Freshers eagerly flicking through your first copy of Varsity: feast your eyes on gory stories about Access problems. Read all about the elitism rife in this decrepit institution; see, in high definition, shocking statistics about the lack of working class people and the dearth of ethnic minorities; look at the centuries-old snobbery that pervades this training ground of tomorrow’s leaders.

But, joy of joys, some positive news: there is a new higher education Access tsar, Les Ebdon, and a new Director of Admissions at Cambridge, Mike Sewell. Change is coming. The former says top universities need to be set more challenging targets regarding the admission of students from non-traditional backgrounds. The latter says that the university cannot be forced to ‘exactly mirror’ society. Oh, the more things change, the more things stay the same…

I remember the day of my interview. Wandering into ‘King’s News’ for some mints (because obviously without mints I would fail my interview and thus the rest of my life) I saw a Guardian headline about how inaccessible Cambridge was for black students and those on free school dinners.

That headline stuck in my head: there I was, an outsider trying to get in, and on that day the top news story was about how unfair the system was. I’ve changed very much since then, but the media’s obsession with Oxbridge hasn’t changed at all.
Freshers, after all your efforts to get into Cambridge you will hear over and over how unjust the admissions process is. Same old same old. For the white, male, privately-educated scum reading this: you don’t deserve to be here. Everyone else: you’re just another tick in the box.

The whole hullabaloo is a classic example of putting the cart before the horse. The government and the press blame universities rather than the examination system. Societal disadvantages cannot be reversed by a university lowering its entry requirements.

It doesn’t take much of a search to find out about the Access schemes run by the university, individual colleges and the student union. People often don’t realise that Oxford and Cambridge offer the most generous bursaries in the country. Not that our own wonderful institution is a perfect place for education. There is real middle class domination but that’s not only Cambridge’s fault; those trained at bourgeois dinner tables are more likely to succeed than those brought up on sink estates, sadly.

Think of programmes like Brideshead Revisited and Inspector Morse: they paint vivid pictures of Oxbridge for their millions of viewers, a picture of a place where there is no room for plebs. If you’ve come from a state school (as I did) I bet you were congratulated to within an inch of your life for managing to ‘break through’ into this strange world.

In the press, simplistic tabloid depictions of the ‘privileged’ on their way to predestined, undeserved success are complemented by the liberals who damn Oxbridge by spitting statistics at their readers. Neither side puts pressure on the likes of Professor Ebdon to do anything other than once again blame universities like Cambridge.

Poverty of ambition festers in such circumstances. People from non-traditional backgrounds are told Oxbridge is ‘not for the likes of us’ and such ideas are fed by TV shows, Fleet Street hacks and civil servants stuck playing up to the same old stereotypes. Every slow-news-day story about Old Boy network conspiracies only strengthens the mindsets of parents, students, and teachers in the ‘worst’ schools for whom applying to Oxbridge doesn’t seem worth the trouble.

The odd Oxbridge obsession has a knock-on effect, as irritating for the students within as it is damaging to the students without. As a result of all the media attention, people here make a big deal out of where you come from: you will meet students who will play the ‘prolier than thou’ card, desperately clinging to their working class status in this middle class institution; equally, you will meet those who are wet dreams for programmes like ‘Young, Bright and on the Right’.

The solution? Perhaps we need another wide-ranging reform of the examination system (we’re getting that in 2015, apparently) or perhaps instead we should aim our sights higher and target unfair wealth distribution, which would solve the problem over time. Politicians promise these big ideas, then fail to deliver. Until then, it is up to the likes of Professor Ebdon, Dr Sewell, the government and the media to stop playing the same old games.

Any debate about our education should be, to say the least, stimulating; this one threatens to be sterile at best, boring at worst. Welcome to Cambridge.