During this winter's mid-term break, the playing fields at Rondebosch Boys school in Cape Town will look like the perfect South African society. Wealthy white boys from "English" suburbs will mix with black cricketers from the townships. The skill levels and enthusiasm will be high, the coaching at Ryan Maron's Cricket School of Excellence, will be, as billed, excellent.

The black and coloured quota of players that must now represent the national team will come from this pool of new, skilled talent. There's only one flaw here: the state has offered no substantial financial boost to black cricket and the quota is not being positively engineered through investment in sports education in the black community.

A state order can hide a lot of deficiencies.

Last week, John Denham, the Westminster universities secretary, said that he wasn't going to "impose" an admissions policy on Oxford and Cambridge, though he clearly would if he thought it would work. Oxford, according to Denham, hasn't tried hard enough to attract students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In 1980, Oxford took 56% of its undergraduates from state schools. After nearly three decades of wealth expansion and 11 years of a government that promised to focus on education, education, education, Oxford now takes 53% of its undergrads from state schools. The Oxbridge system, and who goes to the colleges, isn't the educational gold standard against which all else should be measured. But Denham clearly thinks it is, and rather than admit it might be a wider failure which has caused no change, he'd rather Oxford did as it was told by his department.

Rather than invest in state education and bring it to the point where Oxford and our other elite universities simply couldn't turn away the best, Denham would rather a quota system was there to hide deficiencies.

Alison Richard, Cambridge University's vice-chancellor, doesn't like being ticked off by people like Denham. She recently said universities exist to educate and conduct research, not act as "engines for promoting social justice".

A tipping point is therefore now uncomfortably close, where our elite universities will simply tell the government that state cash is no longer required and orders will no longer be obeyed.

Britain will then have a US "Ivy league" university system, where those from disadvantaged backgrounds will be excluded from elite, expensive institutions on financial grounds. This is the final destination for a quota system.