And man are they pissed:
Headmasters are blaming a shortage of university places caused by funding cuts, combined with the effect of Labour's "social engineering" drive that prioritises bright children from under-performing comprehensives.Two out of three top independent schools approached by The Daily Telegraph said teenagers were finding it harder to get into higher education this year compared with 12 months ago.
From the Telegraph.
I don't see the link between the thread title and the chosen quote.
Actually, income and performance on standardized test scores at the high school level have a very high degree of correlation, so cutting spots at the university level will primarily hurt those students at the bottom of the student-income distribution.
ETA: Reading the article, this squeeze is not happening because of a lower number of spots, but because schools are targetting the top students from bad schools, who won't have straight A's on standardized tests but may have more potential.
The thread title is completely misleading. It's not a free ride - it's simply a change in admissions criteria combined with an increased number of applicants.
Until now, the UK system was pretty much based entirely on the marks the students obtained on their school exams (in that sense it's very much like the Canadian system - at most Canadian universities it's marks, marks, and marks that determine your acceptance - in the US the schools tend to look at a lot of other things including extra-curricular activities and, at many schools if you make the short list, it culminates in an interview).
And it will hurt those "rich kids" from the private school systems a lot less than you might think. The UK admissions system is quite different from the one we're used to in either Canada or the US. Because of the peculiar way the UK admissions system worked there will be numerous students who have been accepted at their "safety schools" (for the record, in this context the "safety schools" included Harvard, Princeton, and so forth) but who are still waiting for the nod from their UK schools - they wouldn't get the answer there until relatively late after final marks became available. Those students that didn't make it into their first choice schools get relegated to a pool and effectively get another kick at the can elsewhere - it's hardly the end of the world. [And you'd be surprised how many Brits I went through school with that didn't have the marks to get into Oxford or Cambridge so they came to Canada with the intention of continuing grad schools at one of those two UK institutions.]
My cousin had the marks to get into Cambridge. Her father was a coal miner and mother worked all kinds of odd jobs. They still needed the scholarship money though, because they couldn't afford for her to go otherwise. She's been teaching math and physics at a university for a few years now. She sounds like a toffey nose when speaking but votes Labour.
Fidel, you're right - going to school in the UK isn't cheap (home school fees are currently about £4,000) which is roughly in line with Canadian university tuitions.
[US tuitions are generally astronomical in comparison - I had dinner with some American friends and they were floored when I told them how little my daughter's tuition was in Canada - they're paying literally ten times as much.]
They're also not paying the high interest on student loans that Canadian kids do. I think when they created the Millenium Fund, they were thinking that's about how long it would take Canadians to pay off their student loans.
My cousin had the marks to get into Cambridge. Her father was a coal miner and mother worked all kinds of odd jobs. They still needed the scholarship money though, because they couldn't afford for her to go otherwise. She's been teaching math and physics at a university for a few years now.
You mean "maths," huh?
We called it "maths" when we were kids. I think "math" is Amerkin and it took over... like crackers over biscuits, and jelly over jam, and grades over marks, and "second grade" over "Grade 2", etc. Oh my word.
Boy, your anti-Americanism really shines through, dosen't it?
