MIT overtakes Cambridge and Harvard to top spot in QS world university rankings

Thanks so much for all the data! I was just about to write a "well, hopefully nobody on HN cares about these rankings" post, trying to remember some of the facts I read about, but your post summarizes these data so well, no need to post at all.

Just for the record: I recently read (presumably on HN, too) about a ranking where somebody asked lawyers to rank schools according to their prestige. Penn-State always got ranked in the middle, even though it didn't have a law school at all. So, in a sense it doesn't even matter if administrators are cheating or not...

You're taught in faculties just like anywhere else. There is a Department of Computer Science or Department of History or whatever, and those are where everyone goes for lectures. You have 1-to-1 or 1-to-2 teaching sessions in your college (or at least, organized by your college), with some kind of relevant academic in the college (taught by a PhD student, PostDoc, professor, depending on who is availble, who the director of studies thinks is good, what level of undergrad etc).

The analogy usually used for the benefit of American-tourists (not meant patronisingly, it's just empirically surprisingly effective) is that it's like Hogwarts. You have the colleges/houses (like gryffindor and hufflepuff) where you live (at least in 1st year) and eat and play sports for, but lectures and the degree in general (like potions class) are all done in faculties with people doing the same course but in other colleges.

Most lecturers and professors will belong to a college too, but they'll still be lecturers in a faculty rather than a college. In Cambridge there is an academic rank called 'College Lecturer' but like most things that doesn't mean what it says, and is probably designed to confuse and intimidate foreign people, like everything else (for example May Week when all the college balls are held after exams, is in June, and the weeks start on Thursday and end on Wednesday). [Lest the po-faced take me seriously, it's not actually designed to confuse people, it's just there's a lot of vestigial baggage that it's not worth the effort of changing [like removing an appaendix when it's not causing you problems] when you've been around almost a millennium and where a switch to the Gregorian Calendar was more recent than when the desk in your study was built.]

Lectures are organized by the relevant subject's department, independently of the colleges; in many ways the departments are as autonomous as the colleges. But supervisions, the more important part of the Cambridge style of teaching, are organized by your college (though smaller colleges with only a few students in a given subject will often share supervisions, and even the biggest colleges might send you elsewhere to be supervised if you've picked an obscure specialization in your third year). Almost all colleges offer almost all subjects (there are a few special cases like st edmund's which is a dedicated theological college AIUI), but some do have a reputation for particular subjects; many (but by no means all) computer science students (in general most students don't have a minor in the UK, especially in Cambridge) go to either Trinity Hall (for its history/reputation and its generous internet usage policies) or to Churchill (which is physically closest to the Computer Science department)

Not entirely true. MIT students are required to take, on average, at least one humanities course a semester even if they are doing a purely tech degree. I was a comparative media studies major there and the faculty was incredible. A lot of the professors are poached or borrowed from Ivy league schools. The linguistics department in particular is amazing. You can also cross register for courses at Harvard or Wellesley, which is awesome. About a quarter of the folks in my dorm were music majors (along with something else of course.) Humanities majors are common, humanities-only majors are rare, but I don't think any of us felt like the humanities education there was anything but world class.

I've been reading through all the comments, many of which complain about bias. That's only part of the problem. Often students applying to graduate school have a better idea of what they're looking for, but for undergraduates the metrics that they're weighing with other factors such as campus life are much murkier, and these rankings don't analyze the questions that deeply.

For example, Stanford and Rice University have the same student-to-faculty ratio, and their endowments are proportional, but Stanford has 2 graduate students for every undergraduate student, whereas Rice is one of the smallest Division 1 schools AND has fewer graduate students. So when Rice claims undergraduates interested in interacting closely with faculty in cutting-edge research will have ample opportunity to do so, one could argue they may be more likely to provide that to undergrads than even Stanford. Because I've compared experiences with Stanford folks, I don't think Stanford is behind Rice in that category, but the fact is, I'm comparing against one of the very top schools. So perhaps my argument holds for most universities that are ahead of Rice in the rankings, but a student is going to have to really dig to figure that out, and perhaps speak with students and faculty at each university to grasp the differences that matter to him or her. And that's only in the category of undergraduate participation in research--there are many other questions students face that these rankings can't properly answer.