In defence of Elly Nowell, the girl who rejected Oxford

When the news appeared earlier this week that 19-year-old Elly Nowell from Winchester sent a rejection letter to Oxford University parodying the style of the thousands pedaled out by such institutions each year, it wasn’t long before the cries of “obnoxious!”, “arrogant!” and “ungrateful!” came screaming out from all corners of the internet.

How dare she insult such a precious British institution, with its almost 1000-year strong reputation for academic excellence and producing great minds of the Western world? Her criticisms – notably that the university takes itself too seriously and that its grand setting allows private school pupils to flourish over their state school counterparts – were quickly dismissed as childish and Ms Nowell was labelled as a ‘silly little girl’ by those defending Oxford.

But why should she accept the status-quo and choose Oxford simply because she can? What should be applauded is that this woman has had the guts to speak out against a system that has been lauded as ‘the best’ without question for too long. Sure, her tone may have come across as obnoxious and arrogant, but this is surely just a sign of the same sharp-elbowed initiative and self-confidence that Oxbridge graduates themselves are so often praised for.

I’m not denying that academic results speak for themselves, and for anyone who enters university purely for the enrichment of personal knowledge or who intends on continuing into research, they could do a whole lot worse than Oxford and Cambridge.

But how well do they actually prepare you for life in the real world?

Tutorials inside seeming castles, supper in the great hall, a suit for every occasion, and ancient college regulations allowing you to order a pint of bitter in the middle of an exam (once you’ve left your sword at the door, of course) – the only place this kind of pomp and pretention is rivalled today is in the House of Lords. It is no surprise then, that so many of today’s top politicians studied at these universities, when they seem to have as tight a grasp of modern Britain’s reality as the institutions they trained in.

I admit my first-hand experience of Oxford is limited to a taster day for prospective students at 16 and a couple of visits to my older sister while she studied at the dwarfed Oxford Brookes (her partner was an Oxford student when she met him – ‘half-breeding?!’ some may gasp), and although beautiful, the place seemed a world away from anything I had experienced before, or have since. It’s no coincidence that Oxford was used as a filming location in the Harry Potter films – both Christ Church college and the Bodleian Library doubled as parts of Hogwarts – due to their otherworldliness; their magical air of a place greatly distanced from the modern world.

I decided not to pursue Oxford as a university of choice when completing A-levels, and my final years at college were far more stress-free than contemporaries who did, busting a gut to attain only the best grades and completing gruelling separate applications to those of us who went through UCAS.

While Oxbridge graduates walk into high-powered, highly-paid jobs because of the name of the university on their CV, shouldn’t employers be questioning what, in practice, these students have over their competitors? They work harder, sure, having had to work to far more deadlines than students at most other universities, but in terms of practical knowledge and life experience what have they gained?

Many would say that university is not necessarily about learning hands-on, professional skills, and that it is what you learn outside of the classroom that sets you up for life in the ‘real world’. What can be said then of a university society based on antiquated practices and outdated traditions, when it comes to preparing students for life after graduation?

An Oxford-educated colleague of mine summed up the university as a ‘finishing school for the rich and powerful; rich and powerful students go there to ensure they continue to be rich and powerful in their working life.’

While one comment on Elly Nowell’s case came from someone saying they would never employ such a ‘spoilt brat’ after graduation, it is this sense of foresight and display of decision-making skills that should be attractive to employers, not the name of an old boys’ club on a piece of paper.

Picture credit: Getty Images

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• john clayton

  Odd that she applied for then rejected a place, i am sure her place was filled easily enough though.Its a choice she is free to make, though i think its just posturing for attention,and if i was an employer,i would regard such an individual as potentialy troublesome,rather than a radical thinker.

• annalee14

  ‘I’m actually a better actress than Judi Dench, only I never auditioned for RADA’.  ’I'm a better footballer than Beckham, only I never joined a football team, so the world will never know just how great I am’.  ’I'm cleverer than you, it’s just that I didn’t want to study as hard as you did at school, so I didn’t go to Oxford’.  I’ve never heard anybody say the first two things, but I’ve had a lot of people say the third to me.  I didn’t get the very best grades at school.  There were a lot of people who were more brilliant than me who didn’t apply to Oxford.  So how did I get in?  Because I was so obsessed with studying the subject I applied for at Oxford that I’d read loads of stuff outside the course and, luckily, I managed not to freeze up in the interview, so they could see how genuinely interested I was.  

  So what about the people at school with better academic records?  Why didn’t they apply?  Because they had other plans for their lives.  I don’t remember the school putting them under pressure to apply to ‘prove’ themselves, and I definitely don’t remember anybody saying ‘Hey, I don’t want to go to Oxford (I want to go to music college, or I want to do this course at Edinburgh) but I’m going to apply anyway just to show how clever I am, and if I get the impression that the interviewers don’t think I’m quite as clever as I think I am, I’m going to write them an email saying they’re all a bunch of snobs and I don’t care what they think anyway.’  Oxford is a university. Not the Spelling Bee.

• Fareham

  I wonder …

  My father graduated from Teddy Hall in 1937 and my two uncles in 1920 and 1924 (Trinity & Teddy Hall). In their day some competence in Latin was a requirement since all the rules were written in Latin, and none were repealed (allegedly). At some time in the 1920’s the requirement to have a reasonable knowledge of Christian Scriptures was dropped. It was said that if you were of a different religion (eg Hindu, Buddhist etc) being able to write down the names of the twelve tribes of Israel would guarantee a pass for that exam.

  Apparently one year the question was omitted from the paper and this caused ructions. Fortunately one enterprising chap from India remarked that the whole paper was gobbledy-gook to him, but if the examiners were interested the twelve tribes of Israel were …

  Sconcing was certainly alive and kicking in my father’s day, and the Teddy Hall cup held around 2.5 pints or so he said.

  As for the pint of porter being the due of anyone sitting an exam longer than 2 hours, it would be interesting to go through the rules and see if that was the case. ‘Bulldogs’ were still around in those days and one vouchsafed that one of his duties was to prevent undergraduates playing marbles on the steps of the Bodleian. Apparently only Scholars were allowed that privilege.

  As for the steak, the sword, full-bottomed wig etc. it cannot be beyond the wit of an enterprising young undergraduate to research and report back …

• Oliver Lawrence

  I am a postgraduate student at Oxford, and I studied at Warwick as an undergraduate. From first-hand experience there is hardly any discernible difference in the character of my fellow students and the people around me. The buildings, I grant you, are much older – which may have scared the young woman in question – but her view that the people at Oxford aren’t as nice, or that the tutors aren’t as approachable or that normal people are sneered at could not be more incorrect.

  She has every right to pre-emptively reject Oxbridge, but claiming that you ‘fundamentally disagree’ with it as an institution is a bit strange, especially after she’d applied to Oxbridge two years in a row.

• Guest

  ‘I admit my first-hand experience of Oxford is limited to a taster day for prospective students at 16 and a couple of visits to my older sister while she studied at the dwarfed Oxford Brookes ‘

  Well, at least you’re honest about simply repeating the same tired clichés about ‘tutorials in castles’. Heaven forbid someone who actually went there should be asked to write this piece.

• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=36809339 Catherine M. Salkeld

  Rhys, you have saved me commenting, as I would have said exactly the same as you did. I was on free school meals at a comprehensive school in the north-east, and was worried that I wasn’t posh enough for Oxford, thanks to ignorant articles like this. I graduated from Hertford in 2006, having had all myths of snobbery well and truly dispelled.

• http://twitter.com/AyaLDN_BEI AAn

  Funny how all “in the defence of Elly Nowell” articles are written by people we go rejected….
  “How dare she insult such a precious British institution, with its almost 1000-year strong reputation for academic excellence and producing great minds of the Western world?”Nobody is really saying that. Criticism of Miss Nowell’s letters are pointing out the fact that instead of inverting what she deems as a 21st century form of class discrimination, she is actually perpetuating it. Surely the way to get greater integration with State and Private Schools is to encourage more state school pupils to apply. I’ve been to both types of school, whereas 75% of my contemporaries applied to Oxbridge from my Private School, only 1 other person applied from my old State School. Snobbery of Oxbridge or just enforced class stereotypes from people with a chip on their shoulder.Plus once you are there you never really realise where someone went to school, unless you are an a**, in which case not many people want to associate with them anyway.

• cyles

  It does sound like a rather badly-informed and ill-advised letter, as shown by how easily it’s been dismissed by everyone she attacks. It’s a great shame that the Oxbridge ‘vs’ the rest of the universities mentality still persists, but I would say that it’s perpetuated equally by both sides. I speak only from experience as the close friend of two Cambridge students: I have been there many times and met people from the university, and of course they are not all upper class snobs. But the long tradition of Oxbridge being academically superior to other universities (a gap which is, incidentally, narrowing, with institutions like Imperial, Bristol and Kings catching up) often translates into Oxbridge students believing themselves to be part of an exclusive socially superior clique (not just in academic terms) and this does tend to rub people up the wrong way. I agree entirely, again through watching my friends go through the Oxbridge system, that it doesn’t give you a rounded education in terms of life skills. Equally, however, people who have been rejected do tend to have a chip on their shoulder, and it must get wearing for amiable Oxbridge students to be the subject of inverse snobbery, as happens a lot. At the end of the day, most of us students are middle-class and privileged anyway wherever we are at university, and we should perhaps, instead of perpetuating pointless bitchery, use the skills we learn to get worthwhile jobs, or volunteer while at university, and help people worse off than ourselves while learning more about the world than the student bubble in the process.

• cyles

  It does sound like a rather badly-informed and ill-advised letter, as shown by how easily it’s been dismissed by everyone she attacks. It’s a great shame that the Oxbridge ‘vs’ the rest of the universities mentality still persists, but I would say that it’s perpetuated equally by both sides. I speak only from experience as the close friend of two Cambridge students: I have been there many times and met people from the university, and of course they are not all upper class snobs. But the long tradition of Oxbridge being academically superior to other universities (a gap which is, incidentally, narrowing, with institutions like Imperial, Bristol and Kings catching up) often translates into Oxbridge students believing themselves to be part of an exclusive socially superior clique (not just in academic terms) and this does tend to rub people up the wrong way. I agree entirely, again through watching my friends go through the Oxbridge system, that it doesn’t give you a rounded education in terms of life skills. Equally, however, people who have been rejected do tend to have a chip on their shoulder, and it must get wearing for amiable Oxbridge students to be the subject of inverse snobbery, as happens a lot. At the end of the day, most of us students are middle-class and privileged anyway wherever we are at university, and we should perhaps, instead of perpetuating pointless bitchery, use the skills we learn to get worthwhile jobs, or volunteer while at university, and help people worse off than ourselves while learning more about the world than the student bubble in the process.