Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, has told elite universities to increase the number of undergraduates they admit from working class backgrounds or face financial penalties.
The policy prompted fears that highly academic institutions would reject well-qualified sixth-formers from private schools to meet the government’s agenda of “social meddling”.
However, about half of the most respected academic institutions in the country are refusing to use state school intake as a key target for increasing opportunities for deprived students.
Oxford said the state school target would be “misleading” while Imperial College London suggested that the problem lay with poor results in comprehensives and colleges.
All universities wanting to charge higher tuition fees of more than £6,000 must sign contracts with a government watchdog containing targets to “widen access” to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Under the new regime coming into force in September, universities could face fines of up to £500,000 for failing to meet their targets or be banned from charging fees above £6,000 a year.
Analysis of the contracts that institutions have signed with the Office for Fair Access watchdog suggests that three-quarters of universities intend to charge the maximum £9,000 a year for at least some of their degree courses.
However, half of the research-intensive Russell group universities in England have refused to include specific targets for increasing the number of state school students they admit.
Oxford University said it was “misleading” to treat all state school students as disadvantaged, compared with those who have been privately educated.
“Our goal is to increase access for under-represented groups. We are not convinced that using school type is the best means to that end,” the university said in an introduction to its contract with Offa.
Instead, Oxford will focus on attracting candidates from homes with incomes of less than £16,000 a year, the very poorest in society. Other universities are focusing on attracting applications from neighbourhoods which rarely send students into higher education.
The University of Manchester said targets for increasing students from state schools and colleges was “widely acknowledged” as “the least valid” milestone to use.
“The social composition of top performing state schools has been shown to be extremely skewed towards more affluent sections of society,” the university said on Thursday.
Imperial College London said state educated students were “not a disadvantaged group in themselves”. Imperial currently takes 38 per cent of students from independent schools. But this simply reflects “the gap in performance” between A-level students in state and private sixth-forms.
Tim Hands, master of the independent Magdalen College School, Oxford, said the state school targets were the product of "politically inspired social meddling".
A Department for Business, Innovation and Skills spokesman said: “The Government is determined that no-one with the ambition and ability, whatever their background, should come up against barriers to accessing higher education.
“Universities will be investing over £670 million in attracting students from disadvantaged backgrounds by 2016/17, over quarter of their fee income above basic fee levels."
