Leading universities are taking fewer people from wealthy backgrounds while admitting more black students, new figures show.
The data from the Office for Students (OfS) divides students into quintiles (fifths) based on deprivation and shows that the richest fifth made up 37.4 per cent of entrants to Oxford in 2019-20, down from 39.6 per cent the year before. The most deprived quintile made up 5.9 per cent of new students, compared with 5.4 per cent the previous year.
At Cambridge the proportion of students coming from the richest quintile decreased from 41.2 to 36.7 per cent over the same period, while those from the poorest increased from 4.9 to 6.6 per cent.
There has been pressure on Oxford and Cambridge to widen their intake and
