Discuss.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3361106&forum_id=2#31474240)

1. Lol at Harvard

2. I thought Cambridge was widely acknowledged as better than Oxford?

3. Looks like Chicago trolling here as well as in US News

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3361106&forum_id=2#31474256)

1a) lol at Yale not cracking the top 10.

1b) lol at USNews for their random ranking shakeups; this one does not have large year-to-year shifts, which make no sense anyway.

2) Cambridge has never been ahead of Oxford in this particular ranking.

In reality of course it varies by discipline. Historically Cambridge has been stronger in pure science and engineering whilst Oxford has been stronger in just about everything else (which is not just liberal arts: law, econ, medicine etc. are all better at Oxford).

Every Prime Minister since Churchill who went to university went to Oxford, with the sole exception of GorTTTon Brown from Scotland, who went to Edinburgh.

The last Cantab PM left office in 1937.

3) I can't explain it either.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3361106&forum_id=2#31474416)

Since you seem to know a lot of about the British universities, how would you compare Oxford/Cambridge to the USA? Since those schools are large and the population in the UK is so much smaller than in the US, are Oxford/Cambridge the functional equivalent of the top 15-20 schools in the US (with differences among the individual colleges of course)?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3361106&forum_id=2#31474453)

I'm not sure I'd say they're the functional equivalent of the top 15-20, though you're on the right track. It's more like "the functional equivalent of the Ivy League+Stanford, plus some chunk of MIT/Caltech".

Oxbridge have a collective enrollment of 40,000 students at all levels; the Ivies+Stanford collectively have an enrollment of 141,000 or so. The ratio is less than the UK/US population ratio, but more of Oxbridge are foreign students (fully 41% of Oxford enrollment) than the Ivies+Stanford, so the raw population numbers don't tell the whole tale with respect to their role in the UK specifically.

Imperial College is the UK's MIT/Caltech, supposedly, but Oxbridge still get the lion's share of the good science and engineering students in the UK, so there's a functional difference between the UK and US scenes, there, too.

Individual Oxbridge college differences are overplayed in the US, I think, especially the extent to which they are likely to matter for Americans at Oxbridge. For postgraduates--which is most Americans--the college matters not at all (other than the living conditions you can expect to be in, which do vary widely, but don't always match up with richer = better), and this is also now increasingly true of the many undergraduate subjects that are mostly taught outside the college (science, engineering, medicine, many specialized courses). It matters most for undergraduate languages, history, liberal arts type programs.

Even there, I believe all undergraduate faculties now operate a unified admissions model, so the quality of the undergraduate students is much more uniform than it would have been in the "old days" of college-dominated admissions. This was always the case for graduate admissions.

I will say that a student's "Oxbridge experience" would be somewhat compromised by choosing one of the graduate-only or nontraditional colleges, but these are the minority.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3361106&forum_id=2#31474567)

What's the dropoff like after Oxbridge (and perhaps Imperial/LSE)? Is there a hard line, or is it a sliding scale in prestige like in the US?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3361106&forum_id=2#31474935)

After Oxbridge it does get a lot muddier. Other "good" schools are LSE, Imperial, UCL, Durham, Edinburgh. St. Andrews is niche but was greatly helped by William attending. I'd hesitate to rank any of these.

This isn't a bad start at a general ranking, though it overvalues several Scottish and Welsh universities for regional reasons, and undervalues Imperial for subject reasons: http://i0.wp.com/media.thetab.com/uploads/2014/05/LEAGUE.png?resize=540%2C1180&ssl=1

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3361106&forum_id=2#31475010)

This has:

1) Oxford

2) Cambridge

3) Imperial

4) UCL

5) LSE

6) Edinburgh

7) King's

8) Manchester

9) Bristol

10) Warwick

11) Glasgow

12) Durham

13) Sheffield

14) St. Andrews

I don't find much to quibble with there in a general sense although I would likely personally put Durham several places higher and St. Andrews a couple places higher.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3361106&forum_id=2#31475034)

Cambridge is certainly not behind and certainly ahead of Oxford

Yale is correctly not on the top 10 list

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3361106&forum_id=2#31474965)

Georgetown might churn out more politicians than Princeton.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3361106&forum_id=2#31475072)

I think it's a reasonable metric for comparing Oxford against Cambridge, especially since the two schools are roughly the same size. The metric probably over-values LSE a bit, though.

Princeton is small and doesn't have a law school, and is inconvenient for a political staffer to pursue further education. Education beyond the BA is also much more common for US politicians than it is for UK politicians, especially because of differences in how the legal profession operates. A lot of those Georgetown degrees on all the charts (and the GWU degrees) are second degrees.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3361106&forum_id=2#31475110)