Oxford and Cambridge have the best teaching system in the world- in some colleges .sx Oxford and Cambridge are so incompetent in teaching that in spite of intense competition for entry nearly half the students leave with =3rd class degrees and worse .sx The standard of an Oxford =3rd only an Oxford examiner like myself could credit :sx there are some colleges which seem to specialize in producing them .sx Or to take the matter which most affects the schools .sx Oxford and Cambridge by their competitive system of entry set standards to the schools which distinguish English education from all other systems except the French :sx only in France and England is it necessary for success to be in hard competitive training from the age of 8 or 9 and to be a mature and polished intellectual at 16 .sx 'Treat them mean and keep them keen .sx ' Or ( as a Bishop wrote in 1889 ) 'the English do everything by way of racing' .sx The results for the successful are almost miraculous .sx 'The war horse saith among the trumpets Ha , ha ; and he smelleth the battle afar off , the thunder of the captains and the shouting .sx ' It is really very pleasant indeed to be an examinee if you are a good one , and it is just as pleasant to coach good examinees .sx But how much harm is done to bad examinees ?sx How far have A level , S level , now the new U level ( or whatever it is to be called ) been affected by Oxbridge scholarship examinations , and by the need to give the rest something to do while the competitors are groomed ?sx So often in the provinces one has to face the problem of rescuing a boy , basically very able , who did well at O level , quite well at A level after two years in the sixth , went back for a third year as a potential competitor , and in fact did worse .sx There could be all sorts of reasons for this :sx the effect is that he arrives in a university stale and defeated , and it is often impossible ever to recover the boy as he existed at 15 .sx There is another contrast .sx In England it is only Oxford and Cambridge which set standards of prestige for universities .sx Men come and go easily between Cabinets , Embassies , Chairmanships of Boards and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges .sx The Colleges are 'inside' ; their lawns , their mahogany , their herbaceous borders ( not- alas- any longer their buildings ) are the real thing .sx We envy , but aspire ; the existence of these things in Oxbridge is the sole basis of our dream that they might exist in Manchester , Coventry , or Colchester .sx The English intellectual till the 19th century lived in Grub Street or in Nonconformist rigour ; from this Oxbridge rescued him in the days of its great reforms .sx No wonder his dream is to be commensalis and socius in a great foundation , a freeholder in the inheritance of scholarship .sx His wife may not of course agree ; the cold collations of North Oxford on the evenings of College feasts have their place in the folklore .sx There are in Oxbridge as many 'outs' as 'ins' ; the democracy of the Fellows is a little like the democracy of the Athenians , among their womenfolk , their metics , and their slaves .sx The Whigs still rule ; democratic principles , a practice of oligarchy and conservatism .sx Who would not choose to be a Whig ?sx One ought not to propose remedies except for admitted evils ; and I find it hard to say that the popularity of Oxford and Cambridge is an evil .sx It is not exactly an evil , it is just a 'thing' , an element in the extremely odd flavour of English society .sx Clearly English society is changing :sx ducunt volentem fata , nolentem trahunt- things are moving , we had better move gracefully , rather than perforce .sx A few points about the future ( very few ) are clear in the clouded statistical ball .sx The proportion of Oxbridge students in the whole system ( apart from London , about one in two in 1938/9 , one in three in 1956 ) is dropping sharply .sx This drop is marked even in the traditional Arts subjects ; but in these ( so far as one can make out from the U.G.C. statistics , which one would call amateurish but that they conceal some things which it is convenient to conceal ) the 1958/9 figures for Arts graduates were Oxbridge 2,740 , London 1,377 , the rest 3,436 .sx In other subjects the relative decline is precipitate ; in ten years' time the Oxbridge mathematicians , scientists , and engineers ( though doubtless of high quality ) will not be much more significant numerically than the Oxbridge medical schools are now .sx To put the same facts in another way ; the more boys and girls reach university entrance standard the smaller the proportion of them who can enter Oxbridge .sx This is ineluctable ; Oxbridge could expand proportionately only at the cost of self-destruction .sx This is the situation to which we must adjust ourselves .sx The mechanics of a clearing house are probably essential to tide us over the transition .sx But the transition can only be achieved by a modification of the 'image' , the simplified picture which governs action .sx We need image builders who will take the Oxbridge myth and weave it into a pattern with other English myths .sx There are plenty of myths to hand ; the myth of London , the great city , the myth of the North , which by its hardness made the modern world , the myths of the Cathedral towns , the leftish myths of Sandy Lindsay and John Fulton , Keele and Brighton .sx Of course , if we were I.C.I. or the steel industry we could have our myths built for us by a good firm of public relations men , at so much per cubic foot of cloudcapped tower .sx We are not thus endowed ; can we get on with the job ourselves ?sx Two points about this , in conclusion .sx First , we have to face a quick transition in a matter where the natural pace of change is slow .sx It is not easy for universities to explain directly to young people in schools what they have to offer ( though of course we should try) .sx The natural mentors are parents and teachers , on the whole those between 45 and 55 , who learnt what they know about post-school education in a world very different from that of the 1970's and 1980's , which is quite close to our students .sx Parents perhaps fall into three sections ; those who were glad to finish formal education at 14 or earlier , those who obtained a professional qualification 'the hard way' under the traditional English system , and those who remember their own University- and for most this would be Oxford , Cambridge or a London Medical School .sx The teachers in public schools and grammar schools will have a strong bias to Arts and pure science , a bias towards Oxbridge , which diminishes as one goes down the long ladder of social status , which is not necessarily a ladder of ability or even of success .sx It is to these 'customers' , the advisors of students , the creators of ambition , that we have to sell a new picture of the system , as it will be , a system in which Oxbridge will have a special but not predominant place .sx My last point is that to me , as a professor in a civic university , interested in the growth and government of cities , with a young family growing up in a city , the civic situation seems a peculiarly advantageous one .sx There is of course a place for York , Canterbury and the rest :sx but the English picture of a university system can only be changed quickly by the universities with which the English live .sx Leeds University , Manchester University , Liverpool University and others are part of the re-building of cities ; new cities and new universities are being created together , and must in the process learn to live together .sx There has never been any doubt about this in Scotland ; there is some cause for uneasiness about the state of Scottish universities , but not on the grounds discussed here .sx Scottish people know about the Scottish universities ; they are familiar things , they fit easily into Scottish society , as English universities do not .sx A large responsibility rests on the civic universities for creating this ease of relationship which has existed in England hitherto only for the charmed circle of hereditary Oxbridge men .sx =2b .sx A PYRAMID OF PRESTIGE .sx A. H. HALSEY .sx Senior Lecturer in Sociology , University of Birmingham .sx SIR CHARLES MORRIS is a splendid utopian .sx He believes that universities exist primarily for educational purposes and are attended by students for primarily educational motives .sx He finds weaknesses in Oxford and Cambridge as educational organizations and deduces the possibility of a relatively increasing future popularity for what he calls 'the modern universities' .sx My own more melancholy assessment of the prospect for Redbrick is based on a view of universities more as antechambers to the economy than as centres of higher learning .sx The key to popularity lies in the Appointments Board , not in the tutor's study .sx My fear is that the outcome of expansion in the sixties and seventies will be an academic hierarchy more securely supported by scholastic selection , more firmly maintained by occupational connections and more clearly recognized by public and participants than ever before .sx In an English context the evolution of education as a meritocratic selection and training ground for the ranks of the expanding army of professional , scientific and technical manpower seems peculiarly likely to result in a graded system of schools and colleges which reflects the power and prestige pyramid of the wider society .sx This is not necessarily to deny Sir Charles' thesis that the Redbrick universities stand for a pedagogical philosophy which derives teaching from scholarship and which is fundamentally different from the Balliol faith that scholarship will accompany well-organized undergraduate teaching .sx Many will agree that the excellence of the tutorial system is not proven .sx The English have a penchant for living on untested myths which they call the lessons of experience .sx We simply do not know what are the best methods of educating different kinds of student for different branches of learning .sx It may be that the short weekly duet of essay and criticism is inappropriate as well as uneconomical in modern circumstances :sx perhaps it is more conducive to producing the amateur gentleman than the professional scholar .sx It may be that the irritated American description of public school and Oxford graduates as 'not the chosen people but the frozen people' , is at bottom a criticism of the 'finishing school' theory of higher learning .sx It may even be that as a distinguishing mark of Oxford and Cambridge , the tutorial system is no longer valid .sx Enquiry might show that the student of physics at Manchester or Cambridge is more similar in his education , style of life and outlook than either is to a man reading classics on the same Cambridge staircase .sx It may very well be too that a B.Com. undergraduate in Birmingham is better taught tutorially than a Cambridge college scholar who is sent out to an ageing , impoverished tutor clinging to a squalid gentility by supervising economics for 30 hours a week .sx The point is , however , that all this has nothing to do with the popularity of Oxford and Cambridge .sx In the minds of schoolmasters , parents and sixth-formers , the image of Liverpool and Leicester by comparison with that of New College or Newnham is such that ancient and modern do not begin to compete .sx Sir Charles is right to use the complimentary label 'modern' to describe Redbrick .sx He knows that the old provincial universities have been nationalized- that , for example , whereas in 1908 the proportion of his students at Leeds who were drawn from within thirty miles was 78 per cent , it was , by 1955 , reduced to 40 per cent .sx But the distinction between ancient and modern applies for most Englishmen only to hymn books .sx Places of higher learning other than Oxford and Cambridge are 'provincial'- a word conveying , in England as in France , the sense of inferiority , outsideness and rejection of those who belong to but are not accepted by the metropolitan culture .sx 'She may not get in to Oxford or Cambridge .sx