Whites have “failed staggeringly” to let blacks into Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and now they must admit students regardless of academic achievement, the Ghanaian-origin “British” Universities Minister Sam Gyimah has announced.

Speaking in an interview with the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Gyimah—who was born in Britain but spent most of his youth in Ghana—said that the administration of the two famous universities had made a “staggering failure” by not admitting more black students, and that “colleges must look beyond exam results to improve diversity.”

Gyimah said he struggled to understand how Oxford and Cambridge could regularly produce Nobel prize winners but could not “crack the issue of admissions.”

He said they had “not done enough” to improve admissions rates of black students and urged them to “take into account a broad range of factors”, rather than focusing purely on academic results.

“British” Universities Minister Sam Gyimah.

He said that the universities should make more use of “contextualised admissions” and that they “take into account a broad range of factors, not just the performance in the tests.”

His comments come after new data emerged that at Cambridge, six colleges failed to admit more than 10 black or mixed-race students in five years, while St Edmund’s College failed to make a single offer.

Similar figures for Oxford, compiled between 2015 and 2017, showed one in four of its colleges had not admitted a single black student each year.

In 2017 Oxford received 396 applications from black students but admitted just 48, a success rate of less than 14 per cent.

In contrast, 8,908 white students applied and nearly one in four were admitted.

The reason for this discrepancy is, of course, that the universities are till using academic achievement and ability as guidelines for admission—and it is this “crime” for which they are now being attacked.

Gyimah warned the two universities to “reconsider,” as there were now “very hard levers” available to the university watchdog, the Office for Students, “if the universities fail to change their ways.”