Social engineers

Published on 07/08/2012 00:00

Traditionally, universities considered an applicant’s social background and school as part of “the contextual data” used to decide who should be offered a place. Now Edinburgh and other universities south of the Border have devised interventionist systems which will dramatically boost the grades of children from low-income homes.

Such overt social engineering will require additional intervention throughout these students’ university career or their drop-out figures will become the next “scandal”.

The fact is that half a century ago applicants like me from housing schemes and mining villages sailed into Edinburgh because of the excellence of state secondary schools.

This gross interference is not “levelling the playing field” but part of a cover-up of some 
disastrous experiments in state schools during the last third of the 20th century.

(Dr) John Cameron

Howard Place

St Andrews