I didn’t think about my accent before I went to Cambridge in 2018. More specifically, I didn’t think about my accent before I went on the Cambridge University ski trip in December of my first term there. I was sharing a room with one of my best friends and my then boyfriend, who both went to southern private schools that send dozens of kids to Oxbridge.

I’d never thought, until then, that their background was any different to mine: I went to private school in Nottingham, boarded during sixth form and had parents who were retired and lived comfortably.

We were, like typical freshers, playing a drinking game when I said something in my Nottingham-esque way. My friend turned to me and said: ‘If you asked me to put us in order of poshness – of the type of person you’d expect to go to Cambridge – I’d say me, then Dan, then you.’ Nobody said anything and the conversation carried on. I was so embarrassed.

Looking back, I feel angry, not at my friend but at the environment that enabled her to say it. Cambridge loves to think it’s impressive and inclusive, throwing figures around (courtesy of its newly minted Equality, Diversity & Inclusion unit) about 72 per cent of students coming from state schools and 30 per cent identifying as Black, Asian and minority ethnic.   

What nobody talks about is how unified the 28 per cent of students admitted from private schools are. Data from the Sutton Trust shows Oxbridge accepts more students from eight top private schools than from 3,000 other private schools put together. It’s no coincidence that of those top eight private schools in question, the northernmost is in Cambridge.

This bias towards posh southerners quickly became glaringly obvious. By my second term, my friend was dating a boy who went to a £10,000 per term private school in the Home Counties. He was one of 64 boys from his year who got a place at Oxbridge (I’m 99 per cent sure the school I went to hasn’t had 64 people go to Oxbridge, combined, in its 156-year history). He would joke constantly about my accent, making me say ‘bath’ and ‘glass’ like it was hilarious. One day, sitting in my friend’s room, I snapped and told him to shut up. ‘It’s a joke,’ he said. ‘You can’t expect me not to when you sound so funny.’

I remember calling my friend Liv, the one other person from Nottingham I knew at Cambridge, to vent. ‘It’s pathetic,’ she told me. ‘At my college, poshos do gun-fingers at me because I’m apparently from “Shottingham’’.’ She told me that at a formal dinner a few weeks earlier, while chatting with her table, a lecturer had interrupted her mid-sentence with: ‘Please, try to speak in a way that’s intelligible to the rest of us,’ when she’d said, ‘My friend and me’ rather than ‘My friend and I’.

I found it difficult to make friends because so many people at Cambridge already had friendship groups from school that had been implanted into university life. I’d go for brunch with girls from college, and they’d sit and talk about how people they knew from home were getting on. Maybe a part of it came from me, too, because I couldn’t be bothered to put myself in situations where my accent and background would be derided. That, topped with a hellish workload, created a lonely existence. I spent most of my time working, in my room, to the pleasure of my tutors but to the detriment of my mental health. By the end of my third year I was having treatment for anxiety – no surprise, given that one in three students at Cambridge will take antidepressants during their time there. I was lucky that my parents were happy to have me home most weekends, and reminded me that the only thing worse than feeling miserable at Cambridge would be dropping out and having nothing to show for it.

If this sounds grisly, bear in mind that I am very privileged. I went to a private boarding school in the Midlands. Then imagine how ostracised you’d feel if you were from a working-class, Northern background. There was a boy called Josh who I studied with in my first year. In the first week, I remember a girl coming over and telling me with glee: ‘Do you know his mum lives in a caravan in Carlisle?’ He’d resat his A-levels multiple times to secure his place, and it was immediately obvious he stuck out like a sore thumb. There were the financial things, like him not having £1,000 to attend the ski trip nearly every other fresher went on in the first Christmas break. Then there was the quieter snobbery, with people saying, ‘I just don’t know what I have to talk to him about,’ when he’d pop into a party. He deferred after a term, came back a year later, and eventually dropped out altogether.

There are issues with student behaviour, and then there are issues with the university talking hot air about inclusivity while encouraging practices that highlight the financial disparity between students. A ticket for a May Ball – the celebratory parties that happen at the end of the academic year – costs between £180 and £400. Most students attend at least three. If your parents or maintenance loan won’t pay for your ticket (you’re not allowed a job while you study because it’s too much of a distraction) you can opt to work for half the evening and get a half-price ticket. Put bluntly, that means poorer students spend half the night serving their richer counterparts drinks or cleaning away their rubbish. ‘It’s the clearest statement of who has money and who doesn’t,’ Liv says. ‘It’s making the students that can’t afford to splash £1,000 a week on parties wait on the students who can.’

I remember leaving one May Ball in my first year in the early hours and on the way home passing students who were going to tidy up our mess. Their ‘payment’? A half-price ticket to next year’s ball.

None of this is to take away from the great things Cambridge offers. I learned with world-leading teachers and graduated with a double first, which opened doors for me career-wise after leaving. I’m undeniably more resilient than when I arrived – even if some of that is down to being disparaged by my peers. But even with the perks, if I ever have a child, I’d never want them to go to Oxbridge. I don’t know which is worse: the idea that they’d be ostracised and derided for not fitting the mould of a typical student, or the idea that I’d raise someone in such a sheltered way that they’d fit in and thrive in that environment.

University bosses have a responsibility to do better. Inclusivity isn’t as binary as figures on state school admissions, and the public should get insights into the percentage of students that come from the top ten private schools alone. Financial support can’t end with the essentials for studying and accommodation, particularly if the university is going to ban people from getting a job.

If £400 balls are advertised as the highlight of the year, bosses need to make sure the working-class students they showcase in their adverts can actually afford to go.

Luring students from diverse backgrounds to a university only for them to spend three years feeling belittled and miserable is, mental wellbeing considered, arguably worse than not admitting them at all.

I’m in touch with a whole two people I went to uni with, compared to dozens of friends from school and home. Next year, I can go back to Cambridge to get my honorary master’s, but I don’t plan on doing so. I’m grateful for the things I learned, not just academically, but regarding the type of person I want to be. With that in mind, would I go back and do it all again, knowing what I know now? Absolutely not.

Names have been changed.