year, approximately 3,500 applicants receive offers from their preference college and a further 1,000 to 1,100 applicants are offered admission by another college through the pool. On average, one in five applicants is pooled and around one in four pooled applicants receives an offer of admission.
Statistics released by the university show that some colleges regularly receive particularly high numbers of applicants, and these colleges tend to take fewer applicants from the pool. Other colleges regularly draw a greater proportion of their undergraduate intake from the pool.
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Public debate in the United Kingdom exists over whether admissions processes used at the University of Oxford and Cambridge are entirely merit-based and fair, whether enough students from state schools are encouraged to apply, and whether these students are offered sufficient admission. In 2020–21, 71% of all successful applicants were from state schools compared to approximately 93% of all students in the UK who attended state schools and 82% of post-16 students.
Critics have argued that the relative lower percent of state school applicants with the required grades for admission to Cambridge and Oxford has had a negative impact on Oxford and Cambridge's collective reputation, though both universities have encouraged pupils from state schools to apply to help redress the perceived imbalance. Others counter that government pressure to increase state school admissions constitutes inappropriate social engineering. The proportion of undergraduates drawn from independent schools has dropped over the years, constituting, as of 2020, 26% of total admissions among the university's 3,436 applicants from independent schools compared to 23% of the 9,237 applications from state schools. Cambridge, together with Oxford and Durham, was among those universities that adopted formulae in 2009 to rate the GCSE performance of schools, using data from the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and took this into account when assessing university …
