A “cruel experiment” that could “ruin lives”


The man responsible for admitting students to Cambridge has claimed allowing poorer students with lower grades into the university would be a “cruel experiment” with the potential to “ruin lives,” the Huffington Post reports. Outgoing Cambridge admissions office head Dr Geoff Parks said allowing “social engineering” would harm students as they would not not be able to keep up with their peers.

“Our bottom line would be that it actually would be a really, really cruel experiment to take a bunch of students and hypothesise that they have what it takes to thrive at Cambridge and then see them fail because they don’t,” Parks told the Telegraph.

“We have very high standards within the university and we do fail students in exams.”

Parks said Cambridge, which was criticised after it was revealed 42% of its students were educated privately, would not pander to “political imperative.”

“None of us in good conscience want to be ruining people’s lives on some gut feel or political imperative based around getting votes or pandering to some particular bit of the populace.”

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