About a fifth of all students accepted in the 2015 admissions cycle were minority students, a number that has risen about 38 percent in five years. (For comparison: About 87 percent of the population in the United Kingdom is white. Eight percent is Asian, and black groups makes up about 3.5 percent.)

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That dismal number for blacks accepted to Cambridge has a lot to do with how the institution is perceived, the men in the picture said. “Many people get discouraged by a particular image or stereotype of a Cambridge student that they have in their mind, thinking that they won't fit in or be accepted,” Folajimi Babasola, one of those in the pictures, told BuzzFeed News.

Dami Adebayo, who studies engineering, told the BBC that even after he was accepted, he wasn't sure he'd fit in. “With a mind-set like that, these types of institutions will never be the right place for people like me,” he said.

Matthew Ryder, deputy mayor of London for social integration, social mobility and community engagement, studied at Cambridge between 1986 and 1989. “It was striking” how few other black students were at the university then, he told the BBC. “There was very little overt racism but at times, as a black person, you felt like an oddity.”

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The university says there are other challenges, too. Cambridge is one of the most competitive universities in the country; most admitted students have earned top scores on their qualifying exams. In 2010, the Higher Education Funding Council for England looked at which students received those scores and found that 82 percent were white. About 11 percent of Asian students and 1.2 percent of black students hit those scores.

A university spokesman noted that in 2015, 140 black students across the United Kingdom secured A*A*A on their exams, the grades that Cambridge entrants achieve on average. Of that pool, a quarter were admitted to Cambridge.

Nonwhite students also tend to apply to more competitive programs, such as medicine. And they tend to stick closer to home than their white counterparts. And when they do leave, they cluster at more diverse, urban universities in London, Birmingham and Bradford. The competitive London School of Economics and Political Science, for example, offered places to 95 black students last year, including many from neighborhoods with historically low rates of university education.

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None of these explanations, though, fully account for what's going on in the United Kingdom. Black students across the country are applying to university in record numbers, and they're more qualified than ever before. Even so, they received fewer admissions offers than their white and Asian counterparts.

According to the Guardian:

Despite record numbers of applications and better predicted A-level grades and equivalent qualifications, only 70% of black applicants received offers of places, compared with 78% of white applicants and 73% of students from Asian backgrounds. According to Ucas’s predictions, 73% of black applications should have been successful.

Fixing this, experts say, will require universities to look beyond their student population numbers. More diverse staffs (just 0.5 percent of university professors in the United Kingdom are black) would help. Most important, though, might be a change in outlook.