Hacker News Reader

Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

No "Public Schools" in the UK refers to a very specific subset of fee-paying schools mentioned in the Public Schools Act of 1868 (sometimes informally includes a couple of others). Private Schools are the other fee-paying schools. What a non-Brit might think of as "public" schools are actually called "state" schools in the UK

View on HN

The way I explain it to American friends is that any member of the public, if they have £45,000+ per year to spare, can send their son to Eton. Simple.

Only if the child in question is male.

Fair point - fixed.

Is that really true though? Money is the only factor in admission? No entrance exams? No rejections for “families we don’t want to be associated with”? No special admittances for prestigious families that don’t get charged?

If not, maybe that explanation isn’t a very helpful one.

Well, it was a joke, but to take an earnest question seriously, there are entrance exams, but they're not especially hard, particularly if you've been coached beforehand, as many of these kids will be. Theoretically no special cases, and "celebrity" would certainly be frowned on at Eton / Harrow - these are old-money families, not nouveau-riches.

I edited the comment — “celebrity” might be the wrong word, but I was thinking that they might care more about having a noble’s kid attend than the 45k, and, like you just implied, they’d reject nouveau-riches even if they had the money, especially if the riches came from a source that’s frowned upon.

So it’s not a very good joke, as it implies that there aren’t any other filters, despite their intense concern for reputation.

If you're looking for jokes to be factually accurate, comedy must be rather unsatisfying for you.

They need to have enough truth/insight to be funny. When your premise is that Eton only looks at cash-in-hand for admissions -- pretty much the opposite of the truth -- that doesn't qualify.

The joke would only work for schools that famously looked the other way on pretty egregious stuff if you paid them enough -- not on a school that makes a point of heavily filtering beyond the official tuition. (Sorry, "sticker price".)

Side note: It's also kinda funny how the parent expects 45k to be some kind of jaw-dropping, outrageous number, when Americans routinely pay that much for college.

The funny thing is that this entrance exam to Eton is effectively their ticket to the top, once you're there you're on easy street. Boris Johnson attended Eton, didn't achieve particularly good results but cruised into a scholarship at Oxford. I attended a decent state school and had a fellow student who had literally top grades in all the exams he'd taken (eight "1"s at Standard Grade, five "A"s at higher, five "A"s at Advanced Higher) and his application to Oxford was touch-and-go. Now, such grades do not guarantee anyone a place at Oxford as there is a lot of competition, but you can be sure that if he had two English A-levels at grade B or C[0] he wouldn't even have been considered. The application would go instantly to the bin.

This is not true of Eton (or I guess Harrow or the other public schools).

[0] - Or whatever Boris Johnson got, I can't recall exactly, they were spectacularly subpar but he's masterfully scrubbed them from the internet

The point is that the school won't reject a child because their parents don't work in a particular industry or belong to a certain religious organisation, as was sometimes the case with "private" schools previously. Both private and public schools pre-date state schools in the UK, hence the confusion over the terminology.

But the parent followed up and said that part isn’t true true either though:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33275396

So… what’s left to make the joke work?

Our son went to a public school and my wife came back from a meeting at the school amused that she had managed to catch sight of the schools evaluation of us as parents - she scored very highly as an advocate (Scottish equivalent of a barrister) and I was scored down for being a humble computing type.

Both of us thought this was hilarious!

It’s supposedly meritocratic by academic ability and potential, now - about 25% of pupils receive bursaries covering a substantial percentage of the fees, but that means the other 75% require parents capable of spending £45,000 pa on their education.

Given the life-long opportunities an Eton education affords someone, and the likely backgrounds of that 75%, you’d be reasonable in suspecting “a system of perpetuated inherited privilege”.

Or win one of the (up to 4) 100% “New Foundation Scholarships” offered to state school boys.

And this comes down to history.

When these schools were founded, the alternative was to have private tuition - as opposed to be taught "publicly" and live with children from other families.

(The school I went to was founded in 1513 - but is known as a private school rather than a public one because it was never a boarding school).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com