Private School Pupils Achieve Better Degrees: Findings from a new education market research study have found that pupils from private schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester, had a major advantage in terms of getting in to and graduating from so-called elite universities. The survey suggested this was the case even if private school pupils were intellectually inferior to their state school counter-parts.

Private School Pupils Achieve Better Degrees

The research, which used data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, looked at 7,700 individuals who attended school during the 1980s and found that those who went to private secondary schools were around two and a half times as likely to go on to achieve a degree from a Russell Group university than comprehensive or grammar school pupils with the same results at A-level.

Privately educated pupils were also one and a half times as likely to have graduated from a mainstream university when compared to students educated via the state system.

In percentage terms, around one in three (31%) of privately educated pupils within the 1970 cohort study gained a degree from an elite university, compared to only 13% for grammar schools and one in twenty (5%) from comprehensives. For the purposes of the research, ‘elite’ institutions included members of the Russell Group, as well as the University of Bath and St. Andrews University.

The report suggested that, among the reasons for the large difference between success rates in terms of attending elite institutions among those attending state and those attending private schools, the outlook of parents may have some part to play.

Indeed, the results suggested that having a parent with a degree significantly increased the likelihood of graduating from an elite university; individuals from the 1970 birth cohort were more than twice as likely to graduate from a Russell Group university than individuals with the same A-level qualifications but whose parents did not have any qualifications.

When this was analysed in tandem with type of school attended, it was found that more than half (52%) of pupils who attended private schools had at least one graduate parent. This figure fell to 31% among grammar school students and to 14% among comprehensive pupils.