Where you learn determines what you earn, according to a Guardian report on the Sutton Trust charity’s research. Over half (well, 51 per cent) of state school students surveyed by the Trust aren’t making the connection between top universities and high earnings.
Separate figures from the Institute of Education show graduates of ‘redbrick’ universities such as Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh and London’s Imperial, are far more likely to earn high salaries — nearly one fifth (19 per cent) of these ‘elite’ graduates were earning over £90,000 a year compared with 5 per cent of those who went to other ‘new’ universities.
Teachers are complicit– wary of attaching status to any particular university, they leave students with little understanding of how significantly their choice could influence future income prospects. But state school students just don’t aspire to elite universities. Those with two graduate parents are more likely to apply to top tier universities. But overall, it’s a case of ‘to those that have, shall be given’.
But what does it matter anyway? After all, working class students are likely to have lower IQs than their more middle class counterparts, according to coverage of a paper produced by Dr Bruce Charlton of Newcastle University — an evolutionary psychiatrist, appropriately enough.
This apparently explains the comparatively low proportion of working class students at Oxford or Cambridge.
The actual report makes for less sensational reading — but it’s still attracted opprobrium from plenty of intelligent (possibly lower class) representatives of academia, who’ve branded Charlton’s ideas “wrong-headed” and “elitist”.
Professor Alan Ryan of New College Oxford is quoted as saying: “The obvious explanation of the class differential in Oxbridge intake has nothing to do with IQ and everything to do with the ability of private schools to get students three As at A level.”
Oh. So you just need to earn enough to send your children to Eton. And how do you get into that high-earner bracket again?
Mind you, separate research by the Sutton Trust finds that CEOs no longer need an Oxbridge education to succeed. And a public school education didn’t do Raef any good this week. Hard-man boss Sir Alan Sugar (Rich List estimate: £830m) still pointed that podgy finger at him and said: ‘You’re fired.’
