Charlottesquare wrote:tjh290633 wrote:genou wrote:I recall that O Grade Latin was still a requirement to read Law at Glasgow ( that would have been entry 75, which may, memory willing, have been the last year in which that was true ). At that time the postal address was
The University
Glasgow
which they have given up, since it caused endless grief at other, younger, institutions. I'm not sure I have a view on how many should go to Uni, but I recall that for my cohort, a degree involved under 9% of the population.
In my day (1951), you had to have a credit in School Certificate Latin to go to a top university.
Certainly more women at university nowadays. In my year of Chemistry there were only 5 women, one from each of the Ladies Colleges. One of those was a nun.
TJH
I suspect that was financial.
My Dad and two of his brothers won bursaries to go, my mum was an only child so her father supported her going to Edinburgh but had she had brothers that would have been unlikely. Similar thought processes applied with my stepmother, whilst she was academically gifted (Dux of her school, Holy Cross Academy, Edinburgh) it was her younger brother who was supported to university in the 1940s, the family could not afford two. Same happened with my grandfather much earlier (pre WW1), he apprenticed as a tailor (like his father) and his brother was sent to Glasgow, their sisters would never have been considered for the one university place the family could afford to support.
Yes - my wife's mother was one of the two daughters who supported their brother to go to St Andrews University.
However by the late fifties Macmillan's "never had it so good" had come true for both working class men and women who aspired to higher education - with means tested grants and zero fees. There was still a lingering cultural battle to be fought - with many able girls leaving school at fifteen, getting a job, and waiting for a husband. However, encouraged by our parents, my sister, from a mining community, went off to Edinburgh University, and I followed on in the early sixties.
There is, however, still a level of sexual apartheid in course selection. E.G UK women are still substantially under-represented in Engineering. In my student days, there were probably less than 20% women taking Physics (called Natural Philosophy in Scotland), while my wife remembers about 50% in Chemistry. (p.s. we both had higher Latin - and it helped us to read the grade of our degrees on our scrolls
)