Everyone loves commenting on Oxbridge. Whether it’s Daily Mail splashes on C-Sunday or The Guardian handwringing over admissions statistics, Oxbridge headlines are a staple feature of the British press. While the UK is home to many world-class higher education institutions, no other university seems able to attract anything like the undivided attention given to Oxford and Cambridge. When it comes to how the UK press addresses the higher education sector, this tendency isn’t as innocuous as it may seem.

It’s not that Oxbridge does not deserve scrutiny.  As public universities they have a duty to serve the interests of the public, and should therefore be held accountable in full view of the population they serve. I wholeheartedly welcome the work which has been done to expose the disparity between the socioeconomic and racial makeup of the UK and those attending the UK’s supposedly top two universities.

The almost exclusive media focus given to Oxbridge means that other universities are not held to account when it matters

However, I think we need to put Oxbridge into perspective. It is easy to forget that Oxbridge represents only a tiny fraction of university places in the UK. Perhaps Oxford and Cambridge have become victims of their own success.  Perhaps they have so convinced the country that their students are the ‘best and brightest’ that they now receive a disproportionate amount of scrutiny and attention. But the reality is that both the universities of Oxford and Cambridge are home to around 12,000 undergraduates each, a mere drop in the ocean compared to the nation-wide body of 1.76 million undergraduates as of 2017.

In fact, going to university, particularly for those aged 18, is not the norm: only 32.6% of 18 year olds began an undergraduate course in 2017. On this basis, it seems an incessant focus on higher education when we discuss the lives of young people is bad enough in itself, as it means that the needs of those who receive other forms of education, or no tertiary education at all, are often ignored. An obsession with Oxbridge is even more myopic. Why are we so preoccupied with Oxbridge, and what effects does this have?

Perhaps an obvious starting point for explaining why we seem to be so obsessed with Oxbridge is its prevalence in the lives of those that most influence public discourse. Our most publicly influential professions are dominated by Oxbridge graduates: 24% of the 2017 intake of MPs were Oxbridge alums, as are 51% of senior civil servants and 54% of the country’s top 100 journalists. It seems understandable, then, that many equate a place at Oxbridge with a golden ticket to join the British elite when we consider how these figures tower above the percentage of the working population that has actually attended Oxford or Cambridge.

There is certainly an argument to be made that this domination of some of the country’s top professions by only two universities is, in itself, a problem. However, while it is true that Oxbridge graduates are the most disproportionately represented in the British elite, graduates of Russell Group universities in general also do disproportionately well. Despite this, the demographics of Imperial, UCL or Durham undergraduates receive nothing like the coverage of Oxford of Cambridge demographics.

The almost exclusive media focus given to Oxbridge means that other universities are not held to account when it matters. Although Oxbridge’s proportion of state-educated pupils is nothing to celebrate, Durham, St Andrews and Bristol are falling behind Cambridge, with Imperial and Edinburgh barely ahead. While Oxbridge’s rate of state participation has been slowly increasing over the last decade, in nine out of twenty four Russell Group universities, the situation deteriorated last year. That Oxbridge is regularly publicly lambasted for its proportion of privately educated pupils while other Russell Group universities have largely escaped scrutiny cannot be considered merely coincidental.

And this, ultimately, is where I think the problem lies. Yes I think Oxbridge is important, but do I think it merits such disproportionate media coverage? No. There are many things that can be said to be wrong with the British university system; focussing so heavily on Oxbridge is going to help solve almost none of them. Poor graduate job prospects, spiralling student debts and a mental health crisis - all of these are real, pressing problems afflicting hundreds of thousands of UK university students, yet seem to receive far less attention than Oxbridge students doing even the most silly, stupid or outrageous things. Until we kill our collective fascination with Oxbridge, I fear this will continue to be the case.