I can still remember how nervous I was as a 17-year-old sixth former when the letter from Cambridge University arrived. The good news was that I was in - a place to read law at Selwyn College. The bad news was that they were concerned that I was "verbose" (well-qualified for a career as a politician perhaps). They also wanted A-level grades that I had no chance of attaining.
So it is heartening, watching BBC2's documentary series Black Ambition, to see just how much some black youngsters who did make the grade are getting out of their education at one of Britain's top universities. The series, which begins this evening, follows the lives of eight black British undergraduates at Cambridge over the course of two academic years. The students of 2002 are followed through their final year and into the world of work, while those who graduated in 2003 are filmed undergoing the stresses of exams and finding jobs.
What is perhaps most striking about the young men and women profiled is their confidence. In the first programme we meet Annette, a computer science student, and Nadine, who is studying law. "The world's my oyster," says Annette, who aspires to a well-paid job as an IT analyst when she graduates. Nadine plans to eschew the traditional professional paths her father wants her to follow in favour of a career in the media.
Such confidence is not just a personality trait. It is something that is carefully cultivated in young people, inspired by supportive parents at home, great teachers in schools and by universities such as Cambridge - or, in my case, London and Harvard - demonstrating their confidence in a young person's potential by awarding them a place to study surrounded by experts and the brightest of their peers.
There is a self-fulfilling prophecy at work here, a virtuous circle of high expectation and high achievement. The academic and social elitism of life at Cambridge, claims one of the students, "prepares you for a life which is expected of you when you leave". This kind of confidence, in two fairly typical young black women from south London, is seen all too rarely among their contemporaries. Here the self-fulfilling prophecy breeds only an acute poverty of ambition. Annette's friends accused her of "selling out" when she opted for Cambridge ahead of a place at a less prestigious university closer to her home in Peckham. "Why do you have to go thinking you're better than everyone else?" they told her.
The problem is equally prevalent in schools. Nadine's headmaster had told her to forget about university because she wasn't "the right calibre" of student: she proved him wrong by getting a 2:2 in law. Annette's family view her schooling in the Caribbean rather than in Peckham as instrumental in her subsequent success. The lack of suitable role models in education (or law, business or politics for that matter) creates the impression that for black people ambition is somehow beyond British shores.
Those that succeed, similarly, often try to escape as soon as they can. When a career in the media fails to take off, one of the students decides to try her luck in the US. Echoing Tony Blair, she points to the success of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as evidence that the US is more accepting of black success than Britain. "I know I'll get what I'm worth in America," she says.
We cannot afford to lose talented young black people, who make it to university, overseas, or worse, to let other talented black people be put off by the notion that university is somehow not for them. At present, the numbers speak for themselves. There are only 84 black British students out of a total of 11,600 Cambridge undergraduates. Though black people make up almost 5% of the population, they account for less than 0.7% of Cambridge undergraduates. And even those that do apply face major obstacles. In 2001, 419 black British students achieved A-level grades in the range ABB - AAA. One hundred of them applied to Oxford, 98 to Cambridge. We surely have to ask whether these universities could be doing more to ensure that more of these highly talented individuals are given a chance to study at Oxbridge. Are admissions tutors being given adequate equal opportunities training and subjected to appropriate scrutiny to ensure that their procedures are fair?
In fairness to Oxford and Cambridge, both have tried hard to widen access in recent years. But it is still not good enough. I know from my experience of higher education in the US that British universities still have an awful long way to go. While at Harvard, I was struck by the palpable sense of noblesse oblige that surrounds their sophisticated outreach and bursary programmes. It is almost as if they view extending opportunity to disadvantaged individuals as their highest mission. There is still elitism, but it is genuine academic elitism, neither as aloof nor as tinged with old-fashioned class prejudice as one finds in Britain. Our top universities have a similar tradition to draw on if they choose - but it is one they seem too easily to forget.
How can British universities catch up with their American counterparts? They need to start by demonstrating far more imagination and creativity in how they recruit talented young people from non-traditional backgrounds. Whereas Harvard is all over Harlem, I simply don't see enough of Britain's top universities in Tottenham, and I'm sure the same is true in Toxteth or Peckham.
Under the government's proposals for higher-education funding, and with a new access regulator for higher education, universities will finally have both the incentives and the resources to properly support students from working-class and disadvantaged backgrounds. Cambridge has already announced that it plans to spend £8m of the additional £20m it expects to receive from higher tuition fees on helping poorer students. But if they want to encourage more applications from these students, universities will have to start early. Many talented youngsters in the black community have written off university - or more often, written off themselves - by the time they take their GCSEs. Universities should be targeting children in inner-city areas as early as primary school.
But those members of the black community who do go to university also have a part to play. We need ambassadors such as Nadine and Annette to go back into the schools in their communities and help dispel the myth that aspiring to success is selling out, or that university is somehow out of the reach of black students. A university education is a privilege, but we should be proud that in Britain it is also a right, no matter what your income or class or ethnic background. As beneficiaries of such an education, Nadine and Annette, like me, have a responsibility to ensure that more people in the black community see it as their right too.
David Lammy is Labour MP for Tottenham and a minister in the Department for Constitutional Affairs.