Owen Jones is dead wrong. Depending on your political sensibilities, that’s either a sentence you utter several times a week, or something you save for special occasions. As a left-leaning, liberal kind of guy, this is a very special occasion for me.

Back in 2011, shortly before the publication of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, Jones wrote a provocatively-titled essay for the blog LabourList, entitled ‘Abolish Oxbridge’. To summarise a much longer and more thoughtful argument, he asserted that Oxbridge was a refuge for social privilege that occupied the loftiest of heights on reputation alone, and was long since due for abolition. He stuck to those views in a 2013 interview with Varsity, asserting that Oxbridge: "isn’t really simply an educational elite, it is partly a social elite, because the people it draws from overwhelmingly are from the most privileged backgrounds."

Nor is Jones alone in this view. You only have to watch The Riot Club (or Posh, the excellent play upon which the film is based) to realise the indulgent Oxbridge student is a trope with enough common acceptance to meet with little or no controversy when it fuels the entire plot of a motion picture. It’s not entirely wrong, of course. With 63 per cent of Cambridge students coming from state schools in 2012-13, simple subtraction tells even an arts student like me that 37 per cent came from independent schools (or home schooling, of course) – while just 7 per cent of children nationally attend such schools. The gowns and the port are undeniable. So is the Latin.

To talk of abolishing Oxbridge, however, or to dismiss the status of these universities as antiquated, is a misguided effort towards noble aims. As the product of a state comprehensive (like Jones, who is quick to admit his own Oxbridge credentials), I support wholeheartedly the efforts of admissions staff and student bodies to pursue greater ‘access’, to ensure state-school students aren’t put off by the stigma or the reputation of these hallowed halls. The overrepresentation of privately-schooled students at Oxbridge, however, does not indicate that Oxford and Cambridge are somehow weaker than they appear, that they are undeserving of their status. It merely reflects the fact – and admitting this pains the part of me which took pleasure in competing with our local private school in every contest we could find – that private schools consistently outperform state schools.

Jones admits this point too in ‘Abolish Oxbridge’, though he relegates it to the status of a side note, a cursory comment amidst a broader monologue on Oxbridge privilege. Oxford and Cambridge are far from alone in over-representing private schools. The Cambridge figure of 63 per cent falls only a few points shy of other leading universities: Durham at 63.4 per cent, Imperial at 64.7 per cent, UCL at 65.7 per cent. Given that Cambridge’s 63 per cent was a significant increase from 57.4 per cent the previous year, it will be interesting to see if the university overtakes any major rivals when figures for 2013-14 are processed.

The dominance of private schools is clearly a broader issue than Oxbridge privilege. At a time when local education authority budgets are being slashed and the national curriculum overhauled, the advantage afforded to those who can pay for it appears more worrying than ever. I can get behind Mr Jones when he calls for the end of this "social segregation in education", but attacking leading universities for attempting to remain leading universities, by taking the most successful applicants in one of the only broad metrics available to them, standardised exams, is a case of assailing the symptom rather than the disease. By all means, ensure state-school students are better equipped for the dreaded interviews, but don’t lower the bars. 

With all that said, though, I am in favour of abolishing Oxbridge. I favour its abolition in one very specific regard: it’s time we stopped treating Oxford and Cambridge as one and the same, both in UCAS and in the broader conversation. Amidst the state school percentages listed above, one name sticks out like a sore thumb: Oxford, whose figure of 57.4 per cent was a national low, excluding institutions too small and specialised to deserve the moniker of ‘university’. Moreover, the number of state-school pupils admitted to Oxford actually fell from the previous year, in absolute terms. Jones’ first example of culture shock is "having to attend exams in silly costumes (you get turned away if you wear brown shoes)". For those who might be unaware, this is a practice exclusive to Oxford, which we in Cambridge have been mocking for about as long as Jones has.

Like Leonardo DiCaprio (the first, and I suspect, the last time I’ll ever be able to make that comparison), I recognise that the raft can’t hold both of us. If Oxford threatens to slip further behind while Cambridge cleans up its image (raising state-school admissions, I might add, while remaining top of the country in the major university rankings), it’s time we stopped talking about the mythical ‘Oxbridge’. If people are going to criticise us, they can at least make sure they’re talking about the right university.