Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

How can a scoring rely on the assessment from the students who will then benefit from the rank of their university. Sounds like a recipe for gaming the metric …

Oxford admissions have a heavy interview component: if they think you're really smart, have great potential, and then you'll be of the caliber to get 4 A* no question if you had rich parents and went to a top Public School (but don't, so may not), then -- yeah -- they can make you a lower offer. Their place, their rules.

It isn't dumbing down or taking worse students, it's easing out the rich types who will drink/play lacrosse or rugby/bore to at least Blues standard, are pretty bright but have been spoon-fed to get there so will turn out to be dumber and worse students that people whose potential hadn't been fully revealed by 17/18, even if the spoon-fed cohort get better A Level results.

This obviously doesn’t follow, and you should feel a decent amount of embarrassment for ignoring the fact that exam grades don’t correlate with “dumbness” or lack thereof.

It should be trivially obvious that a student who is perhaps from a less well-off background, attending state school and achieving decent grades, can be equally as talented and deserving of a top-tier education as a better-off, privately-educated student.

Access programs go some way towards trying to tackle snowballing generational inequality - which essentially results in a bias away from merit, and towards those able to afford private education.

If you want to argue against that, then fine - but at least don’t start with such faulty assumptions.

So a good UK university cannot profitably offer education for UK students.

So for some of the best they'll focus on non UK students. These students aren't subject to a capped price we can't afford, so we can gouge them to make up for the lost revenue from home students.

But the usual "I'm not racist but..." people of course hate foreigners. How dare any of these people be different in any way. And so while some of them will pretend their hatred only extends to some foreigners it's always the same exact people who are aggrieved and want yet another excuse to hate foreigners.

This results in government efforts to make it harder to study here, and more expensive to teach students here. That way they slightly appease racists who weren't going to vote for them anyway and they feel justified.

I assume eventually this will collapse, and judging from Brexit nothing whatsoever will be learned by the supporter/victim class, the same gullible morons will keep falling for lies from the same people who feed off them. Certain that somehow it must be somebody else's fault their lives are shit while the leaders they're feeding are doing so well.