Most 'Oxbridge' students are privately educated. One state school bucks this trend in a big way

This is a lot less remarkable than it seems.  Admission to the school is highly selective. The students are bright to begin with.  It is not an elite school socially but it is an elite school intellectually.  It has no lessons for mainstream government schools

Elite UK universities Oxford and Cambridge are renowned for stringent admissions policies and student populations weighted in favor of private schools, but one state school has had remarkable success in bucking that trend.

Brampton Manor Academy has revealed that 41 of its students have received offers to study at Oxford or Cambridge, collectively known as Oxbridge, the highest number since its sixth-form college (teaching students in the final two years of high school) opened in 2012.

"We were delighted when last year we sent 20 students to Oxbridge, having seen the number increase gradually from just one offer in 2014," executive principal Dayo Olukoshi said in a press release. "For this to have more than doubled again is phenomenal."

The school is in the London borough of Newham, one of the most deprived in the British capital.

Almost all of the students in question are from ethnic minority backgrounds, according to the press release. Half of them receive free school meals as part of a government program designed to assist disadvantaged families, and two-thirds will become the first in their family to study at university.

State schools in the UK are funded by taxpayer money, and would be called public schools in the United States.

Just 7% of British schoolchildren are educated at independent (a.k.a. private) schools. Yet they still score about 40% of the places on Oxford and Cambridge undergrad programs. These children are generally from wealthy families -- private school fees run to tens of thousands of pounds per year -- and are primed for an Oxbridge education.

However Brampton Manor is making significant progress in opening Oxford and Cambridge up to students from different backgrounds. "We are passionate about instilling within our students the self-belief that they are good enough, that their talent and potential is far more important than any preconceived notion of the 'type' of student Oxbridge might be looking for," said Sam Dobin, Director of Sixth Form.

"These young people have often overcome so much to get to this point and now have such exciting futures ahead of them; we couldn't be prouder of them."

"This incredible achievement really helps challenge some of the myths about who Oxford and Cambridge is for, showing that we are open to everyone with the talent, passion and drive to study here," said Sam Lucy, Director of Admissions for the Colleges at the University of Cambridge.

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Experimental colleges once were the future. Now, what is their future?

When Hampshire College opened its doors in 1970, it was part of a wave of new schools founded as experiments in alternative education. Some let students set their own course of study and didn’t require letter grades. Some focused on the classics. Some drew students interested in farming or the environment.

But Hampshire’s current financial troubles raise questions about whether this style of education is a luxury that consumers today can no longer afford. Some of the problems facing alternative schools are the same as those facing more traditional small schools: a shrinking pool of college-age students, rising costs, and small endowments. But alternative schools also struggle with unique challenges, given their unorthodox offerings.

“It’s awfully hard for those institutions and their graduates to prove what they’ve learned in a job market that is oriented toward hit-the-ground-running and prove-you-can-do-something from day one,” said Dennis Jones, the past president of National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.

Hampshire officials announced this week that, amid economic pressures, they are looking to merge with another college and might not admit a freshman class this fall. Across the country, it’s a not-uncommon fate for alternative schools, many of which have shut down or reinvented themselves — or are facing pressure to do so.

Franconia College, which opened in New Hampshire in 1963 in an old inn in the White Mountains as an experiment in alternative education, shut down 15 years later after financial problems that began nearly from the start. It had also come under attack from political conservatives in the state who accused it of harboring draft dodgers and fostering a culture of drugs and sexual promiscuity.

In Plainfield, Vt., another atypical college faces an uncertain fate. Goddard College, known for its “low-residency” program where students come to campus for only one week per semester, is on academic probation with the regional accrediting agency. The agency has cited concerns over Goddard’s finances and leadership and has given the school two years to correct the problems. Goddard was established in 1938 on a former sheep farm as a communal setting for “plain living and hard thinking.”

Other nontraditional schools have morphed to stay afloat. New College, in Sarasota, Fla., was founded in 1960 as a private college to foster the arts and free students from traditional curricula. The school is located on the former estate of Edith and Charles Ringling, who helped found the famous circus. It uses a “contract system” where students negotiate an agreement with their adviser each semester about their courses and expectations for the term. In 2001 it became the honors college of the state system.

Many of the alternative colleges that appear to be more financially sound are those with big endowments, or those that are so small and narrowly focused that they can operate with very few students.

Darron Collins, president of College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, said his school has a successful niche that helps it stay strong. The school offers only one major — human ecology — and students design their own program under that umbrella. The campus has two organic farms and two island research stations.

Collins said the school, which has just 350 students, has also been conscious of trying to keep overhead costs like administrative salaries low.

“I’m never going to say we are immune to things, because the demographics are tight,” he said, but applications are up, and about 25 percent of the school’s students are international.

Antioch College in Ohio, which focuses on practical work training for students and uses written evaluations in addition to grades, has a different type of survival story. The school was founded in the mid-1800s but closed in 2008. Three years later it was reopened by a group led by alumni who purchased the campus and offered the first four classes of students free tuition. The school is now transitioning to paid students and ended fiscal 2017 with a $1.7 million loss, the records show.

Mark Roosevelt, president of the Santa Fe campus of St. John’s College, said small schools struggle not because of their particular niche but because of practical concerns like managing their endowment and enrollment.

The St. John’s endowment is about $190 million, Roosevelt said. The school has focused more on fund-raising lately and is more than halfway toward its capital campaign goal of $300 million. Hampshire’s endowment is about $52 million, according to the school.

The curriculum at St. John’s College, which also has a campus in Annapolis, Md., is composed of a rigid curriculum where students read Homer, Plato, Nietzsche, and Einstein, and must learn to translate ancient texts.

Jones, the past president of the nonprofit higher education consulting organization, said that while students may appreciate alternative types of higher education, it is increasingly difficult to justify the cost. At Hampshire, for instance, the tuition is $50,000, plus $14,000 for room and board.

But the struggles of these schools does not mean innovation is dead, Jones said. These days, schools are forced to be creative economically, rather than simply academically. Many students pay for their own degrees and are worried about debt, so schools are trying different economic models to keep costs down, such as online education.

“Institutions that challenge the economic model are the new frontier of higher education innovation,” he said.

Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Wash., is an alternative school that has stayed healthy thanks to its public status. It has always been part of the Washington state system, a factor that its administrators say has helped keep tuition affordable. Tuition at Evergreen is about $7,000 per year for in-state students plus about $12,000 for room and board.

The school was founded in 1967 with a similar goal of giving students more control over their learning and curriculum. It now has about 3,000 students.

Still, Sandra Kaiser, vice president for college relations, said enrollment has been on a 10-year decline, driven, ironically, in part by the strong economy. About half of Evergreen’s students are community college transfer students. But fewer students typically attend community college when the economy is healthy, and jobs are plentiful. She said the school is constantly evaluating how to best serve students, who are increasingly nontraditional, including older adults and veterans.

“We have to really improve and renew in order to serve students,” she said.

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Democrats Ready Universal Pre-K Pitch Ahead of 2020

Democrats appear ready to weave universal pre-kindergarten into their pitch for winning back working-class voters, with the 2020 campaign just underway.

The pitch was best exhibited most recently by former secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro when he announced his presidential bid.

"To be the smartest nation requires an early investment in our children's education," Castro told a crowd gathered in his hometown of San Antonio, Texas. "Today, we live in a world in which brainpower is the new currency of success.… As president, we'll make [universal pre-K] happen … for all children whose parents want it, so that all of our nation's students can get a strong start."

Before abandoning his own presidential ambitions earlier this month, Tom Steyer laid out a broad vision for what he called the "5 rights," including "the right to learn," which the California billionaire and political activist hoped would be enshrined in any future Democratic Party platform.

"If we don't provide free, quality public education for kids, pre-K through college or skills training, we are creating, legislating inequality," Steyer told a group in Iowa, just hours before he dropped out of the race.

Steyer and Castro's endorsement is only the most recent in a long political trend. Democrats at every level of government—municipal, state, and federal—have endorsed the policy, despite its overall effectiveness being mixed if not downright negative.

There is strong evidence that the overall benefits of pre-K are most notable shortly after the program ends but fade away over time. One study published in 2018 found students who didn't partake in pre-K programs on average tested better than those that did by the second and third grades.

Similarly, a 2014 report by the Heritage Foundation showed that in Oklahoma, which implemented universal pre-K in 1998, the results have been negligible. Fourth-grade reading scores, an initial measure of the impact of early childhood education, have remained nearly unchanged in the state between 1998 and 2014. Furthermore, even though Oklahoma spends almost $7,400 per student on early childhood education the state's standardized test scores are still below the national average.

Results at the federal level haven't been much better. In 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services published a report on the effectiveness of Head Start, which provides early childhood education to families living at or below the poverty line. The report inadvertently showed that although Head Start spent more than $180 billion over 48 years, it had almost no effect on the "cognitive, social-emotional, health, or parenting outcomes" of its participants.

A widespread debate further exists as to whether universal pre-K programs are actually "universal." Critics have cited that most programs claiming to be such actually take a "targeted" approach that restricts eligibility to child and family characteristics. Of those, the most common requirement is family income. A 2015 report by the Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes found that nearly 58 percent of all publicly funded pre-K programs set family income thresholds at or below 185 percent of the poverty level.

Other pre-K programs claiming to be "open to all enrollees" also fall short of being universal because of funding issues that limit available space. The National Institute for Early Education Research found that only 10 states in the country had enrollment numbers above 50 percent. Only four states provided pre-K to more than 70 percent of eligible children.

Proponents have mostly ignored or written off such findings. The majority of the arguments in favor of universal pre-K are steeped in appeals to emotion. When pushed, champions have claimed that for every dollar spent on pre-K a seven-dollar savings occurs in programs to reduce teen pregnancies, boost graduation rates, and reduce incarceration, among others.

The 7-to-1 return on investment claim has become a staple of the universal pre-K conversation, even being cited by former President Barack Obama in his 2013 State of the Union address. It's accuracy, however, has been widely discredited as it is the result of one study conducted more than 50 years ago of 58 "at risk" children. It has not yet been replicated in state pre-school programs.

While Democrats might be making a bet on universal pre-K, voters are unsold. At the ballot box, the feel-good measure has a mixed record. Some larger municipalities have voted to tax themselves for pre-K, but some of the failures are noteworthy. Although the vote was from 2006, deep blue California rejected new taxes for pre-K which "had drawn high levels of support in early public-opinion polls, but eventually succumbed to months of debate over the benefits of such a program," according to a report by Education Week.

In the 2018 elections, voters in Colorado and Pittsburgh voted down education packages that earmarked significant funds toward early childhood education and pre-K, while Seattle bolstered their program with new funds.

Corey DeAngelis, an education expert with the libertarian Cato Institute, says these kinds of campaign offerings make perfect sense from the politician's point of view.

"It's just easy for a politician who doesn't really understand the educational system to just say, ‘Okay, more might be better, let's just add another year on to the beginning of the K-12 system, and let's just do 14 years rather than 13 years,'" DeAngelis told the Washington Free Beacon. "But it takes a lot more work to ask what about the system is leading to bad educational outcomes? Improving the years of education they're already going to get takes a lot more thinking and work than just saying, ‘Well, let's just add another year.'"

If Cato analysts represent the right-of-center thinking on pre-K, the political left has notable critics as well.

The Brookings Institution wrote just last year that, "unabashed enthusiasts for increased investments in state pre-K need to confront the evidence that it does not enhance student achievement meaningfully, if at all."

"It may, of course, have positive impacts on other outcomes, although these have not yet been demonstrated. It is time for policymakers and advocates to consider and test potentially more powerful forms of investment in better futures for children."

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