Because the poor are considered worthless, why should they be given an education by the ruling elite? They will never be accepted by the society in which they wish to become absorbed...
The town of St Andrews, whose university said only 200-300 teenagers from Scotland's most deprived areas got the requisite grades in 2011.
One of the UK's top universities has estimated that only two or three out of every 100 school-leavers from Scotland's most deprived areas are getting good enough grades to win places at elite universities.
St Andrews University said it believed the greatest barrier for children from deprived areas getting into top universities was long-term poverty, and a lack of educational and social support from a very early age.
Prof Louise Richardson, St Andrews' principal, said its analysis suggested only 200 to 300 teenagers from deprived areas got the results to reach St Andrews. Recent criticism by NUS Scotland was unfair and over-simplistic, she said. The student union said the university had a "truly awful" record after it emerged that it had only accepted 13 people from deprived areas.
"The issue isn't one of highly selective universities not having an interest in attracting kids from deprived backgrounds," Richardson said. "It's quite the reverse. The problem is that so few kids from deprived backgrounds meet our entry requirements. We go to enormous pains to try to attract them."
NUS Scotland found that in 2011 only 13 students of all ages from Scotland's most deprived areas won places at St Andrews, amounting to just 2.7% of places there. Just 91 won places at Edinburgh (5% of all its undergraduates) with 51 at Aberdeen (3.1%).
NUS Scotland's data did not show how many poorer teenagers overall got the grades needed to reach St Andrews, or highly competitive elite courses such as law or medicine. Unlike in England, the Scottish government does not publish detailed data on grades achieved by children from different social classes.
Ranked as Scotland's top university, St Andrews requires three As at Highers – the year-long Scottish qualification that is roughly equivalent to A-levels – as its minimum entry requirement.
St Andrews carried out its own analysis and estimates that between 200 to 300 of the 11,000 teenagers from the poorest 20% of Scottish neighbourhoods who left school got three As in 2011. By comparison, 5,555 pupils across all social groups achieved these grades in 2011.
St Andrews argues that the top universities across the UK compete vigorously with each other to attract the best-performing candidates from poor backgrounds: they are far more likely to be offered places at St Andrews than those from richer backgrounds.
Richardson said St Andrews had recently increased its scholarships and bursaries, and put on summer schools. Some scholarships set up for such applicants went unfilled because the candidates were not there.
"It's a much more complex problem," she said. "This annual cycle of criticising universities for not taking enough kids is getting us nowhere. We don't want to admit kids and set them up for failure. We can only admit kids who've a reasonable expectation of success here."
Robin Parker, the president of NUS Scotland, said he did not recognise St Andrews' figures but said it needed to "get real".
"Of course Scotland has deeply ingrained poverty issues, and no one is asking universities to solve all of society's ills. However, just because universities can't do it all doesn't mean they can't do more," he said.
"They should instead be looking at how they can start offering opportunities to talented young people they are currently overlooking."
Earlier this month, Oxford announced it would offer Scottish students from deprived backgrounds up to £22,000 over three years to take up courses there. Baroness Helena Kennedy, a Glasgow-born lawyer now principal of Mansfield College, told the BBC: "I want to make sure these opportunities are not the preserve of the elite. I want these opportunities to be available to the brightest and best everywhere."
Scotland's elite universities face statutory measures from the Scottish government to widen access in new legislation expected later this year, in return for a new funding package. St Andrews has led calls for graduate contributions to replace Scotland's free tuition for Scottish residents.
St Andrews' analysis was backed by Prof Lindsay Paterson, a sociologist and an expert in educational policy at Edinburgh University.
"It's not St Andrews' fault," he said. "We know that the social origins of inequality go far further back, right back to early childhood. It actually goes to the differences in language and brain development.
"There's a limited amount that schools and universities can do about this. It's actually about inequalities in society. If we continued tackling poverty, that would get to the heart of it or targeting children at the point at which it would have the biggest impact – about the ages of three to five."
Aberdeen University said it could not comment on St Andrews' figures but said the issue needed far greater investigation. "We would argue that by turning this into a quantitative metrics exercise for higher education institutions, we avoid addressing serious issues of deprivation that will have impacted on the student's experiences for the first 17 or 18 years of their life," a spokeswoman said.
A Scottish government spokesman said it was "strongly committed" to improving educational standards through its Curriculum for Excellence reforms, and was developing new strategies for teachers to improve outcomes.
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