White working-class students excluded from Oxbridge diversity schemes
Albert Tait, Education Editor of the London Telegraph, writes July 1, 2026, that Oxford and Cambridge do not include poor working class whites among the disadvantaged and that DEI scholarships and financial aid are reserved for people of color only:
For more than a decade, Oxford and Cambridge have been running outreach programmes, scholarships and bursaries specifically for ethnic minority students.
These have ranged from taster days and webinars to £20,000-a-year scholarships, including one created by the rapper Stormzy at Cambridge, exclusively for students from Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds.
. . .
White working-class students, who are one of the most underrepresented groups in higher education, remain excluded from almost all of the schemes.
. . .
The revelation is just the latest case of companies and public bodies running diversity schemes that exclude white people.
Writing in The Telegraph today, a 20-year-old white student from a working-class family has described how such schemes have left him feeling like a “second-class citizen”:
“I am white and working class, and took my A-levels at an inner-city comprehensive last year, where I got all A* and A grades.
“Not many people from my background go to a Russell Group university, let alone Cambridge. Nevertheless, that was my dream, and I looked into outreach programmes and financial-aid schemes, supposedly designed for pupils from deprived backgrounds, to see if I could get some advice and support.”
“Repeatedly, I found they were only available to applicants from black, Asian or other ethnic ‘minority’ backgrounds. Unfortunately, it is clear that the DEI machine has chosen the groups it wishes to advance quite independently of the data. So, far from tackling disadvantage, DEI is entrenching it for the group that the evidence singles out as the most disadvantaged of all: white, working-class boys.
“Looking ahead to see what training schemes, internships and placements might be on offer while I’m at university, I realise that I will face the same discrimination.”
Meanwhile, Merton College, Oxford announces: “Our appeal in support of the Universities Black Academic Futures Program has now achieved its target, while the Refugee Academic Futures Scholarship has more than met its original goal.”
PCR comments: When I was in school scholarships were based on merit, not income class or race. A kid with rich parents could receive the honor of a scholarship as could a kid with poor parents. A few people funded scholarships for kids from specific locations who intended to prepare for certain occupations, such as medical doctor. They might have specified a white recipient or perhaps the location and topic to be studied resulted in the recipient being white. I remember a case decades ago in which judges ruled that scholarships could not be limited to one race, and a donor who had funded a scholarship for a poor boy of promise from a white working class neighborhood had his intent overturned.
This was in the US, so the comparison with Oxbridge today where whites are excluded from diversity, equity, and inclusion scholarships–another “white privilege”?–is not exact, but it does show a movement from color-blind scholarships to color-based scholarships, a paradoxical outcome of a movement that began as a color-blind movement for equal treatment.