Opening England

England's elite universities Oxford and Cambridge are planning to liberalize their entrance requirements in an effort to increase the proportion of students from government supported secondary schools.

While only 6 percent of all public secondary-school students in Britain attend private schools, almost half the students at Oxford and Cambridge are alumni of those institutions. In 1982, for instance, 48 percent of the students at Cambridge were private-school graduates, 46 percent find attended government schools, and 6 percent came from overseas.

At Oxford, a committee headed by Sir Kenneth Dover, master of Corpus Christi College, has been asked to draw up a program of "positive discrimination" in favor of government-school students by next fall. The committee is expected to recommend changes in entrance exams to improve those students' chances. The Chronicle of Higher Education