LONDON, Oct. 20 (Xinhua) -- A shocking level of social and economic inequality at Oxford and Cambridge (Oxbridge) universities has been revealed in data published by a British Labor party lawmaker on Friday.
Labor MP David Lammy, former minister for higher education, filed the Freedom of Information request to Oxbridge and discovered that between 2010 and 2015, four out of five Oxbridge students had parents with top professional and managerial jobs and the number is on the increase.
The data also showed a "shocking" regional bias, with more offers made to pupils from five home counties than the whole of northern England.
"At Cambridge, applicants from eight areas in the south of England received almost 5,000 offers, whereas students in eight local authority areas across the Midlands, the north and Wales received just eight," said Lammy.
Meanwhile, only one in four Cambridge colleges made offers to black British students in every year between 2010 and 2015.
Writing on the Guardian, Lammy said he was "appalled to discover" Oxbridge is actually moving backwards in terms of elitism.
Oxford and Cambridge are national universities, the recipients of more than 800 million pounds (1.05 billion U.S. dollars) of taxpayers' money each year -- paid for by people in every city, town and village; yet the government demands nothing in return, Lammy wrote.
The seaside towns and "left behind" former industrial heartlands that voted for Brexit are almost invisible when it comes to who is offered a place to study at our most fabled seats of learning, according to him.
He asked the two top universities to reform their admission systems, recommending a new centralized admissions system as a possible replacement for the current collegiate system, to recruit more talented students from the state schools and far northern part of the country.
A spokesman for Oxford University said they realize there are big geographical disparities in the numbers and proportions of students coming to Oxford, and "rectifying this is going to be a long journey that requires a huge, joined effort across society -- including from leading universities like Oxford -- to address serious inequalities".
