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Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

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Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#341

Post by OJFord »

musicale wrote: post #338
OJFord wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they'll never have quite the same cachet, but it's the same anywhere - UCLA/Stanford/Yale are extremely respected but nevertheless not Harvard or MIT. No doubt someone more familiar would say not all IITs are equal, but Bombay, Bengaluru & friends lead the pack. &c.

Probably Berkeley (not UCLA) is the top-tier UC. 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 wa…

I may have an overly STEM-centric view, but I don't think Yale has anything like the reputation of MIT internationally. I'm only really aware of it from Americans (in Hollywood, newsletters, etc.) being impressed by lawyers' and MBAs' credentials.

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.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#342

Post by musicale »

OJFord wrote: post #341
musicale wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably Berkeley (not UCLA) is the top-tier UC. 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 wa…

I may have an overly STEM-centric view, but I don't think Yale has anything like the reputation of MIT internationally. I'm only really aware of it from Americans (in Hollywood, newsletters, etc.) being impressed by lawyers' and MBAs' credentials. 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 whateve…

> I may have an overly STEM-centric view

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, having attended U. Delaware and Syracuse University.)

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#343

Post by rayiner »

ceejayoz wrote: post #308
rayiner wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re suggesting that having “a shitty home life” can make people perform badly on tests, but not perform badly in real world tasks, we don’t “know” that. It’s something people want to be true, but there’s not much evidence for it. Meanwhile, there’s reams of evidence that standardized tests scores are highly predictive of performance.

Most people don’t go to Oxford just to go right back home to said shitty home life.

Okay, but where is the evidence that those people perform better in real world tasks than their test scores would indicate once they are no longer in that shitty home life?

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#344

Post by yodsanklai »

cauch wrote: post #316
yodsanklai wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These tests are pretty advanced maths and physics, not just multiple choice question you can just drill. Also almost all the prep schools are public. Pretty much all French physics Nobel Prize and Field Medal laureate when to the same top school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supérieu...

It misses the point: if you split the universe in two identical parallel universe, but then take the same individual and in one universe train them 2h per week, and in the other universe, train them 8h per week, do you really think, whatever the test is, the second one will not perform better? This is the point of training: the more training you have access to, the better you do. If it was not the case, then the noti…

Yes, more training will invariably give better outcome for a given individual. But some people are just incredibly more talented than others due to genetics alone.

If you want to build an elite sport team, I don't think you want to artificially put less athletic kids for the reason they had to work harder.

I think the question is why do we need elite higher education at all. Maybe we don't. In my view, we want to funnel the brightest people there and make sure they get access to the best resources.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#345

Post by danpalmer »

vzaliva wrote: post #140

Be cautious with university rankings. Universities can be assessed by research, student satisfaction, teaching quality, cost, accessibility, or by specific fields. Some excel in computer science, others in medicine or the humanities. A single overall ranking is therefore meaningless - look instead for the measure that matches your priorities. For instance, for research impact in computer science, see: https://csranki…

Research impact correlates to size, which may be directly opposed to getting a good education as smaller institutions may have more resources per student.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#346

Post by blibble »

exe34 wrote: post #147
rm445 wrote: post #124

I am a Durham graduate, still somewhat involved with the university via some voluntary roles, and a bit of a 'booster' in the sense that I'll sing its praises to anyone. I also have a postgrad degree from Cambridge and did a little teaching while there. So, I'm quite familiar, and while I'm happy to see Durham get some love, this is bunk. There is a gulf in undergraduate teaching between Oxbridge and the pack. The su…

> The supervision system guarantees all Oxbridge students weekly, small-group tutorials, 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.

2 is the norm for supervisions/tutorials

and having 4 people is very different from 2

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#347

Post by OJFord »

_hark wrote: post #174

I'm a researcher at Oxford, and I've both taught and studied here and in the US. The undergraduate teaching here is phenomenal. It's incredibly labor intensive for the staff, but the depth and breadth students are exposed to in their subject is astonishing. It's difficult to imagine how it can be improved. My favorite study of university rankings comes from faculty hiring markets, which compute implicit rankings by m…

> British A Levels are far more difficult than the SAT/ACT/AP exams.

I think we just teach people to pass exams, really. Not to say it's necessarily wrong - you do need a grasp of the subject matter still - just that 'how the exam works' is an additional thing you learn.

I'm British, always lived here, took A levels naturally, and took SATs & ACTs too because I applied to MIT - I think I did extremely poorly. (vs. decently on A levels, meeting both my Cambridge & Imperial offers) I just had no familiarity with the test, the sort of questions, etc., maybe some of the subject matter is different too - from memory I think there was no calculus and an extraordinary emphasis on trigonometry? But I can readily understand then that vice versa you'd look at an A level exam and think Oh that's hard, because it's just not what you've been taught towards in the US.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#348

Post by nine_k »

rando001111 wrote: post #340
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time of every bright child having Oxbridge as first university pick ended quite a few years ago. Not accurate that parents are saying this either, the change has largely come from parents who are often people doing hiring and have seen the change over the past few years. The very top aren't applying there any more at all, you don't need to: Stanford, Harvard, MIT, all better. Oxford, in particular, has made their…

You're talking like Oxford is some school for shitdogs now. 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.

On one hand, fair. On the other hand, an MIT or Stanford graduate is more likely to be immediately hired by Google, or NVidia, or Barclays, or something else top-notch, without having to make intermediate career steps.

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#349

Post by OJFord »

jgraham wrote: post #257
joosters wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oxbridge have never had to 'let in dumber people'. They are always heavily over-subscribed, and give offers to a small fraction of the people who come for an interview, let alone apply. The whole point of the interview process is to assess not just the applicant's past achievements, but what they might be able to achieve if they got their place at the uni. Part of that is looking at the applicant's background, and kn…

In addition, the colleges have a lot of data about the people they interview and how well they do during the degree programme. My understanding (based on a discussion with one Natural Sciences admissions tutor at one Cambridge college nearly 20 years ago, so strictly speaking this may not be true in general, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't common) is that during the admissions process, including interviews, applica…

All these Cambridge alumni with this dodgy Latin, 'smh'! You're an alumnus, or identifying as an alumna! (Identifying as many alumni at a stretch, but then still not 'a Cambridge alumni'.)

(alumnus not of Cambridge, but from a state school, fwiw)

('people called Johns, they go the Cambridge?!')

Re: Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

#350

Post by rcxdude »

wulfstan wrote: post #330
growse wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parents in state schools don't put in even half of the effort on average. I wondered how long it'd be before we'd see "parents who can't afford private education just aren't putting the effort in".

The truth is that if you have an intelligent child, independent school is a complete waste of money. In the UK you will be spending in the vicinity of £200k over a child’s education to finish a levels, and although they will get better a levels on average, their results at university do not reflect their a level achievements. This is why independent schools find themselves downgraded in university offers. This isn’t…

>You also end up with a very narrow program of study which for children with broader interests forces them into a box very early

To some extent, but one of the things about it that I liked was the course I was on was more general than most other English universities. But still, it's not as broad as e.g. a US university, so it's pretty relative. (Basically, for engineering the curriculum is basically 'all engineering' until the second year, where you then can pick specific modules to go into specific areas. Natural Science and Mathematics are similar. But, relevant to your point about burnout, they didn't really cut anything from each area compared to other, more focused courses, so the workload was definitely intense). For me it was a perfect fit because I knew I wanted to go into engineering but I didn't really have a strong preference for which type (still haven't really given up being a generalist).

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