.1 million tourists visited the city in 2008, and when I visited the city for my summer studies in July, the streets were packed shoulder-to-shoulder in a way that mimicked New York City rush hour. For many visiting scholars, the place at first seems like an academic utopia. Beyond the canon of public perception, however, lies a much murkier crossroads of wealth, social function, and class dynamics, all of which make the higher echelons of English education difficult to comprehensively analyze.
Though a formal university was not constructed at Oxford until 1249, evidence of higher education in the city dates all the way back to 1096. This near-millennium of continuous teaching and research has given Oxford ample time to accrue interest on their landholdings and wealth. Indeed, many of the forty-odd constituent colleges that make up the university have extremely generous budgets, in absolute terms and even more so per-capita. Magdalen College, for instance, holds an endowment of £700 million for just under 600 students per year — divided amongst students, that endowment would rank among the wealthiest colleges in the rest of the world, yet this figure is around the median for colleges at Oxford. The university, furthermore, has educated thirty-one UK Prime Ministers, as well as countless judges, civil servants, and business leaders, all of which serve to reinforce the association between Oxford and the upper echelons of society.
Oxford’s immense wealth and record of producing the elites of England is especially salient given that British culture places a higher emphasis on class than most other European nations. Historian David Cannadine, in his book The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain, refers to the country as “class-bound and class-obsessed,” in that everything from accent to lifestyle is seen as a signal for one’s social standing. The traditional British accent, for instance, that Americans would stereotypically refer to as “posh” is known as “Received Pronunciation,” and is associated with the upper-class citizens of southern England. More northern, regional accents, in contrast, tend to signify working-class tendencies, although this is changing as a result of more equitable education opportunities. Preferences for certain art styles, sports, foods, clothing, and leisure also traditionally serve as markers of class standing, although such distinctions are becoming increasingly blurred in the modern era. The main left-wing party in UK politics, Labour, was formed a hundred years ago off of class-based considerations. Even British entertainment is seen through this lens: “You can tell a lot about a country’s neuroses by what’s on its television sets,” Hadley Freeman argues in an article for The Guardian, before going on to argue that Britain’s programming is “completely steeped in class,” citing examples of “laughing at poor people on Benefits Street to laughing at rich people in You Can’t Get the Staff.”
Where did all these class distinctions come from? And what historical trends serve as the origins of the formation of Britain as we know it today? To answer that, we first must go back to the feudal system, brought by William the Conqueror during the Norman Invasion in 1066, which established a distinction between landholders and peasants, and the rights and privileges that they were afforded. Some economic historians next point to the English acts of enclosure during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, which deprived peasant farmers of lands traditionally held by the community and gave more inheritable property rights to the gentry (which created more generational wealth). Some of this social stratification may also stem from the inequality-exacerbating characteristics of industrialization, a process which Britain was the first in the world to undergo. Finally, national educational policy extended the gulf between classes: until 1826, royal decree held that no universities besides Oxford and Cambridge would be instituted in England. This capped the supply of college-educated employees and, in practice, limited admission, and hence competition, for civil service positions to mostly those educated at elite private schools.
Oxford, in its earliest stages, may have been one of the most reliable mechanisms of class mobility: though people at the absolute bottom of the social order were often illiterate and thus naturally barred from academic life, a reasonably educated son of a minor landholder could implant himself into the royal or ecclesiastical order by attending Oxford and becoming a civil servant in the ever-expanding English bureaucracy. As the aforementioned drivers of inequality set themselves in society, Oxford increasingly became a bastion of the upper class. From the 17th century to the mid-20th century, many students at Oxford came from “public schools,” a confusing term to American expectations: in the UK, these schools charge tuition and would be akin to elite private high schools in the United States. Contrast this with the state of the working-class, in which only 13% of children in the 1930s attended school past age thirteen. Several iterations of Labour Party reform in the subsequent decades provided universal public education, and today about 90% of all British students today attend “comprehensive schools,” a concept similar to America’s public high schools. These schools typically test significantly below public schools in the British national exams, yet serve as a marked improvement from the fragmented education system the past century had to offer.
Bringing this framework into the contemporary era, the past fifty years of the development of the internet, burgeoning bureaucracies, and globalization has led to an increase in educated human capital in nearly every sector of labor, both in Britain and the rest of the world. Supplementing this growth, the percentage of youth attending college in the UK has risen significantly from only 5% in 1960 to 40% in the present day. More and more students entering this sphere necessarily implies more conversations about the intersection of class and education, and working-class students have increasingly highlighted the disparities that Oxford possesses. The curricula at fee-paying schools often place a heavy emphasis on classical forms of education, with most students at these schools learning Latin or Greek. These expectations are often adopted by fields where knowledge of such languages may not even be necessary, disproportionately harming students who did not get these same opportunities: “I wasn’t reading Cicero in my cot as an infant,” Oxford student Lucy Heywood said in an op-ed for The Oxford Blue-- “That doesn’t make me any less worthy of my place here.”
Though steps are being taken to alleviate this gap, advocates feel that the university is not doing enough. Some colleges within Oxford have introduced “class liberation officers” to mixed result: some applaud the effort as the first step in a larger dialogue, while others ridicule it as a performative gesture that lacks substantive change. The university has engaged in outreach efforts to encourage underrepresented groups, but it will take some time for Oxford’s reputation to fully transform: “Students from working-class backgrounds are often discouraged from applying to Oxbridge [a colloquial term for Oxford and Cambridge],” another 2022 op-ed in Oxford’s student newspaper claimed. “It’s out of reach; it’s a waste of money; it’s an elitist institution full of posh people who will ridicule and bully you until you pack up your things and get the first train home.”
Oxford seems to be trending towards class parity— two-thirds of their incoming 2024 cohort now hail from state-run schools— but it remains to be seen which side of the debate Oxford will ultimately land on. So long as the university retains its reputation for excellence and prestige, factors of scarcity will limit just how equitable the college can be: Last September, Times Higher Education’s 2024 World University rankings placed Oxford at the top of the list for the fifth consecutive year. Regardless of the outcome, Oxford’s architecture and scholasticism will continue to inspire each new generation, as it has for centuries— but exactly what lens they will view the institution through is another matter entirely.