How Britain’s private schools lost their grip on Oxbridge
“Five years ago, my son would have got a place at Oxford. But now the bar has shifted and he didn’t,” says my friend, a City of London executive who has put several children through elite private schools in Britain. “I think he got short-changed.”
I’ve been hearing this more and more from fellow parents with kids at top day and boarding schools in recent years. Some of it sounds like whining: most of us like to think the best of our progeny. But my friend has a point. After years of hand-wringing about unequal access to elite higher education, admissions standards are finally shifting.