Oxford has educated a wide range of notable alumni, including 30 prime ministers of the United Kingdom and many heads of state and government around the world. In the university's Faculty of Music on St Aldate's is the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments, a collection mostly of instruments from Western classical music, from the medieval period onwards. Out of the students who matriculated in 1870, 59% were sons of professionals (25% were Anglican ministers). All of these colleges later became coeducational, starting with Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne's in 1979, [61] [62] and finishing with St Hilda's, which began to accept male students in 2008.

There is a range of support available to students and staff at Oxford, including help to deal with the impact of the pandemic. In June 2017, Oxford announced that starting the following academic year, history students may choose to sit a take-home exam in some courses, with the intention that this will equalise rates of firsts awarded to women and men at Oxford. Oxford University RFC are the most famous club with more than 300 Oxford players gaining International honours; including Phil de Glanville, Joe Roff, Tyrone Howe, Anton Oliver, Simon Halliday, David Kirk and Rob Egerton.The Sutton Trust maintains that Oxford University and Cambridge University recruit undergraduates disproportionately from 8 schools which accounted for 1,310 Oxbridge places during three years, contrasted with 1,220 from 2,900 other schools. Many aspects of our vaccine trials and accompanying data have been published in scientific journals. If a large number of shortlisted applicants for a subject choose one college, then students who named that college may be reallocated randomly to under-subscribed colleges for the subject. Recruitment of those who have a higher chance of being exposed to the virus has been prioritised, such as frontline healthcare workers, frontline support staff and public-facing key workers, in an effort to capture the efficacy data as quickly as possible.

As such, its collection is growing at a rate of over three miles (five kilometres) of shelving every year. The Chancellor is elected by the members of Convocation, a body comprising all graduates of the university, and holds office until death. The university's professors are collectively referred to as the Statutory Professors of the University of Oxford.

For graduate study, there are many scholarships attached to the university, available to students from all sorts of backgrounds, from Rhodes Scholarships to the relatively new Weidenfeld Scholarships. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found one dose of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine to be 30% effective against this variant and two doses to be 67% effective.