[lordnacho]

You'll find all the colleges have an outreach programme where they send the undergrads around to various schools to encourage the kids to apply.

I'm not sure the dons themselves can do much about it, it seems like they only get to see a small sample of the total pool of applicants. I only met a couple of them when I was applying, and after I got in it didn't look like they had a full view.

As for data, it's not obvious what data would tell you whether they did or didn't try.