Substack

Friday, May 17, 2019

Ovarian Lottery and Inequality - UK Edition

From FT, this
As many Oxbridge places go to students from just eight, mostly private, schools as from 2,900 other secondary schools, according to the Sutton Trust, an education charity.
And this,
A report from the Sutton Trust last year showed that almost half of all Oxbridge places go to children at private schools, although only 7 per cent of kids in the UK attend these.
And social mobility in US and UK,
When it comes to issues of social mobility and university, the UK and US are not so far apart: the OECD calculates that while Americans from families with university degrees are 6.8 times more likely to attend college than people from families without a degree, this ratio is only slightly better, at 6.3, in England. In Finland and South Korea, by contrast, it is just over one.

Update (12.06.2019)

From the US in the context of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanagh's hiring of the daughter of writer Amy Chua to clerk for him, Ed Luce writes,
On pure arithmetic, the average American’s chances of entering a top university are tiny if they are born into the wrong home. Studies show that an eighth grade (14-year-old) child from a lower income bracket who achieves maths results in the top quarter is less likely to graduate than a kid in the upper income bracket scored in the bottom quarter. This is the reverse of how meritocracy should work. Children from the wealthiest 1 per cent take more Ivy League places than the bottom 60 per cent combined.

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