UK universities slide down global rankings | Hacker News Reader

UK universities slide down global rankings

thetimes.co.uk

21 pointskrigath33 comments

55 dropped, 6 stayed the same and 32 improved. Or to put it another way, this really isn't news. Then when you hear 96% of Chinese universities improved... this has nothing to do with the UK at all! Of course if one massive country manages to improve practically all their universities' rankings in 1 year, everyone else in the league table will be going down. The question is what happened? Did the universities actually just all suddenly improve in 1 year? I doubt it. This is almost certainly the rankings changing the way they regard Chinese universities.

When I was at Uni we had exactly this game happen. I was at a uni where our department was ranked highest in the country, then the student survey went around. At the time if you talked to anyone about how satisfied they were with the course they were pretty pissed off, somehow the department had managed to mis-grade every single group project for the largest single grade of the year and as a result capped everyone's grade, which for some people was very important.

Guess what we wrote in the student survey? That we fucking loved the place. Why? Because student satisfaction counted towards the rankings and we wanted our degrees to be valuable so we wanted a good ranking. All these measures are pretty bollocks.

I recently spent about a month total in Cambridge and Oxford, just as a remote worker / tourist. Having previously visited Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton, etc. it was my impression that American universities have an order of magnitude more resources than UK ones. Even an average state school campus in the US appears larger and better funded.

Of course, Oxford and Cambridge have a centuries-old historical legacy (and are both absolutely worth visiting, although I much preferred Cambridge) but they seemed more dependent on that traditional reputation. So if the “brand” of the UK goes down, it will have a direct effect on the top universities in a way that I don’t think would happen in the US.

From a UK perspective, the US "throws money" at everything, both culturally and because you are a larger economy.

Education, sports, healthcare, industry, space, science to name a few.

The UK also has an opposing culture, we don't invest in the long term in infrastructure or people. Even in your case, you visited the two richest universities (by a long margin) in the UK.

There's long term investment in London, but the North never recovered after losing its industry.

Numerous promises such as "northern powerhouse" have failed to materialise.

I think it would be safe to call London an outlier for the UK, for the reason of how much investment is directed there

The north didn’t “lose” its industry, im afraid. It was deliberately destroyed as a matter of policy.

Deindustrialisation is terrible.

For people outside the UK - English people refer to the north of England as “the North”, even when talking in the context of the UK.

> The UK also has an opposing culture, we don't invest in the long term in infrastructure or people.

That's not really so different from the United States!

While good amenities may matter for certain types of research (biotech), what about disciplines such as maths, which require good thinking, a piece of paper to draw on, and that's about it? If you look at the results of the International Mathematical Olympiad, many of the really successful countries (Russia, Hungary, Romania, Iran) aren't very rich.

A possible explanation would be brain-drain: talented mathematicians leaving too-poor Oxford for better pay in the US. Does that happen?

Academic pay is vastly higher in comparable US institutions, and it's fairly easy to get a work visa as an academic. The brain drain is probably weaker than you would expect because so few of us went into academia for the money, but I definitely know of talented people who have left Oxford for the US with money as one of the key reasons.

I think the number of purely mental fields is fairly small, especially in technology.

More than that, though, are how amenities affect future applicants. If I was a prospective student choosing between Oxford and say, Princeton, the quality of the campus and amount of resources available would affect my decision. My impression was that Oxbridge is very much about maintaining and continuing the traditions of the UK more than anything else.

As a tourist in Oxford or Princeton, how can you tell what resources are available?

Of course, a lot of things are not accessible to tourists. But it’s fairly easy to see inside most buildings and generally just tell that e.g. the library is smaller or that the department of X is in a 8-story modern building vs. a 2-story old one. That doesn’t always correlate to “resources available” but as another commenter put it, American universities are practically small city-states.

> many of the really successful countries (Russia, Hungary, Romania, Iran) aren't very rich

While the US could use (homebuilt) computers to solve engineering issues, the Russians had to resort to manual calculations. The eastern block always lagged behind in terms of computing.

> Does that happen?

All the time.

Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones bennefiting from a brain drain of americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreing talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.

It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were.

The top destination for top tier UK scientists and researchers is the US. [0]

[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...

I grew up behind the Iron Curtain and yes, computational power was sorely lacking. Calculators were sold on the black market for enormous money.

But despite this fact, actual maths was on a high level both in the satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union itself. Notably, translated Soviet mathematical textbooks are still rather popular in the Anglosphere among people who want to dive into higher mathematics deeply.

Some of those books were literally written at the same time when ordinary Soviet citizens queued for food.

US campuses are mini cities with large amount of money spent on a lot of useless things

Europe campuses are buildings with just a bit more than the bare minimum you need to do the job

University funding varies wildly in the UK and it mostly correlates with ranking, at least the 'higher-up' universities generally have more disposal income to give to researchers. Unfortunately, it's a vicious circle because it's the difference between "you can go to this conference" or "we'll pay the article fee" and "we have no money, sorry". Allowing researchers those sorts of freedoms means you tend to get better researchers who can pump out more research with higher visibility.

Oxford University owns pretty much the entire historic town centre, so they're sitting on a lot of assets that aren't obviously visible (beyond the colleges).

UK universities have generally very good staff benefits. 30-35 days of leave is not uncommon, on top of public holidays and the usual academia "if nobody notices" flexitime attitude. Pay is probably a little better than the US when you compare cost of living. The US has notoriously poor PhD and Postdoc salaries and several big universities have had strike action against them. Don't confuse US institutional endowment with what trickles down to researchers.

The US does have per-diem though, which is a fantastic source of beer money when traveling. UK universities are almost always penny-pinchers for staff expenses.

> University funding varies wildly in the UK and it mostly correlates with ranking, at least the 'higher-up' universities generally have more disposal income to give to researchers.

This is how the entirety of the UK works. All the funding goes to London, everywhere else gets nothing. All the laws are written to benefit the landlord and investor classes, everyone else gets nothing etc. Little recognition that the entire nation is meant to be one big tribe, barely any redistribution or attempts to raise up the failing parts. In my opinion, the ruling classes have never really abandoned their colonial mindset, and now their overseas power has waned they treat the rest of the UK as a colony of the City and Westminster.

I completely agree about the colonial mindset and an inherent bias towards self-perpetuating elitism in the UK.

I’m in the process of getting rid of all my stuff and so I’m in the process of shredding old school work and it’s mad how much of is centred on the royal family, the UK military and the romans. The indoctrination starts early.

The National Curriculum (applies in England and Wales) for history:

> aims to ensure that all pupils:

> - know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world

> - know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the nature of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; characteristic features of past non-European societies; achievements and follies of mankind

You should have covered from the stone age right through to "Britain’s place in the world since 1945". The Romans, military and royal family are part of that.

None of that says you must approve of Roman Britain, the military or the royal family.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul...

I can only speak for my experience but there was little discussion of events elsewhere in Europe, let alone the rest of the world, with the exception of very significant events involving the UK military such as the world wars or the withdrawal from India and even they were told from a very UK centric viewpoint.

Quite frankly, I think learning about say the conquistadors, the Ottoman Empire, the Portuguese empire, asian history etc and how that has gone on to shape the world we have today would probably be of more use than the amount of time spent dissecting the personalities of past monarchs.

"London’s thriving economy generates a £26.5bn surplus that is recycled by the government to provide financial help to Britain’s less well-off regions, according to an official breakdown of the public finances."

and

"Every Londoner provided £3,070 more in tax revenues than they received in public spending, while people living in the south-east ran a surplus of £1,670 per head."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-d...

Yeah, because rather than investing money in other areas, all of it goes to London. It is a self perpetuating cycle. The government could take steps and provide incentives to move industries out of London like politics, media, marketing, law, IT or finance but it rarely does so.

And that “thriving economy” is in large part to the £125 billion pounds of dirty money that is flowing through London every year, not to mention selling half of the housing stock to dodgy oligarchs. It’s a crooked city.

https://www.ft.com/video/d3bafb94-9dbd-4c1e-8016-8cd8331960f...

The headline makes it seem like a UK thing, but

> Institutions in Europe and the US also fell back, and the report’s authors said the UK’s rankings had held up better than French, German, Japanese and American universities.

it feels more like a West vs the Rest (or even a Rest vs China) thing.

Part of this seems inevitable, with the West providing world-class education to Chinese students for decades, which can them be imported back into China

Add in the funding China provides to universities, and you would be disheartened if Chinese universities didn't improve

In the top 50 of the referenced global rankings[1], there are 5 non-western universities. The highest one ranked at 13 (Japan), then 27 (Japan), then 31 (South Korea), and finally 44 and 49 (China).

[1] https://cwur.org/2023.php

You forgot the University of Tokyo, ranked 13.

Ah, thanks! Edited.

Considering how much more funding US universities have, this is inevitable. Also, most people here don't fund endowments or really give back to their universities.

Interesting that it mentions China rising in the same breath.

I'm not sure if I should be surprised there isn't a facet of the rating like:

"percent chance you will be disappeared for holding up a blank sheet of paper" or

"how excited other countries children are to attend."

Maybe the ranking just cares about how much money you are pouring into STEM research.

https://archive.is/imsbv

You could just remove universities and the article would still be true.

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