Oxford’s Career Connect is failing northern students

The north-south divide is alive and well at Oxford’s railway station at the end of term. While students heading south crowd the opposite platform, those of us heading north have enough room on the other side of the tracks for a quick kick-about.

The University of Oxford suffers from a severe lack of representation of Northern students, with almost 50% of UK-domiciled undergraduate students coming from London and the South East, while students from the North-West, North-East, and Yorkshire and the Humber made up just 7.6%, 2.5%, and 5% of admissions, respectively, from 2022-2024. There appears to be an inbuilt bias, however unconscious, against the North, the implications of which can be felt in a plethora of ways. 

Accent prejudice in Oxford, for instance, has been well-documented in recent articles from Cherwell and other student newspapers. Bias can start even before the first day – a friend of mine was asked if all the mines were closed yet in the North-East during our offer-holder day. Not exactly a great first impression. These attitudes reflect an ingrained social prejudice that just won’t come unstuck. Nor are they confined to the University. When doing my research for this article, it didn’t take long before I was hit with blatant assumptions about people from the North in the byline of a 2021 Daily Telegraph article, synonymising “bright young things from the North” with “students from poorer backgrounds”.

So you can imagine the pleasant surprise that I felt when the recent careers emails were sent round proudly advertising the “over 50 exciting summer opportunities available across the UK” that were about to drop. A quick browse on Career Connect, though, brought me back down to the (southern) earth, as the claims of placements “across the UK” didn’t come into fruition.

Of the 60-odd opportunities advertised in the first round of domestic summer internships, only one was an in-person placement in the North (an opportunity in Newcastle seems to have slipped through the net – otherwise, the map seems to have been erased north of Watford).

We’re undeniably very lucky at the University of Oxford to have so many internships organised and shared by the careers service. It is heartening to see that many of the placements available are remote, widening opportunities and improving accessibility. It’s also good to see that three regional alumni groups (The Oxford University Society of Cornwall, East Kent, and East Sussex – all, unfortunately, in the south) are offering bursaries to support students from these areas to access internships, while there are also routes within colleges and the broader University to apply for financial support and travel grants. But the implication that I would have to commute to the south in order to conduct a worthwhile in-person internship seems to ignore the many interesting and insightful organisations doing important and varied work in the North. 

While an online placement is certainly better than nothing, the idea that just because I’m from the North, I can’t access the same in-person insights into a workplace as my Southern counterparts seems pretty unfair. Because even if commuting into London, or forking out for a place to stay, was an option (it certainly isn’t for me), at the end of the day, it is the careers office that is missing a trick here. Through failing to advertise placements in many of the hundreds of fantastic organisations that are doing wonderful things in the North, it is the University’s students who are missing out.

Given that Oxford is a southern university, it is both reasonable and to be expected that the domestic internships are therefore weighted towards the South. It would be fantastic, though, if there were even proportional representation, offering a similar percentage of placements in the North as there are northern students. 

In recent years, the University and individual colleges have been making a concerted and commendable effort to improve Northern representation in the student body, with programmes such as Oxford for North East, Oxford for North West, and Oxford for Yorkshire and the Humber offering “workshops, application support, mentoring, and residential visits” in order to boost intake. Through making connections with organisations based in the North, for instance, through linking up with the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, the University could go one step further, cementing relationships with the regions and, in doing so, taking a more holistic approach to boosting northern admissions. Offering internships in the North would demonstrate long-term support for northern students that goes beyond the application process, ensuring equal provision once students are in the door.

For now, though, I had best get back to my search for a placement in those seemingly little-known, off-the-map backwaters like Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds.