WHAT ARE YOUR chances of getting in to Oxford or Cambridge? The two universities admit about 6,700 undergraduates between them each year, roughly 2 per cent of the total entry to higher education.

Cambridge received 14,585 applications and Oxford 13,287 for entry this October. Cambridge alone rejected at interview more than 5,000 students last year who went on to get three A grades in their A levels, underlining the intensity of competition.

They may all be academic thoroughbreds, but success in the Oxbridge stakes can seem as remote as winning the Grand National. Yet students with a bookmaker’s nose for form can shorten the odds through careful study of the application rates for different subjects and colleges.

Figures on the ratio of applications to offers at individual Oxford colleges show a lot of variation. Oxford gets an average of 3.2 applicants per place for politics, philosophy and economics (PPE), its most popular course alongside law, English and medicine. However, Balliol’s reputation as a kindergarten for future political leaders helps to explain why it draws 5.5 applicants. The odds of studying PPE are twice as good at Keble and Pembroke, where there are 2.7 applicants per place, and best of all at Mansfield College, which receives only 1.8.

St Hilda’s, Oxford’s only all- female college, gets 0.9 applicants per place for PPE, although men, of course, are ineligible to become “Hildabeasts”. It typically receives far fewer applications than other colleges — less than one for every two places offered in classics, biology or chemistry, for instance — but gains from the university’s allocation of candidates who have expressed no college preference.

Take medicine. Magdalen, notorious for bridge-jumping revellers on May Day, wades through 9.6 students per place, while St Anne’s gets only three. In law, St Peter’s gets only 2.5 applicants per place, less than half the number battling to get into Trinity or St John’s. It’s a similar story in English; an average of 9.4 candidates compete for each place at Magdalen, more than three times the number seeking entry to Somerville or St Hugh’s.

Across the subjects, chances at Oxford are highest in biology and chemistry, which attract fewer than two candidates per place. As the furore over the rejection of Laura Spence highlighted in 2000, they are weakest in medicine, where the ratio of candidates to places is five to one.

Cambridge does not break down applications in each subject by individual colleges but it does provide a wealth of information that may influence students’ choices. Offers were made to 60 per cent of the 125 applicants to study classics, but to only 30 per cent of the 665 candidates for modern and medieval languages.

Applicants for English had only a 25 per cent chance of success, compared with more than 60 per cent for those seeking places in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic studies. Philosophy had a 20 per cent success rate, and offers went to 45 per cent of candidates in theology.

Colleges make differing proportions of offers too. All-women Newnham offered places to 45 per cent of candidates, and there was a 40 per cent success rate for applicants to New Hall, its single-sex sister. One in three applicants to Girton received an offer.

Just 20 per cent of applicants to King’s or St John’s were offered places, however, a strike rate matched by nine other colleges.

Though it may boost your chances to weigh the best combination of college and course for your application, strategy alone will not win you entry to Oxbridge by the back door. The more obscure subjects may attract smaller numbers of candidates, but they inevitably contain high proportions of knowledgeable enthusiasts.

Bluffers won’t get past the interview, but those with a genuine curiosity about the field can impress the tutors with their desire to study. As Cambridge notes in its advice to would-be students: “We’re looking for someone who really wants to learn about the subject and is not interested just in the degree at the end — important though this is.”

Despite persistent grumblings about discrimination, students from independent schools still win about 40 per cent of places at Oxbridge. What difference will “OffToff” make?Ministers have been at pains to emphasise that the regulator known formally as the Office for Fair Access (Offa) has no influence over admissions. Yet Oxford and Cambridge appear to have adopted different approaches in the access agreements they signed with Offa in return for the right to increase tuition fees.

Oxford limited its ambitions to raising the proportion of state school applications from 57 to 62 per cent within five years. To do this, it must attract an extra 270 state applicants per year.

Cambridge set a target to increase admissions from state schools from 57.6 per cent to between 60 and 62 per cent. Geoff Parks, the director of admissions, insisted that entry would continue to be on merit, but pointed to the university’s efforts to reach out to “genuinely competitive” students from the state sector.

He said: “It is not a case of saying that we have more applicants from state schools. Therefore, we must reduce places from independent schools. But if competition goes up, somebody will lose out on places. The ones with more to lose are more likely to lose them.”

As the only British universities in the world’s top ten, Oxford and Cambridge inevitably command great attention. Both are working to dispel the mystique surrounding them that undoubtedly left some youngsters feeling too intimidated to apply in the past.

Summer schools, outreach visits and open days, plus the wealth of information about the admissions process on their websites, all make Oxbridge more accessible than ever. But if you never apply, you’ll never know.

• E-mail your questions for John O’Leary, Editor, The Times Good University Guide 2006
• From Friday: subject tables in full, and the top university named

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