Found here, The Guardian is suggesting Oxbridge is elitist and, worse than that, racist too, as the top unis accepted no black students last year. So because something statistically unlikely happened one year, that makes them racist? I can see why Oxford and Cambridge would have been hesitant to show this data, because it's so easy to label them as racist becouse of it. But they're not. That would be like saying the University of Winchester is sexist because of this year's tiny percentage of women on the Journalism course. It's not, that's just how things have worked out this time around. Wikipedia has estimates from 2007 of 1.45 million black people living in England, and a estimate from 2008 of 51.4 million people across the country. If If remember my GCSE maths correctly that means that black people make up just 2.8% of England's population. So this is already a smaller group of people to draw applicants from than white and Asian Brits.
And are Oxford and Cambridge really elitist? I doubt. The fact is that those posh schools like Eton have a lot of money, and with all that money they can afford the most expensive teachers, and with the most expensive teachers they can successfully groom their pupils towards Oxbridge and other elite universities. Meanwhile in public schools the higher education aims are set lower - depending on where the school is located, much much lower. The students have it harder as they have less resources available, though how much harder varies of course. So it's a given that those lucky, privately educated individuals will have greater success in applying to Oxbridge, but that doesn't mean that Oxbridge is elitist. Why would they turn a prospective, quality student, no matter what their background?
The simple fact is that of the black students who applieds to Oxbridge last year, none of them got in. That just means that those students - and it has nothing to do with the colour of their skin - did not meet the standards the universities asked for. It's just an unfortunate occurence, and the Guardian is making a bigger fuss of it than it really ought to.
