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Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

> British universities bizarrely seem to often reward/celebrate athletics more than academic achievements.

I'm not sure how you get that impression.

American universities do this, but (with a couple of famous exceptions, like the traditional boat race between Oxford and Cambridge) British universities don't care about sport.

The social hierarchy was just separate, and had no bearing on anything academic. I didn't care for a second what the rugby team were doing (generally drinking themselves into a stupor), and they didn't care about me. That's just a reflection on British culture in general.

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At Oxford, for instance, social life mostly happens at colleges. The way things are set up, you simply do not get to spend that much time with your course-mates - you do not interact with them during lectures, and then everyone goes back to their colleges.

And social life in colleges is (sadly) dominated by drinking at the college bar, drinking in clubs, and dinners in the dining hall, where everyone seems to sit according to some unofficial hierarchy (with being in the top sports team in a popular sport seemingly correlated with being near the top of that hierarchy). Inter-college and Oxford vs Cambridge competitions in all kinds of sports (but primarily rowing) are a massive part of college life. The university rewards athletes with awards of blues and half-blues, drawings on college walls celebrating sports victories, prominent mentions in college publications etc. Academics, on the other hand, are not given nearly as much attention - you would almost never know how good someone is doing in their studies, especially since they are probably studying a completely different subject to you.

It would be common to go and support your college sports team in, say, rowing; whereas nobody really cared so much about academic competition between colleges. Those academic victories were never really mentioned or celebrated.

I went to a mid-ranked UK university and while social life is definitely drinking and partying heavy, sports played basically no role in it at all, like not even a bit. I don't remember a single sports match even being advertised let alone having a major spectator turnout.

I do think it's worth adding, though, that from what I've heard (and given my own experiences), the culture in Oxford/Cambridge is not at all representative of University culture generally in British Universities.

True, yet they are some of the best universities not only in Britain, but in Europe and the world. So they are highly relevant in this discussion as we are talking about the top maths/physics education in each country for top students. E.g. when Russian universities/schools are mentioned here, it is usually Moscow State University or another top university or school that is assumed.

And in many ways, e.g. when it comes to drinking and partying, I would guess the culture in other British universities is even worse. In a top Russian university you simply would not have the time, and they would not hesitate to kick you out; graduating from university can be more difficult than getting into one.

The criticism, then, should be directed at Oxbridge, and not at [almost] all other British universities which don't do this.

I went to Imperial College. "Work hard, play hard" was some kind of motto. Most people followed the first part, the second part was optional. There was more "play" at weekends, and less during the week, compared with my friends at other universities. Mostly, it meant focussing on work during the week to leave time at the weekend.

I remember two mentions of sport: when a friend turned out to be on the hockey C team, and when the student newspaper announced that we'd lost some traditional cup [1]. You can see just how little attention was given to the game by the number of spectators [2].

(It would help the UK if the drinking age for beer and wine were reduced to 16. People can then get too drunk and do silly stuff with some oversight from their parents, and be a bit more mature about it at university. See Denmark for a similar Northern European country with this.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_Match

[2] https://twitter.com/hashtag/bottlematch2018

On your final point about the drinking age:

The minimum purchasing/public drinking age is 18 (other than a single pint with a meal), but there's no practical restriction on parents letting their kids drink in private. My parents encouraged me once I was around 16 to join in with the adults whilst they had drinks. This led to me getting silly drunk a couple of times but with proper supervision. Same thing with going to some college house parties with 6th form friends - their parents knew that at the end of the night all the kids we're being picked up by their family.

The problem is if parents don't consider this and just ban drinking for kids up until they leave the house and aren't under their control any more. That's what causes people to go out of control at Uni since it might be literally their first experience with alcohol, or at least more than "1 glass with a meal" etc.

My sister was at a private school in the UK and they were given drinks(a single glass of champagne) at certain events even before they turned 18, with permission from parents. Like you said, it's only illegal to buy alcohol under 18, but there's no problem with consumption itself.

I was given Buck's Fizz (Champagne and orange juice) when I was 5, at the birthday party of a super-posh boy who lived in the village. His grandfather didn't even ask my mum first. Upper class people apparently have different rules.

At Imperial, when the Google London office was new, the feedback from staff for why so few students hung around at their recruitment event was the lack of alcohol. Overturning this HQ-imposed very American policy apparently took significant effort.

In MSU of early 00's most students drank a lot. I certainly did, mostly with other people from schools #2 and #57 already mentioned in this thread. But there was another company with a reputation of "real crazy drunkards". They were from another excellent high school, distinct from the Konstantinov lineage: the Kolmogorov's boarding school. Most of them left parents' house at age of 15.

In a top Russian university you simply would not have the time, and they would not hesitate to kick you out; graduating from university can be more difficult than getting into one.

Are you sure? I studied math in MSU in early 00's. Most of my coursemates drank a lot. I took some silly pride in drinking a lot and still learning enough to get good grades, but a lot of us just weren't bothered by getting worse grades. You had to be exceptionally and repeatedly bad at the exams to be kicked out.

This is an American perspective but I think this could be an Anglo phenomenon so let me take a crack at it.

When I was brought up, the image of what a successful student was, was a very well rounded one. The perfect student was a diligent worker in all courses and always an athlete. Athletics was very very tied to the image of being a proper student because basically athletics = team and team = learning to work with others to overcome challenges and work towards a goal + being physically fit.

This is the gist of it, it's a bit hard to explain without living it. Also there is a religious aspect thrown in because America.

This was the image of the perfect young adult given to me by Boy Scouts and the image my private school friends were given by their schools. At my public school though everything was a bit watered down as we got far less development attention than private school kids would get.

For non-Americans reading: private school = good, public school = bad, in terms of education in the US(usually). I know this is flipped in some places.

> when I was brought up, the image of what a successful student was, was a very well rounded one.

I think this idea is dead, or close to it. Almost all the people I knew in college were there for a simple reason: to get a piece of paper that says they can now participate in the work force. Being educated was more of a side effect.

Plenty of people complain about gen eds or other requirements for degrees that are not explicitly related to the major.

> For non-Americans reading: private school = good, public school = bad,

This really depends on the university, the professors there, and the field. My school (USC, no, the other one) is #1 for international business, etc.

Athletics is extremely emphasized, though. I understand that colleges have to discriminate somehow to give people scholarships, and that sports make an insane amount of money for colleges, but it always struck me as odd that getting a full ride for being excellent at a sport is even a thing.

That is exactly it.

To me, that seems like an odd culture for universities to encourage/perpetuate, given that most top professors at top universities are unlikely to be particularly athletic, and the word "intellectual" is often used as almost an antonym of "athlete".

It varies by course and college. My college had a relatively small number of maths students and would give a prize to the top performers each year. We all knew who got the prize and what grade everyone got. Some of my friends were top athletes in niche sports, but none of us really cared about the boat race, varsity rugby, or anything like that. Social life was centred much more around drinking than sport. I don't think our dining hall arrangement had anything to do with sports teams, official or otherwise.

Possibly relevant quote from Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions (talking about the early '60s):

"The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to be brilliant without effort, or to accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. I took this as an invitation to do very little. I’m not proud of this, I’m just describing my attitude at the time, shared by most of my fellow students."

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