PRESSURE to hit controversial new targets for admission of state school students would increase drop-out rates or reduce academic standards, the President of Trinity College, Oxford, said yesterday.

Michael Beloff, QC, predicted that Oxford would declare independence from the state system and go private within 20 years, setting its own tuition fees to escape government interference. He said that the Government should “take its tanks off Oxford’s lawns” over admissions policies.

Sir Colin Lucas, the outgoing Vice-Chancellor, also gave warning against growing government regulation in his retirement address yesterday. Sir Colin said: “This regulation is articulated so visibly in a spirit of distrust of universities that we may legitimately be anxious about its future direction.

“We should never depart from the paramountcy of academic quality in the selection of students. I have no doubt that if we were required to use other criteria instead, that would provoke a crisis in our relationship with government.”

Mr Beloff accused the Government of shifting the debate with last week’s publication of the new “benchmarks” for recruitment of state students at top universities. Oxford’s target rose by nearly 9 percentage points to 77 per cent.

“It is no longer about whether Oxford’s admission system is sufficiently meritocratic: it is whether it is sufficiently egalitarian,” he told the annual meeting of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference in St Andrews, Scotland.

Oxford wanted the best applicants wherever they came from. Failure to hit its target would not be evidence of class bias, but of the university’s determination to safeguard its reputation by maintaining admissions standards. “To alter those standards in pursuit of social or political rather than educational objectives would be a betrayal of the university’s role,” he said. “If universities are forced to select unsuitable students, they will have to fail them or lower the pass mark.

“They are educational institutions, not laboratories of social engineering. It is not for universities to be coerced into relieving the Government of its responsibility for ensuring an improvement of standards in the maintained sector.”

Recalling Gordon Brown’s attack on Oxford after the rejection of the state school student Laura Spence in 2000, Mr Beloff said: “Gordon Brown appears to believe that the fact that candidates from independent schools achieve places at Oxford disproportionate to their numbers in the secondary education system overall is a sign of some inherent vice in the Oxford admissions system.”

Selection of students “should not involve any departure from merit as the criterion of admission, or discrimination in favour of the product of state schools”. A government report on admissions last month had urged universities to create a more diverse student body.

“What we should be striving to create is a student population of higher quality,” Mr Beloff said. “Diversity as an aim makes no more sense for Oxford than it does for Arsenal: no one suggests that Arsène Wenger should pick more white footballers simply because they are white.”

Tony Blair’s 50 per cent target for participation in higher education by 2010 risked “dumbed-down degrees coinciding with a graduate glut”. It raised “the scary vision of students from bog-standard comprehensives proceeding to take ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’”.

A huge amount of public money would potentially be wasted on students who were unsuitable for unversity. The tuition fees increase to £3,000 a year from 2006 would be too small to end the financial crisis facing universities.

Mr Beloff said that comprehensive schools had failed the country’s brightest children. Seventy per cent of Oxford entrants had come from the state sector in the early 1970s before grammar schools were largely wiped out. The abolition of grammars was “one of the major mistakes made in Britain in the last century”. Nothing could convince him that the brightest students did as well in comprehensives.

“If you have to teach intellectually outstanding and the intellectually challenged together, you may benefit the latter but you will surely burden the former . . . Whatever ends comprehensive schools serve, the polishing of the minds of the most gifted of our teenagers is not among them,” he said.

Mr Beloff criticised the Government’s “seasonal mantra” that annual improvements in GCSE and A-level grades were the result of greater effort by students and better teaching.

“The substitution of modes of soft assessment for rigorous exams, of multiple-choice questions for essays; the decline in knowledge of foreign languages, and of linguistic skills in their own; the turning away from the harder sciences; the abandonment of joined-up history; the threat to the study of Shakespeare in the national curriculum all point in a downward direction.”

Employers were not deceived and continued to distinguish between an Oxford degree and “the kind of degree soon to be awarded by institutions with no research facility”.

Mr Beloff said: “It risked a massive waste of resources on students who in terms of temperament, ability, and aptitude are not equipped even for the more exotic syllabuses — golf course studies and aromatherapy and the like — on offer at some of these recent comers to the higher education scene.”

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