Oxford, in particular, has made their bed. They have made a willful choice to be worse. I am not sure why anyone wouldn't take them at their word.

Do you have a source to back this claim?

ARWU is biased towards research, but nevertheless Durham is currently #201-300 and St Andrews is #301-400. So the post is a bit sensationalistic as well. However, as someone in Oxford, I reckon the university has serious structural issues that need to be addressed if they want to stay at the top of their game.

Unlike Cambridge, Oxford doesn't have a post equivalent to Assistant Professor. In many divisions, appointment as an Associate Professor often occurs by internal promotion and this has created really toxic dynamics that scare off top talent. Furthermore, in many fields, Junior Research Fellowships are no longer attractive compared to e.g. a Lecturer position at Imperial or an Assistant Professor position overseas. Failing to attract and retain junior faculty has devastating consequences in terms of teaching and research quality.

Undergraduate admissions have experienced lots of recent changes. It is great that anti-state school bias is no longer present, but some faculty I know have expressed concerns about admissions becoming too subjective and often taking in students that are gaming the system by creating a false narrative of overcoming learning difficulties and minor disabilities (vs considering true disabled students, for instance). I find this very unsettling.

With that said, some courses (e.g. Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science) are outstanding and more isolated from these issues. IMHO, they still offer terrific value at the Home Fee rate (£9k), even if you need a mortgage. A rigorous and timeless no-nonsense education that is greatly valued by top employers.

The only people applying to those from the UK are the wealthy.

If by "very top" you mean "richest", then maybe. But I'm not sure we care about that?

However... some of the best business contacts I have came from teaching at a trade school in Texas. But I'm just selling solutions into SMEs, I'm not baby-sitting kids with VC funds.

For this they measured the gap between what graduates made, and what they would be expected to make based on high school record, test scores, and choice of major. In other words, "How much do you earn because of the university you went to, rather than your own virtues?"

That university won because it has a network rich people who could help people's careers get a good launch.

If you can't get the grades, you don't have merit.

Debase the currency, surprised when it has less value? Lol.

Of course! So easy! What percentage of foreign students applying get aid or scholarships?

> Again, this is really the best of the best, those with the highest merit.

You're assuming that "the best of the best" are applying. This is not true. "The best of the best who are encouraged to apply and/or have the means", apply. This is not the same population.

> All they had to do was convince a bureaucrat their life was hard

I don't know who this "bureaucrat" is. When I interviewed at Cambridge I was seen by 3 fellows, all members of the relevant departments.

> If you can't get the grades, you don't have merit.

Nobody's this naive, surely?

Collage loans seem like a great solution when you’re entering a highly lucrative career, but that’s not true for every top student.

> Debase the currency, surprised when it has less value?

This bizarre comment is not related to the issue at all.

Higher education is a strange purchase that is engineered to extract the maximum amount of money (up to full-cost tuition, fees, etc.), based on financial records which you are forced to provide.

Any asset except for a residence is typically considered something that could be tendered to the university, and is accordingly deducted from financial need.

This means that external scholarships are limited as to how much they can reduce the expected parental or student contribution. Anything beyond this limit is deducted from need and pocketed by the university.

Not to say I'm (nor was) 'the very top' either - I just liked the idea of MIT for the same reason Imperial appealed I suppose.

Do you mean that they've accepted more state school students? Because you'd expect to take quite a good number of them if you're selecting the "best"!!

I went to an unranked school here in Canada for electrical engineering and graduated this year. I did a couple co-ops, won a couple engineering competitions and had my EIT job lined up for me after graduation. Started work a week after classes ended.

Rankings are not the end-all be-all for uni.

Obviously there are some industries where degrees are necessary (law, medicine, presumably academia, although I'm not certain), but outside of those, the limiting factors of how far you can go are independent of where you graduated from. There are some places where the initial hiring process will be mostly filtered by where someone graduated, but in the long term, most people will either hit a point of diminishing returns regardless, or they'll be able to make up the difference.

Postgrad degrees still have a lot of value, and open a lot of doors. There are things I learned in my Master's that I probably wouldn'tve been able to get at a deep level working in industry, and for that same reason I want to go for a PhD (even if it might be ill-advised in these times).

I think sales in general may also be one of those fields where education is not that important.

If you don't it may take you a decade of career time to "prove yourself" and network to the point where you could apply for something similar.

Or you might _never_ get the chance to do that because you are stuck in jobs at "normal" companies where you spend all your time on low impact stuff.

Why would you want to work for those places?

Infrastructure projects are where it's at. Pays well and you're using your technical skills to do some good for the country for a change.

A rather crude way to express it. But I don't think that pointing out that Oxbridge isn't always a first choice implies, um, "shitdog" status, whatever that is.

Those are not in the UK?

Anyway, you are making some bold statements and have zero substance backing them up. Please refrain from spreading nonsense.

Frankly speaking, the only advantage of US universities is how much fund they have for postgraduates.

and I agree with much of the parent post, and would add that "oxbridge" and/or "high ranking schools in subject areas" provide many of the professors to "lesser" schools or programs, so you can get a fine education from anywhere.

however, the special extra sauce for me was not small classes/personal attention, but rather rooms full of the smartest possible peers to do problem sets with, and these are found at the highest ranked schools, see first paragraph above, they attract the best incoming freshman.

Wouldn't league tables like Norrington and Tompkins be more important for them?

I remember during my Britishphilia phase in HS and imagined doing a CS Tripos at one and then a BCL at he other before I removed the emotion and realized the services and network was inferior to a good UC like Cal or UCLA or a B10 like Mich, I was concentrating more on the College itself, not the Uni as a whole. Like being at Harris Manchester College, Oxford wouldn't open the same doors that Balliol College, Oxford would, and it was Oxbridge, Imperial, UCL, LSE, or bust.

At the undergrad level, Oxbridge is college driven and not all colleges are equal even if everyone is in the same faculty.

It's not like Yale or Harvard where you are randomly assigned a house, and the overwhelming majority of education services are provided by departments.

I don't like using "Anglo" because it also implies the Anglophone world, so I'm hesitant to use "Anglophilia" because it is also often used to lump Australia, Canada, and even the US to a certain extent as well.

A portion of Russell Group programs are amazing, but I felt I could get similar exit opps at at a good domestic state flagship in the US with less headaches around AP-to-A level equivalencies, admissions exams, and logistics.

So... yes... despite consistently ranking high on surveys, Durham and LSE are not "sexy" in the way Cambridge and Oxford are.

Yale is part of the Ivy League and was founded ~65 years after Harvard. Also ranking #1-#2 for producing US presidents, Harvard-Yale is probably a somewhat better US university analog to Oxford-Cambridge.

Stanford is well-regarded and may be a solid competitor to Harvard in a number of ways (#1 in Turing awards, #2 in VC-backed startups behind Berkeley, etc.) but it was founded 250 years later (considered a long time in the US) and has a smaller endowment (4th place, behind Harvard, UT, and Yale.) It has also only produced one US President: Herbert Hoover.

MIT is a top tier school though more focused on technology (it's in the name). MIT has a business school (Sloan), but a Harvard/Yale/Stanford will include a business school, law school, med school (etc.) and a range of well-regarded programs in humanities and social sciences in addition to science and engineering.

Anyway, I don't think the specifics really matter, point is it's not unusual to have a bunch of extremely good universities and then a handful or fewer that are for whatever reason the first-to-mind 'best' ones.

This is likely; international vs. US also probably makes a difference, as three of the last six US presidents (by person, not year) were Yale alumni (no MIT alumni have yet become president, but I think it's a good idea!)

And five are Ivy League grads: Obama from Harvard Law School, and Trump with an undergrad degree from Wharton/U. Penn. (Biden being somewhat of an outlier, attending U. Delaware and Syracuse University.)

The same is true in the US as well: The University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania are probably world beating for economics and finance research respectively -- but I would still recommend people to go to Harvard/Stanford for an economics-focused undergrad or finance MSc or MBA if they have the choice, due to the name recognition and the network...

We had that in Physics at Manchester in the 2000s. 4 students. I'm guessing they got the idea from Oxbridge, but I don't think it's been a USP for a very long time.

When I was at Cambridge in the early noughties, supervisions for maths and computer science (and physics I believe but I didn't go to any of those) were 2 students in 4 1-hour sessions per week (1 per 24 hour lecture course). [Edit: hmm, actually maybe it was just 2 per week.] In maths, if there were an odd number of students then one would get 1 to 1 supervisions, but I'm sure that depends on the college. For computer science, I was put in a 3 person supervision when they had an odd number (and I wasn't happy about it at the time!)

I later did teaching at UCL and Imperial and the difference was huge. When they get to it, I would advise my children to go Oxford or Cambridge in a heartbeat. (For reference, my parents were too poor to even consider university.)

A large part of uni is about learning to learn on your own and learning in groups - if everything is spoonfed, it might not be the best training.

Tutorials in Oxford are impressive for me for many reasons: 1. Those teaching were generally of a higher level beyond Ph.D., post docs or professors, all paid, all assessed against an NPS from students, and the performance of the students in exams 2. Tutors are generally teaching more adjacent topics (creating connections), students are challenged to think beyond the assignments (which are generally tough), 3. Tutorials are calibrated and personalised to students and made sure all students are challenged at the right level, I had tutorials where I had to teach 1:2 because the students were excellent and needed a higher level of complexity.

and having 4 people is very different from 2

Oxford has long had a reputation for being a dual university - a raw academic track for smart people, and a political/establishment track for people with money, connections, ambition, and the kind of entitled self-assurance that comes from easy privilege.

"Political" doesn't just mean politics, although the notorious PPE degree often means exactly that. It also means media/journalism, and law.

There's some overlap between the talent intake and the connections intake, especially in the humanities. (Science is a little more rigorous.)

Generally if you're on the political track Oxford opens doors no other university will. Cambridge is a good second choice, and St Andrews has a minor presence in Scotland. But realistically the rest - Durham, York, Bristol - don't really count.

The difference is that tutors don't just teach, they talent scout. A good word and an introduction from a tutor - quite likely to be face to face at a social event - opens doors and plugs you straight into the network.

Another problem is that students are very often totally uninformed about their own institutions, despite their institutions informing them. During my time here I have seen multiple instances of students demanding a thing that already existed for years, was mentioned in the beginners brochure, could be found on the official website with a simple google search and so on.

So as much as I dislike saying it as a former student, but the mayority of students opinion is not necessarily a reflection of the institution itself, more of the mood within the student body. And this may or may not correlate with the value of the education received there.

When my son and I visited St. Andrews a few years back we were informally told that they really only select people who make that university their first pick - and given that St. Andrews doesn't seem to have any problems attracting students then I would question whether everyone puts Oxbridge first. I certainly knew people when I was applying to university (40+ years ago) who were very bright but who didn't even think about applying to Oxbridge because of the perceived snobbery.

I've also met quite a lot of rather unimpressive Oxbridge graduates in my career - so I wouldn't automatically assume that they get the brightest and the best.