Taking this point further, I note there's a huge Anglo-Saxon bias in the prestige of Universities.
I don't know why this is.
I say this having studied at Oxford and Cambridge and noticed how 'unfair' it was that many French and German universities had undergraduate bodies with even higher selection standards, yet few people internationally would have heard of them.
It seems odd to me that Harvard and Oxbridge are well known, but an elite German university like TUM is not.
With respect to Anglo-Saxon institutions, I don't think all of it just mere bias.
The talent pool issue is not a negligible one. English-speaking universities simply have a larger pool to draw from, and the best American universities in particular have the advantage of being able to not only draw talent from the largest English-speaking country in the world (itself, though arguably India too if we count L2 speakers), but also tons of aspiring students around the world who also speak English (especially from large countries like China and of course India) who become alumni, achieve success elsewhere and go on to boost their alma mater in their spheres of influence. Also the spreaders of international influence (the media) tend to be predominantly English-speaking, so Anglophone universities are naturally boosted over others.
Most non-English speaking elite universities are limited in that way -- Ecole Polytechnique for instance is very famous (and very elite) in France but has trouble drawing talent from the rest of the world. Not as many people are interested in learning French vs English...
The other is "forward momentum" I think, which has to do with research $ for producing work that matters. US schools have real money to hire and do "stuff that matters", at a scale that would be inconceivable at universities in smaller countries. It's also easier to assemble the right team with when you have a big pool of people to draw from both domestically and internationally, and to provide a strong academic community for folks to thrive in.
Also universities that optimize for selective admissions at the undergraduate level tend to have different goals (say, grooming an elite class for the country's public, private sector, etc.) from research universities, whose goals are to generate discoveries (the latter tends to be considered, for better or worse, more prestigious). As such, you may not be surprised to learn, most elite universities (at the undergrad level) don't have strong research programs.
There's a metagame here, and our instinct is to think that education rigor is necessary and sufficient to produce prestigious universities, but I think in the modern world, other factors dominate.
For selective undergraduate universities, there’s a whole bunch of “elite” universities in Asia — eg the IITs in India, or Tsinghua & Peking in China, or NUS in Singapore.
If someone asked me about Germany, Heidelberg probably comes to mind.
And national university in my opinion should educate in their nation's language(s). Even if it means losing the very crème de la crème of global talent.
If the EU could get its shit together they might some day dump more money in universities than even America does. And create some giant English based universities located on the coast of a sea, somewhere where the EU has the best climate. All just to compete with the global top universities.
The first EU university enters in the 40s or 50s of the list and Australian universities seem perhaps overrepresented.
Closer to the ground, or, let's say, being more grounded in mundaneness, I think it's also because a lot of excellent papers are never translated to English. Asia "gets" this and pushes their English papers.
FWIW, Galois's memoirs have still not been translated, as far as I know.
Oh yes, and ETH Zurich is at least in the top 10 of the QS list.
I've heard that this is because the French and Germans often split institutions into teaching and research, so their teaching institutions look crap to outsiders because they're not doing any research.
> I say this having studied at Oxford and Cambridge
Hah! So not so smart after all then...
Maybe someone from a Grandes Ecoles would know ;)