I lied to my interviewers back in December 2013 (Sorry Pete!). I didn’t pick King’s College because of its magnificent architecture, left-wing reputation, or (thank God) its central location. I’d never once visited Cambridge before my interview, and picked King’s the day before UCAS was due because I couldn’t find the option for the pool, and King’s was the only college I’d heard of. By some stroke of luck my fabricated response got me in, and I arrived here assuming that many of the friends I’d make would have similarly blundering stories to tell. What I hadn’t expected was to encounter so many people who knew ten, twenty, or thirty people from their school already here. It seemed that for many Oxbridge wasn’t the transcendent, unattainable place that I’d conceived of, but, for many was akin to an open invitation.

Suddenly, despite coming from a pleasant middle-class area in York, I became one of the ‘less privileged’ here. I qualified for a full bursary, and met people who were the next generation in a line of their family to come here, people who didn’t need to take out maintenance, or even tuition loans, and people who thought a ‘standard’ family holiday was a skiing break at their chalet in the Alps. The even more bewildering thing was that not all of these people came from private schools – shattering a dichotomy I’d always invested in. Of course, the private school intake problem remains at Cambridge, with the BBC reporting in 2011 that Eton, Westminster, St Paul’s School and Hills Road Sixth Form College (the only state-funded out of these) sent more students to Cambridge than 2000 other lower performing schools. Since then, there have been claims of improvement in state school intake - my own college supposedly takes the highest proportion of state school students in the university. However, the recent equality report’s claim that not a single child from Cambridgeshire qualifying for free school meals got admitted to Cambridge in 2014 was unsurprising, and very much in line with my experience here.

Statistically speaking, state school intake may have increased, but it remains difficult to point out many examples of genuine, successful social mobility. The preponderance of state school students I have encountered here come from old grammar schools, or those (like mine) in affluent, middle class areas of the country. My own sixth form performed well academically, and did the best they could to prepare me for interview, but even then we were working on many assumptions that turned out not to be true.

The attitude prevailed for me that Oxbridge success was rare, and perhaps unattainable; it was largely the opportunity to attend a pre-university summer school that pushed me towards applying. If my sixth-form was somewhat underprepared, it’s depressing to imagine the situation at less well-performing schools. The problems for access begin when GCSE and A level students are told that Oxbridge ‘isn’t right for them’, a refrain easily digestible to those with no family record of attending university, and for anyone misled by the assorted myths shrouded around both universities. David Cameron has recently pointed his finger at Oxbridge for a lack of diversity, all whilst handing down measures that make it increasingly difficult for lower-achieving state schools to prepare their students for these universities.

Removing the AS-level benchmark has meant Cambridge no longer has early criteria for assessing whether to ask students to interview, and has thus been obliged to bring back the admissions exam, in a move that will further disadvantage the lowest-performing state schools. It is a test that will scare state-schooled students away from applying and hinder those schools that cannot offer the same advice and guidance that private schools can, on the kinds of responses the exam will be searching for.

Access initiatives like CUSU’s Shadowing Scheme, which I recently participated in, are fantastic for targeting these students for whom Oxbridge might not seem an option, and dispelling pertinent myths about the ‘type’ of person who can go here. Yet it seems progressively more difficult to maintain that the student body here is ‘diverse’ while the government is simultaneously squeezing money and resources out of struggling schools and making it harder to encourage those students who are truly underprivileged to even consider applying for a place at Oxbridge. Chancing upon a summer school opportunity like I did cannot be counted on by all prospective applicants. Student access initiatives can only reach so far, and while low-performing state schools struggle under the current government, private school students will continue to saunter through the application process, and the Cambridge version of ‘underprivileged’, or ‘poor’ will remain gravely disjointed from reality.