Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK | Hacker News Reader

Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

hotminute.co.uk

271 pointsilamont428 comments

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 supervision system guarantees all Oxbridge students weekly, small-group tutorials, organised and paid for by the colleges, which retain much more academic involvement than other collegiate universities like Durham and York (whose colleges are mainly residences with pastoral care and sports teams). If you go to Oxbridge as an undergrad, you'll be pushed hard and closely supported.

The second gulf is of course the selection effect of every bright child in the UK having Oxford or Cambridge as their first university pick. No-one from an older generation would advise any teenager to do otherwise. (Incidentally, I'm acutely aware that Durham first, then Cambridge is lower social status than vice versa. Because I didn't get in at 17). Everyone knows about this, and we could debate how reputations change, but I suspect my point above about the supervisions system for undergraduate teaching is less well-known.

I could also mention the gulf in wealth between universities (which pays for those supervisions, book grants etc), in age (Oxbridge actively lobbied against new universities in England for hundreds of years), which has a consequence for historic buildings, famous names and prizes, and so on. It all creates an almost unbreakable flywheel of reputational lead for Oxbridge that would take generations to overturn.

I don’t know what college you were in or what you read, but in castle, we had weekly tutorials in physics. Grand total of four of us in the group.

Same at Exeter Uni. in the 1970s when I studied Applied Physics there and my wife studied Law and also had a similar tutorial arrangement. I don't know what they do now though.

> 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.

Unique Selling Point?

yes

Same, at Imperial in 80’s

That sounds like a similar idea but I doubt it's to the same extent.

When I was at Cambridge in the early noughties, supervisions for maths and computer science (and physics I believe but I didn't go to any of those) were 2 students in 4 1-hour sessions per week (1 per 24 hour lecture course). [Edit: hmm, actually maybe it was just 2 per week.] In maths, if there were an odd number of students then one would get 1 to 1 supervisions, but I'm sure that depends on the college. For computer science, I was put in a 3 person supervision when they had an odd number (and I wasn't happy about it at the time!)

I later did teaching at UCL and Imperial and the difference was huge. When they get to it, I would advise my children to go Oxford or Cambridge in a heartbeat. (For reference, my parents were too poor to even consider university.)

cue the Harvard graduates tell us they had 5 teachers for 1 student in their tutorials.

A large part of uni is about learning to learn on your own and learning in groups - if everything is spoonfed, it might not be the best training.

We certainly didn't get spoon fed in tutorials at Exeter Uni. in the 1970s!

Tutorials are all but spoon-feeding. Tutors are strongly encouraged not to give just solutions, but actually to teach the approach to solving problems and creating connections with adjacent topics where possible.

When I was there (maths, 2010s) it was 1 supervision per course per fortnight. You had 4 problem sets in an 8 week course (for long courses). 16 lectures meant 3 sets, 12 lectures meant 2. I never heard of a college doing more than 2 students in a supervision.

I used to teach tutorials at Keble college (Oxford). Not sure how they were run in Manchester.

Tutorials in Oxford are impressive for me for many reasons: 1. Those teaching were generally of a higher level beyond Ph.D., post docs or professors, all paid, all assessed against an NPS from students, and the performance of the students in exams 2. Tutors are generally teaching more adjacent topics (creating connections), students are challenged to think beyond the assignments (which are generally tough), 3. Tutorials are calibrated and personalised to students and made sure all students are challenged at the right level, I had tutorials where I had to teach 1:2 because the students were excellent and needed a higher level of complexity.

Video of maths one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTAUsTZbiZk

2 is the norm for supervisions/tutorials

and having 4 people is very different from 2

I think high school students preparing to go to university are most interested in rankings not least because for graduate schools specific areas of research are more important.

and I agree with much of the parent post, and would add that "oxbridge" and/or "high ranking schools in subject areas" provide many of the professors to "lesser" schools or programs, so you can get a fine education from anywhere.

however, the special extra sauce for me was not small classes/personal attention, but rather rooms full of the smartest possible peers to do problem sets with, and these are found at the highest ranked schools, see first paragraph above, they attract the best incoming freshman.

> high school students preparing to go to university are most interested in rankings

Wouldn't league tables like Norrington and Tompkins be more important for them?

I remember during my Britishphilia phase in HS and imagined doing a CS Tripos at one and then a BCL at he other before I removed the emotion and realized the services and network was inferior to a good UC like Cal or UCLA or a B10 like Mich, I was concentrating more on the College itself, not the Uni as a whole. Like being at Harris Manchester College, Oxford wouldn't open the same doors that Balliol College, Oxford would, and it was Oxbridge, Imperial, UCL, LSE, or bust.

At the undergrad level, Oxbridge is college driven and not all colleges are equal even if everyone is in the same faculty.

It's not like Yale or Harvard where you are randomly assigned a house, and the overwhelming majority of education services are provided by departments.

Anglophilia

You are correct (the best kind of correct).

I don't like using "Anglo" because it also implies the Anglophone world, so I'm hesitant to use "Anglophilia" because it is also often used to lump Australia, Canada, and even the US to a certain extent as well.

Then the equivalent adjective that you are grasping for is 'Britanno'.

^ inferior as an international student from the US with options at peer universities.

A portion of Russell Group programs are amazing, but I felt I could get similar exit opps at at a good domestic state flagship in the US with less headaches around AP-to-A level equivalencies, admissions exams, and logistics.

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 bed. They have made a willful choice to be worse. I am not sure why anyone wouldn't take them at their word.

> The very top aren't applying there any more at all, you don't need to: Stanford, Harvard, MIT, all better.

The only people applying to those from the UK are the wealthy.

If by "very top" you mean "richest", then maybe. But I'm not sure we care about that?

The network value of knowing a rich person far exceeds the network value of knowing a smart person.

How are we valuing the network? There are doors that many wealthy people would not be able to open and vice-versa. On the other hand, someone both smart and wealthy... Sam Altman comes to mind, as well as a number of other figures of historic importance.

If you're measuring the value in dollars, it would be very surprising if people maxxed on the INT stat rank higher than those on the USD stat. But, for example, if your goal is to secure a professorship at a top university, or do the most cutting-edge research at a national lab, I think the network value of knowing a smart person far exceeds that of a rich person.

Kind of depends. Attending a service academy in the states is a VERY GOOD IDEA if you want to make being a military officer your career. But yes, I take your point for the general case.

However... some of the best business contacts I have came from teaching at a trade school in Texas. But I'm just selling solutions into SMEs, I'm not baby-sitting kids with VC funds.

This is why https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2015/10/29/our-firs... concluded that the best university in the USA is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_and_Lee_University.

For this they measured the gap between what graduates made, and what they would be expected to make based on high school record, test scores, and choice of major. In other words, "How much do you earn because of the university you went to, rather than your own virtues?"

That university won because it has a network rich people who could help people's careers get a good launch.

No, you can get a scholarship. Again, this is really the best of the best, those with the highest merit. If you have that, why would you study somewhere that has no people of merit? All they had to do was convince a bureaucrat their life was hard (usually based on rather unobjective criteria), everyone else has to pass exams.

If you can't get the grades, you don't have merit.

Debase the currency, surprised when it has less value? Lol.

> No, you can get a scholarship

Of course! So easy! What percentage of foreign students applying get aid or scholarships?

> Again, this is really the best of the best, those with the highest merit.

You're assuming that "the best of the best" are applying. This is not true. "The best of the best who are encouraged to apply and/or have the means", apply. This is not the same population.

> All they had to do was convince a bureaucrat their life was hard

I don't know who this "bureaucrat" is. When I interviewed at Cambridge I was seen by 3 fellows, all members of the relevant departments.

> If you can't get the grades, you don't have merit.

Nobody's this naive, surely?

While I sympathize with some of your arguments, you are wrong about scholarships. Getting financial aid as a foreign student at an institution like Harvard, Yale, or MIT is the norm.

Some financial aid isn’t the same as being able to afford to go to a college in another country across an ocean.

Collage loans seem like a great solution when you’re entering a highly lucrative career, but that’s not true for every top student.

Not least to say that most kids don't want to go to university thousands of miles away from their family, friends, and support networks.

The mean talent at Oxbridge and at the Ivy League is pretty similar. The talent level of Ivy League scholarship holders is significantly higher than either. Obtaining a scholarship is a significant hurdle that not all applicants clear - so it is very naive to act as if any Oxbridge candidate could just walk into a scholarship. And if you agree that they couldn't walk into it, then it obviously is a hurdle, contrary to your comment.

> Debase the currency, surprised when it has less value?

This bizarre comment is not related to the issue at all.

There aren't merit-based scholarships to any Ivy League schools, they all offer need-based financial aid packages.

Do they have enough money available to fund everyone who can't afford to come, or do they have to decide who to fund from a wider pool of otherwise good applicants?

MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and I believe most or all of the other Ivies, all fund 100% of the demonstrated financial need of every student, and they do not consider the financial needs of applicants when making admission decisions.

> demonstrated financial need

Higher education is a strange purchase that is engineered to extract the maximum amount of money (up to full-cost tuition, fees, etc.), based on financial records which you are forced to provide.

Any asset except for a residence is typically considered something that could be tendered to the university, and is accordingly deducted from financial need.

This means that external scholarships are limited as to how much they can reduce the expected parental or student contribution. Anything beyond this limit is deducted from need and pocketed by the university.

No, not for international students. Stanford (I haven't checked others) is very explicit about having a limited number of scholarship for international students: https://financialaid.stanford.edu/undergrad/how/internationa.... Admissions for US applicants are indeed need-blind.

This assumes that "the best of the best" all want to move halfway across the world to attend university. There are many reasons (proximity to family, friends, cultural differences, and increasingly the uncertainty caused by government policies changing) why students wouldn't want to do that. Even if they are smart enough to get in.

I applied to MIT from the UK 15 years ago, I'm fairly sure I'm not among whom you mean by 'the wealthy'. (I failed the alumnus interview; failed STEP mathematics exam to meet accepted Cambridge offer; went to Imperial.)

Not to say I'm (nor was) 'the very top' either - I just liked the idea of MIT for the same reason Imperial appealed I suppose.

> The very top aren't applying there any more at all

Do you have a source to back this claim?

I think this statement is a bit of an exaggeration. There is undoubtedly some competition from US, but Oxbridge still attract a lot of the top talent. This is reflected in quantitative rankings like ARWU, where Cambridge and Oxford are always in the top of the pack, and often #1 in some subjects: https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2025.

ARWU is biased towards research, but nevertheless Durham is currently #201-300 and St Andrews is #301-400. So the post is a bit sensationalistic as well. However, as someone in Oxford, I reckon the university has serious structural issues that need to be addressed if they want to stay at the top of their game.

Unlike Cambridge, Oxford doesn't have a post equivalent to Assistant Professor. In many divisions, appointment as an Associate Professor often occurs by internal promotion and this has created really toxic dynamics that scare off top talent. Furthermore, in many fields, Junior Research Fellowships are no longer attractive compared to e.g. a Lecturer position at Imperial or an Assistant Professor position overseas. Failing to attract and retain junior faculty has devastating consequences in terms of teaching and research quality.

Undergraduate admissions have experienced lots of recent changes. It is great that anti-state school bias is no longer present, but some faculty I know have expressed concerns about admissions becoming too subjective and often taking in students that are gaming the system by creating a false narrative of overcoming learning difficulties and minor disabilities (vs considering true disabled students, for instance). I find this very unsettling.

With that said, some courses (e.g. Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science) are outstanding and more isolated from these issues. IMHO, they still offer terrific value at the Home Fee rate (£9k), even if you need a mortgage. A rigorous and timeless no-nonsense education that is greatly valued by top employers.

Is this the same across all classes? (legit asking, not trying to make a snarky comment.) I grew up in the states so the UK class system is a little weird to me and I don't quite get it. But if you told me Cambridge and Oxford are still very popular amongst upper-middle and upper class types, but everyone else just goes to where they can get the best education and be in close proximity to the most impactful researchers, I would completely believe it. But what the heck do I know... I went to grad school at Liverpool.

> They have made a willful choice to be worse.

Do you mean that they've accepted more state school students? Because you'd expect to take quite a good number of them if you're selecting the "best"!!

Plenty of ambitious Americans dream of the London School of Economics.

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.

DeepMind and top firms from the City of London have recruiters chasing Oxbridge students in CS, Math, and Statistics before graduation, sometimes even a year or two ahead. You hear more about MIT or Stanford because you are based in the US. Ranking or prestige-wise, in case that matters (I think it's just a lazy filter), they are indistinguishable: https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2025

My perception is that the further you get from the time of graduation, the less it makes a difference where someone went to school. A year or two, I felt like where I got my degree might have made a difference in terms of my ability to find jobs, but coming up on a a decade since I graduated (which is a pretty small portion of what I expect will be a decades-long career), it might as well be entirely irrelevant. Amusingly, I said something similar to one of my colleagues recently when we were discussing the level of stress their teenager was having around their upcoming college applications, and they agreed, mentioning that no one cared that they didn't even have a degree, which was clearly true since I had absolutely no idea that was the case! It never came up in the past despite us chatting fairly regularly about our personal lives because it ultimately just didn't matter to either of us, and while it affected their initial attempts to break into the software industry, it pretty quickly stopped mattering even to their prospective employers compared to their actual work experience.

Obviously there are some industries where degrees are necessary (law, medicine, presumably academia, although I'm not certain), but outside of those, the limiting factors of how far you can go are independent of where you graduated from. There are some places where the initial hiring process will be mostly filtered by where someone graduated, but in the long term, most people will either hit a point of diminishing returns regardless, or they'll be able to make up the difference.

Tech might be the only high-paying (or, hell, reliably middle-class white-collar) field where this is true.

Not true tbh. Tech was the first place where that was the case, but increasingly high-paying professional jobs don't require an undergraduate degree, since its losing its value as an indicator of ability.

Postgrad degrees still have a lot of value, and open a lot of doors. There are things I learned in my Master's that I probably wouldn'tve been able to get at a deep level working in industry, and for that same reason I want to go for a PhD (even if it might be ill-advised in these times).

What fields? Or what regions? My experience is limited, of course, and this is all anecdotal. I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

In California, I've met two people in the last two weeks who live comfortably on their income without a college degree. One of them was in medical sales consulting, the other worked at an art gallery managing the sale of works from the artists they represent to clients. The first started when they were in college and dropped out after their career began to take off, the second was promoted out of an internship.

I think sales in general may also be one of those fields where education is not that important.

That's a fair point: sales has always worked like that. I think there's sales and sales, though. Like, if you're going to be selling high-level stuff, to wealthy and/or sophisticated people, then your background (maybe not always, but generally including, education) really does matter. I don't know, though. I'm not part of that world.

The difference is that if you have a prestigious degree you have good odds of dropping into a fast track starter role.

If you don't it may take you a decade of career time to "prove yourself" and network to the point where you could apply for something similar.

Or you might _never_ get the chance to do that because you are stuck in jobs at "normal" companies where you spend all your time on low impact stuff.

My counterpoint is that those companies you listed do more harm than good anyhow. Advertising and data gathering, helping LLM companies train models that use more electricity than many countries, and charging outrageous interest and practicing usury.

Why would you want to work for those places?

Infrastructure projects are where it's at. Pays well and you're using your technical skills to do some good for the country for a change.

The customers are using the energy. LLMs don't use energy, they just sit there.

Society does not exist in a vacuum. Your individual actions affect others. A corporation's actions do as well.

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

A rather crude way to express it. But I don't think that pointing out that Oxbridge isn't always a first choice implies, um, "shitdog" status, whatever that is.

im so confused whether a shitdog is a good thing or bad thing, Im too in love with the term to look it up. Its like a schrodingers cat of words.

Let’s pretend what you say is true in the slightest. What does it have to do with the ranking of universities in England? You are arguing that the best undergrad students in England are now at Durham?

> Stanford, Harvard, MIT

Those are not in the UK?

Anyway, you are making some bold statements and have zero substance backing them up. Please refrain from spreading nonsense.

I would (and did) take Oxford in front of any American university. You can stay in a sane country for one and you don’t have to deal with the US absurd elective system. Also Oxford is like ten times less expensive.

Frankly speaking, the only advantage of US universities is how much fund they have for postgraduates.

There's a section in Yes, Prime Minister where Humphrey Appleby makes some comment about preserving England's great universities. Then pauses a beat and adds "both of them." (referring, of course, to Cambridge and Oxford.) It's obvious there are other very good universities in the UK and I don't doubt the LSE has programs that surpass the others. But I spent a couple months on a research project at LSE (and even delivered a few lectures) but most people hearing I was a guest lecturer there were like "meh. whatever." (Oddly, the guy I knew from Cambridge was "oh! they have some very good programs there.")

So... yes... despite consistently ranking high on surveys, Durham and LSE are not "sexy" in the way Cambridge and Oxford are.

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 was founded 250 years later (considered a long time in the US) and has a smaller endowment (4th place, behind Harvard, UT, and Yale.) It has also only produced one US President: Herbert Hoover.

MIT is a top tier school though more focused on technology (it's in the name). MIT has a business school (Sloan), but a Harvard/Yale/Stanford will include a business school, law school, med school (etc.) and a range of well-regarded programs in humanities and social sciences in addition to science and engineering.

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.

> 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.)

"Reputation" is not a uniform quantity; it matters hugely if we're talking about Arts, Law, STEM or what.

I know - I went to Oxford instead of LSE for my masters degree exactly because the reputation of the latter is not there outside a narrow subset of finance/econ professionals in the UK. Even though the LSE programme was older and more established and cheaper.

The same is true in the US as well: The University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania are probably world beating for economics and finance research respectively -- but I would still recommend people to go to Harvard/Stanford for an economics-focused undergrad or finance MSc or MBA if they have the choice, due to the name recognition and the network...

100%. I went to Oxbridge as an undergrad. Now I’m an associate professor at a middling UK university. Comparing the prior ability of the students that attend, the expectations placed on them, and above all the support and feedback provided to get them there — it’s just an entirely different thing. If only every uni had the resources Oxbridge do, the country would be in a very different place.

These are rankings by "national student survey", which is - how can I put this politely? - possibly not the most rigorous way to measure merit.

Oxford has long had a reputation for being a dual university - a raw academic track for smart people, and a political/establishment track for people with money, connections, ambition, and the kind of entitled self-assurance that comes from easy privilege.

"Political" doesn't just mean politics, although the notorious PPE degree often means exactly that. It also means media/journalism, and law.

There's some overlap between the talent intake and the connections intake, especially in the humanities. (Science is a little more rigorous.)

Generally if you're on the political track Oxford opens doors no other university will. Cambridge is a good second choice, and St Andrews has a minor presence in Scotland. But realistically the rest - Durham, York, Bristol - don't really count.

The difference is that tutors don't just teach, they talent scout. A good word and an introduction from a tutor - quite likely to be face to face at a social event - opens doors and plugs you straight into the network.

Something I am curious about is Cambridge's reputation today for sciences. A lot of pretty famous British mathematicians have done the Tripos part III there. Is that still considered meaningful? I am asking because many US mathematics departments have shed or reduced their master's programs in favor of just focusing on the PhD for postgrads. For historical reasons I am curious how the Tripos part III there has fared.

Cambridge's reputation for sciences is the best in the country, way ahead of Oxford outside a few niches. The tripos part III Masters programme is selective and demanding - and most students are doing it while applying/angling for PhD programmes so from what I hear the pace is high.

As someone who works and teaches in academia, it is surprising how relative student happiness is. Our university for example, has within its own field (arts) one of the best collection of workshops of all mayor european universities. Yet students complain and feel there is not enough — that is, until they went to an exchange after which they tend to sing high praises about how good we have it here.

Another problem is that students are very often totally uninformed about their own institutions, despite their institutions informing them. During my time here I have seen multiple instances of students demanding a thing that already existed for years, was mentioned in the beginners brochure, could be found on the official website with a simple google search and so on.

So as much as I dislike saying it as a former student, but the mayority of students opinion is not necessarily a reflection of the institution itself, more of the mood within the student body. And this may or may not correlate with the value of the education received there.

"the selection effect of every bright child in the UK having Oxford or Cambridge as their first university pick"

When my son and I visited St. Andrews a few years back we were informally told that they really only select people who make that university their first pick - and given that St. Andrews doesn't seem to have any problems attracting students then I would question whether everyone puts Oxbridge first. I certainly knew people when I was applying to university (40+ years ago) who were very bright but who didn't even think about applying to Oxbridge because of the perceived snobbery.

I've also met quite a lot of rather unimpressive Oxbridge graduates in my career - so I wouldn't automatically assume that they get the brightest and the best.

How do they know they're your first pick? Unless things have changed, you don't provide a ranking until the universities have made their offers.

From what I can recall (it was a few years back) they said you should write that in your personal statement.

I'm not saying it's wrong but people are reacting to this as if the Times university guide is some objective truth.

Regarding the potential lowering of standards for widening participation purposes, this doesn't change the fact that the entry standards for Oxford and Cambridge are still higher than LSE and St. Andrews.

I don't know anyone at Oxford but do have friends who work in higher education. From what I hear from them Brexit has turned UK higher education upside down when it comes to funding and research. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is a consequence of some universities navigating that better than others.

But you don't get anywhere near as much online outrage with that theory so "leftists are ruining western civilisation" wins out again.

Yes I’d agree with that. International student income dropped, rounds of layoffs.

Some universities are better at optimising for rankings, see also REF research funding and how much effort and resources are spent on it, which varies by university: https://2029.ref.ac.uk/about/what-is-the-ref/

Its a double whammy of EU students suddenly have to pay a lot more cash for a lot less certainty

but on the other end our political class fail to understand/sell that stopping international students means that we have to fund university education.

How did international student income drop with Brexit, when the UK now have 4-600k student visas granted in each of the last few years vs 2-300k pre-Brexit?

Because universities borrowed staggering amounts of money and hired massive numbers of people.

The assumption was that international student numbers would be allowed to grow as fast or faster than in the past, ignoring the fact that the UK is not able to provide infrastructure for the people who live here let alone temporary inhabitants. There is no way to keep the bubble going (as with every bubble, for government and university administrators it just seemed unlimited because there are no limits to resources, dangerous).

Don't forget that the Universities focused on getting foreign students and cashing in instead of providing valuable education.

The quality of teaching is non-existent. It's about giving foreign parents ability to tell their peers look my brilliant child is studying in England! But really they are not studying. Attendance is not checked and lectures are a sham.

This is such garbage. The only reason universities focused on getting foreign students is because the introduction of fees that don't increase with inflation means they are all slowly going bankrupt.

The funding squeeze is real, but that’s not the whole story. Universities didn’t have to turn into diploma/visa mills - they chose to. Instead of protecting standards, they pivoted to a business model of brand-selling: recruiting overseas students at inflated rates and cutting corners on teaching.

Domestic students end up with debt for degrees that deliver little value, often taught by underqualified lecturers. Those who complain get brushed off or quietly bought out with NDA-style settlements. Foreign students mostly keep quiet because openly questioning standards would devalue their own diploma.

So yes, funding cuts mattered - but the bigger scandal is how universities responded. They saw the “golden years” were over and decided to milk the brand, not safeguard education.

They are basically a scam.

I TA’ed a course at my state university a few years back. We had some program that attracted hundreds of students from the UAE. Many were obviously from wealthy families and drove Mercedes and BMWs, etc.

The amount of cheating on exams and complete lack of effort on studying by the vast majority (+80%) was astounding. We were essentially hand feeding them to get them to learn the material.

The professor was very frustrated but (I presume) was told you can’t come down hard on them. They were obviously a huge income source for the university.

Reason #53 why modern university has basically become a scam.

I’ve seen lots of variations on this. Community colleges seem to have gotten in on it in a big way.

> Attendance is not checked and lectures are a sham.

Formal tracking of attendance at lectures is a fairly new thing in British universities (introduced around 2015 when I was teaching at one).

Actually, the Home Office / UKVI does require universities sponsoring international students to monitor attendance and engagement, and to report non-attendance. This has prompted many universities to formalise attendance tracking (barcode check-ins, attendance apps etc.), especially for visa-holding students. Whether they actually do it, is another question.

Yes, but it is not till quite recently that this implied formal attendance tracking of student attendance at individual lectures. For example, here is how UCL interpreted the requirements as recently as 2015:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2015/oct/ucl-international-studen...

I’m not sure where you’ve got the stats from, but student visas granted dropped since 2022, acc to UK gov (-5% in 2023, -14% in 2024).[0]

Combined with universities' increasing reliance on international student income (over the last years) and issues accessing research funding, this can get universities into trouble.

[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

Here's one source, I checked a couple, the numbers varied between sources curiously but they seemed reasonably consistent.

They do show drops in the last year or two, but I find it hard to attribute that to Brexit when they're still much higher.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/293277/study-related-vis...

Research funding isn't a cash cow to keep universities financially viable, it should be used for genuine research. It all to often is not.

The big fall in income is nothing to do with Brexit, and it's worth saying that international students from within the EU paid the same as home students pre-Brexit.

What happened was a massive expansion to non-EU students paying the larger uncapped fees because of an expansion of student visas to allow (a) dependents to come (b) a route to staying in the UK. It led to over a million immigrants in one year, was massively criticised politically, and so got scrapped. There's no a lot of arguing that we should as a country remove/change the Indefinite Leave to Remain route because those graduates (and dependents) are from January starting to be eligible to apply and stay permanently.

Government decided it doesn't want to pay for tertiary education. But, it does want UK students to get tertiary education, and they can't afford it. So, OK that circle can be kinda squared by "student loans" except of course the cost on these loans would sky-rocket. So, then government says ah, you can't charge more than this small fixed amount, and we'll never increase it because that's unpopular. For-profit lenders can charge as much as they can find an excuse for, but you educational charities too bad, you're not getting an extra penny.

So a good UK university cannot profitably offer education for UK students.

So for some of the best they'll focus on non UK students. These students aren't subject to a capped price we can't afford, so we can gouge them to make up for the lost revenue from home students.

But the usual "I'm not racist but..." people of course hate foreigners. How dare any of these people be different in any way. And so while some of them will pretend their hatred only extends to some foreigners it's always the same exact people who are aggrieved and want yet another excuse to hate foreigners.

This results in government efforts to make it harder to study here, and more expensive to teach students here. That way they slightly appease racists who weren't going to vote for them anyway and they feel justified.

I assume eventually this will collapse, and judging from Brexit nothing whatsoever will be learned by the supporter/victim class, the same gullible morons will keep falling for lies from the same people who feed off them. Certain that somehow it must be somebody else's fault their lives are shit while the leaders they're feeding are doing so well.

Just on a point of fact, fees went up by RPI-based inflation this year.

I find the rates high for what some (most?) students are getting.

Where can you anecdotally find out about the accept/reject rate by students offered places? in particular I read the preference for UK universities by international students nosedeived ~2021 when the UK govt + universities said they couldn't even guarantee them either a definite visa during/after graduation, and fees went up.

> I'm not saying it's wrong but people are reacting to this as if the Times university guide is some objective truth.

I can’t see a single example of anyone reacting to it that way.

All the UK university ranking systems use basically the same data — the National Student Survey (NSS) which measures students' impression of teaching quality, the Graduate Outcomes Survey (GOS) which measures employment 15 months after graduation, and a bunch of standard data collected by HESA — entry standards, whether students complete their degrees, average degree classifications, etc.

Much of this data is extremely 'gameable', and a lot of the 'alpha' between successful and less successful institutions is being 'good at surveys.' e.g. for NSS, between comparable institutions it's really a question of how good they are at getting students to complete the survey (students mostly ignore it, and you lose marks for poor completion rates).

Of course — it should also go without saying that there is no 'correct' weighting for any of this data, and depending on how you weight the different indicators, the rankings change.

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://csrankings.org/

This is a cool site. For anyone who doesn't feel like clicking, the top overall is Carnegie Mellon. There are three from China in the top 10, the other seven are American. ETH Zurich is the first outside of China/USA at number 12.

However if you select only AI, Carnegie Mellon drops to 3rd and only two of the top ten are outside Asia (mostly China but also National University of Singapore and KAIST in South Korea).

But honestly, why would you activate the "hype" category? I can go to my local community college if I want to hear people say "my AI is alive" or "you should always optimize locally."

That being said... CMU always had a decent program (as did UIUC.) They came down in my estimation when they started granting trade school degrees. In the old days, you had to take a class on parsing and foundations of computing to graduate. You could talk to a grad who knew what a recursive descent parser was and what it's drawbacks were. And there's a chance they could understand the basics of Turing's paper(s).

There's a maxim I read somewhere that undergrad was supposed to change the way you thought more than teaching you facts (and maybe skills.) What I liked about the old system is you were taught a concept (functional decomposition, for instance) and then concrete examples were given to support the concepts. Now it seems like students are taught where to download python packages and enough unix commands to type in example code from online forums.

CS pedagogy in the states is a joke, but I guess if I want someone to write a PHP plugin for wordpress, I know where to go.

#OldManYellsAtClouds

compare contrast

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...

US News rankings are garbage based in no small part on opinion surveys and famously manipulated year over year.

Though I strongly disagree with their choice of conferences, probably the best regarded ranking of computer science schools is CSRankings.org (https://csrankings.org/)

Rice at 53 is interesting

Similarly watch out for ultra-specific rankings that are used to dupe you into thinking the school excels at something that isn't a real category. My state alma mater managed to rank #2 (to HBS of course) in "international business" for years but really has a worthless MBA program. Pure marketing.

Good but has some bizarre omissions, e.g. PODC.

This website massively skews towards publication count, e.g research quantity over quality. Vastly flawed.

Not true. It quantifies publications in top conferences. These are highly competitive, and you cannot just publish any junk there. If the site were to measure ANY publications, then it would be indeed skewed, as you suggested.

I'm not refering to junk papers by quantity, but that not all papers at the same venue are equal, and some fields take longer. For example a logic/programming-language paper often takes much longer to theorize than an AI paper.

Even within the same field should a paper that speeds up LLM's by 10x be equal to one that improves object detection accuracy in a specific dataset by 2%, or a dataset paper? All could be published at NeurIPS and all are good papers, but that does not make them equal in impact.

A better example might be that a hypothetical paper curing some cancer through some magic technology, or a differnt one detecting cancer better using AI could both target a similar venue (as evidenced by various nature puplications), but are vastly different in impact.

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

>Durham University improved by 30 places year-on-year in its students’ evaluation of teaching quality, which was the main driver in securing its third place in the overall university league table.

Yeah this is worthless. "Elite" colleges in the US value student evaluations of teaching VERY VERY highly in things like tenure review. Well, guess what kind of grades professors give almost every single student at those colleges... It's a race to the bottom. Students aren't experts in teaching; they're rarely even experts in learning coming out of modern secondary education.

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 measuring which institutions tend to hire (PhD->faculty) from others. [1] It's not perfect, but at the very least it's a parameter free way to get a sense of how different universities view each other. The parameters in most university rankings are rather arbitrary and game-able.

Some have pointed to things like contextual admissions [2], and more broadly some identity politics capture of the administration for declining standards. While this might be true, in my view Oxford is still far more meritocratic than US institutions on the whole. There are no legacy admissions, and many subjects have difficult tests which better distinguish between applicants who have all done extremely well on national standardised tests (British A Levels are far more difficult than the SAT/ACT/AP exams.)

Lastly, admissions at Oxford are devolved to the individual colleges, of which there are ~40. The faculty at each college directly interview and select the applicants which they will take as students. This devolved system and the friction it creates is surprisingly robust and makes complete ideological capture more difficult.

The most pressing issue for Oxford's long-term viability as a leading institution, in my view, is the funding situation. For one the British economy is in a long, slow decline. Secondly, even though Oxford has money, there are lots of regulations/soft power influence from the British govt to standardise pay across the country, which makes top institutions like Oxford less competitive on the international market for PhD students, postdocs, and faculty in terms of pay.

[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400005

[2]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...

From [1], these are the rankings for CS:

1. Stanford 2. UC Berkeley 3. MIT 4. Caltech 5. Harvard

I'm a little surprised MIT and Caltech are lower than Stanford and UC Berkeley. I know that MIT has a culture of sending its undergraduates to different graduate schools (so, if the top CS students go to MIT for their undergrad and professorships, they often would not have a PhD from MIT, lowering their prestige rating), but that does not explain why Caltech would be lower than Stanford/Berkeley. I know Stanford has a decent CS program, but I'm wondering if there's a gaming network effects thing going on, since both Stanford and Berkeley attract more hustlers.

MIT has it's own peculiar pedagogy that doesn't work for everyone. Stanford is a little more mainstream (in terms of pedagogy) but I'm surprised UIUC and CMU don't appear on this list.

Also... do you mean Computer Science or Software Engineering or "Computer Engineering" (a term that makes me shudder.)

We should be able to fit 50 universities in top 5.

I interpret "Computer Engineering" as electrical engineering for computers (e.g. the people making the new iPhone). I don't know if I mean "Computer Science" or "Software Engineering", because I was just using the article's terminology which may differ between all three of us (they call it "Computer Science").

I studied at Berkeley and Princeton (big classes vs small classes), I find your view to be fundamentally flawed. You presuppose that meritocracy is an inherently fair value system implementation, while many critics and philosophers reject this assumption; in the next breath you delegitimize social justice issues subtly framed as "identity politics", needless to say many other critics and philosophers do not share this talking point either.

Essentially, Oxford researchers—institutionalists—are on the worst perch to evaluate institutions because they don't have a deep understanding of cross-societal differences and inevitably end up using their position to ad hominem and rationalize their own insider-ish biases. That's a tough ideological shell to crack through if the goal is to maintain an objective discussion.

As to the matter, the real issue is that Oxford/Cambridge is a different system than the US big universities. The people who apply to Oxbridge are from UK-related nations where they can study for an IB or an A levels. So for example the miscomparison that "A levels are harder than SAT/AP" is because it fundamentally misunderstands the historical aims of American education philosophy and very different social formations of the 20th century. This is a better approach to explain why UK/European universities are the way they are versus the (previously) leading ring of STEM universities in the US.

Take as another example the PhD system. The American system is different, they prefer non-Masters students direct from undergrad. The European PhD is only 3 years! By one metric that sounds insanely short and not enough time to develop a PhD-level mind. By another metric, yet another systemic difference, with differing rationales and intentions.

More deeply, if we really are to reject identity politics, then a class-based critique would demolish the notion of university education as a filtration system for all societies. Second if Oxbridge are so good then why is all the world's research still essentially American with some satellite results coming out of Europe and perhaps (very cautiously) China? A response that decouples education from research is itself an assumption, one that the American academic philosophy in practice does not agree with. American academia prioritizes research, then teaching, then community service. In other words, decoupling “education” from “research” is itself a pedagogical-philosophy assumption, one the American/British/European academic systems nevertheless still has various problematizable, elitist mindsets about.

So there's a much broader social, political, and historical/class analysis to be made rather than this kind of wonkism of foolish comparisons, and I'm rather miffed that supposedly world-class researchers are still not cognizant of this. Sometimes we are too close to critically think about our own habitus fairly.

Or, before making graphs and charts, read some Paulo Freire.

There is no such thing as "the European PhD". A PhD in the UK nominally takes 3 or 4 years, depending on the program. In Finland, it's nominally 4 years (but typically longer), and that assumes that you already have a Master's. It used to be longer, but Finnish universities moved to shorter "American-style" PhDs, because politicians wanted people to graduate faster.

There is such a thing conceptually as distinct from how American PhDs are selected and developed. I've alluded to this already without elaborating in full on it.

My point was that there several major university traditions in Europe. The differences between them are almost as significant as the difference between any particular European tradition and the American tradition.

The UK is a particularly poor example of how things are done in Europe. In many aspects (such as whether the primary university degree is Bachelor's or Master's) it's closer to the US than the average continental European country.

You edited your comment after I started writing mine. Your idea that the US is still responsible for an exceptionally large fraction of academic research sounds like a leftover from the 20th century. European universities needed a couple of generations to recover from WW2, but since ~20 years ago, there have not been any significant qualitative or quantitative differences between the research output in the US and Europe. (China may also have crossed the threshold recently, but it's too early to say.)

At least not in the fields I'm qualified to judge (computer science, bioinformatics, genomics). There are obviously major differences in both directions in individual topics, but that's because both blocks are pretty small. Neither has enough researchers to cover every subfield and every topic.

American universities fill most of the top positions in university rankings, but that's mostly because the concept of "top institutions" is more relevant in American culture. (That's another aspect where the British tradition is closer to the US than continental Europe.) In many European countries, all proper universities are seen as more or less equivalent as far as education is concerned. Some universities employ more top researchers than others, but that doesn't impact their reputation as educational institutions as much as in the US or the UK.

The problem with this view is that it actively obscures the central role that neoliberalization of academic institutions plays in these formations of quality. So I'll give a logical argument: the US remains the most powerful nation on Earth, and it "in-sources" the world's talent to maintain and reproduce its scientific and technological leadership. Inasmuch as political conditions are changing, European neoliberalized academia shall change and develop as well.

Pointedly, I don't define results or leadership as "research output". I mean who was responsible for Crispr? For LLMs? All roads lead to Rome; but today, empires also change shape and form.

The US has had to share its scientific leadership for some time already, and China is now seriously challenging its technological leadership. It continues to attract foreign academic talent, mostly because its academic salaries are less competitive against industry salaries than in other developed countries. Because Americans are less likely to pursue academic careers, it's often easier for foreign academics to find opportunities in the US than in other countries.

Who was responsible for CRISPR is good question (I'm less familiar with the advances leading to LLMs). There was a series of incremental advances building on each other from at least Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, the US, France, Sweden, and Lithuania. And the Nobel prize was shared between an American researcher working in the US and a French researcher working in Sweden (and later in Germany).

You're either blithely (in fact, stupidly given electoral results this past decade) assuming everyone shares your normative goals and values, or you just asked ChatGPT to write you a "kritik" like some kid in a school debate league.

Edited: I think what's really going on is that you've internalized oppression so as to be so cynical and toxically jealous that someone else online can actually blithely/stupidly say what they think on a Sunday afternoon. Because you're professional working at a university, and you can't just do that and speak out. Noam Chomsky famously described this behavior amongst his peers.

I'm Asian American and LGBT+, and I was privileged by an advanced formal education. So, yes, I literally have a different set of values and goals than you. So you should just try to read it in good faith, I have made no such assumption rather my comment laid out those issues for you to think about. Unless you are doing the old "rules of rational discussion are for me, not for thee"? Surely you're not that sort of antiintellectual reactionary.

And to the other possibility, you're just writing an insult, so the problem there is you and your emotional regulation, and you are responsible for that.

Going back, it's quite the opposite, when the other commenter framed "identity politics" and "meritocracy", they were committing the very error you have ignorantly accused me of. Thus you are just engaging in projection. Not to mention the ("kritik" conservative's dogwshistle).

Thus, the fact that you are lacking in critical thinking skills today does not excuse you from such intellectually prejudiced remarks.

And finally, your reference to "electoral results" tells me you didn't read through my comment, and are pigeonholing me as one type of left-American Democrat or another, of which I have provided enough commentary in the original comment that I could not be one.

So as much as you were trying to suggest the problem is on my end, the problem is with you and your narrowminded (and frankly, one with a racist tenor because surely you would not have said that comment to my face) reply, eli_gottlieb. It's too bad you're actually a postdoc, if I were an evil SJW or Democrat (or whatever politics it was you were insinuating) I'd be cancelling you through your own institution or something.

If you are a conservative, further discussion is going to be pointless. If you are Bernie/AOC/other leftist then I'll chalk it up to you basically misreading what I wrote.

Wow, you think Bernie and AOC are the limits of the spectrum at that end?

> So as much as you were trying to suggest the problem is on my end, the problem is with you and your narrowminded (and frankly, one with a racist tenor because surely you would not have said that comment to my face) reply, eli_gottlieb. It's too bad you're actually a postdoc, if I were an evil SJW or Democrat (or whatever politics it was you were insinuating) I'd be cancelling you through your own institution or something.

Oh yeah, you're asking ChatGPT for kritiks. Fuck off.

> Second if Oxbridge are so good then why is all the world's research still essentially American with some satellite results coming out of Europe and perhaps (very cautiously) China?

Do you have a source for this?

> 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.

Depends on the subject right? A Level Further Maths modules were (at least when I did it) typically at a very high level, and you couldn't wing them, you really needed to understand the material.

Like I said you do need a grasp of the subject matter still, but I think if the exam changed a bit to something you should technically be able to work out with the same knowledge, but isn't what's expected, a lot of people would struggle. It was always a common complaint anyway right - 'that was nothing like the past papers!' etc.

Implicit in the funding issue is the inability to attract and retain top researchers in resource heavy fields (AI, experimental field).

The starting package For new professors at Oxbridge is several orders of magnitude less than top institutions outside UK

So my experience with moving from a Cambridge undergrad to an Edinburgh postgrad, albeit a couple of decades ago now, was the expectations between the two were nowhere comparable.

Cambridge if you'd not done the homework before the tutorial, you got sent packing for wasting everyone's time, but in Edinburgh it was common for all but the best students to only start the homework at the tutorial (thus wasting their opportunity to ask questions on trivial stuff they could get by reading the course notes.

Equally on exams, the minimum standard at Cambridge was "regurgitate proof from course notes" with the other 2/3rds of the marks for iterating on it with unseen material, whereas the Edinburgh exams the regurgitation would get you 100%.

Unless things have changed significantly (or Edinburgh is that much worth than other redbricks), I'm not sure I trust these rankings in terms of student quality.

Your anecdote doesn’t contradict the story - the University of Edinburgh doesn’t appear in the top 20 so apparently their “rankings” don’t think highly of the University of Edinburgh either.

(Also Edinburgh isn’t a redbrick, it was founded in 1583)

This was also my observation but in the reverse direction. I turned down a place at Cambridge to do my undergrad at Edinburgh a few years ago (for various reasons, not relevant here). It was only the top n% of students in the cohort who'd turn up for tutorials (prepared, or indeed at all), do assignments without cheating, ask questions in lectures, etc. Getting high grades in exams was mostly a memorization game. There was a really high workload but that was more due to busywork than intellectual challenge.

> This was also my observation but in the reverse direction.

I don’t see the “reverse direction” part. What you are describing and what owlbite is describing is the same thing seemingly.

What do you mean by “reverse direction”?

As in, having observed the UG experience at Edinburgh first-hand but at Cambridge only second-hand. Whereas the GP did the reverse.

I see! That makes sense. Thank you for the explanation!

How very odd. In most of my finals at Exeter Uni. Physics department in the 1970s regurgitation of course notes got you nowhere because all the exams were open note so the examiners didn't bother asking questions of that kind. The Quantum Mechanics exam was an outstanding example, not only did it not ask for any regurgitation most of the questions required the student to provide answers to problems that had not been more than hinted at in the course.

I wasn't even aware Oxford has ever loses top 2. May be I am way too stuck in the past. Also surprised Imperial and UCL are lower than what I expected.

I remember the joke in "Yes Minister" about LSE. How times have changed.

I also wonder the world is now more American focused, how do they rank against Harvard, MIT or other US Universities.

1. LSE 2. University of St Andrews 3. Durham University 4. Oxford and Cambridge 6. Imperial College London

You can see one international ranking (maybe the most important) from June this year here:

https://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings

Given that this is Hacker News, I think it is worth pointing out that Durham's strong suit traditionally is the humanities. In my opinion a CS degree from Oxford, Cambridge, or ICL is considerably more impressive than one from Durham.

Given this is Hacker News, I think we should definitely encourage all Yes, Minister references.

It's scary how relevant a 1970's/80s comedy show is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgkUVIj3KWY (Salami tactics)

Incredibly good writing throughout... only Armando Ianucci gets close, IMO. Of course he leans a bit more heavily into straight up farce, which may not be to one's taste, but still...

I hope he does something like Death of Stalin again.

I've found graduate students at Edinburgh to be fairly good as well thanks to the EPSRC's preference for the uni.

I think the real story here might be the line below:

"Durham University improved by 30 places year-on-year"

Seems a bit suspicious, no? What methodology change led to this result? How can a university that was previously not as well-regarded become the #3 in the country overnight?

What's the provenance of this "30 places year-on-year" assertion anyways? (TFA won't load on my end.)

The Times filed Durham 7th @ 859 in FY24[1], 5th @ 898 in FY25[2]. They're now 3rd @ 906 for the current FY.

P.S. Chuckling at the perception that a university which ranked top 10 for at least the past decade being characterized as "not as well-regarded"...strikes me as indefensibly elitist.

[1] https://archive.is/QN4Js

[2] https://archive.is/KyP48

I think they are referring to:

> Durham University improved by 30 places year-on-year in its students’ evaluation of teaching quality, which was the main driver in securing its third place in the overall university league table

Which isn't quite the same as 30 places in ranking as OP suggests, however I agree with their point that moving 30 places on that metric could be fairly suspicious.

For example - when I was at university in the UK we got a speech telling us basically that we were going to get sent a survey from the times, and the higher we ranked the university, the higher the universities ranking would be, and that would make our degree more valuable. If the main reason they jumped from 7th to 3rd could be a metric that is potentially 'influence-able' by the university, it could be more of a change in comms-strategy than actual university quality.

Appreciate the clarification and perspective.

Yes, seems I misunderstood the original text. Thanks for the clarification.

My recollection from thirty years ago was a lot of people that were aiming for Oxford would have Durham as their backup plan. It's been hovering around there for a while although not so much in the the world tech people care about, for which Warwick and Imperial circle Cambridge far more closely.

There's a stereotype, possibly unfair but somewhat amusing, that Durham attracts some people who are less clever/bright than they and their families believe, who failed to get into Oxbridge despite expensive private education, personal tutors, every other privilege under the sun. Sometimes known as "rahs" possibly? ;

Durham is the oxbridge reject university, and it’s a standard opener during freshers week to ask which college rejected them. Me, Corpus Christi Oxford reject, Durham alumnus.

What has seemingly happened here is that oxbridge have ramped up their intake of overseas students, who pay a vast sum compared to a U.K. student, thus pushing more U.K. talent to Durham, as you’ll always preferentially give the place to the kid paying six figures rather than the one on a state bursary.

I assumed one generally applied to both, no?

Yes, and then when oxbridge reject you, you take your second choice, Durham. At any rate that’s how it worked 25 years ago, I think it’s much the same now.

As I understand it, you can't apply to Oxford and Cambridge in the same year.

pg thinks this is because of letting in poor people: https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1969334665375813679

> Middle class students, knowing they'll be discriminated against, are now applying to US schools

I can't take that seriously. Middle class students in the UK would not take on the level of student debt required to study in the US, the sums of money required are vastly, vastly different between the two countries.

Sounds like PG has a hobby horse he very much wants to ride no matter what the facts show.

Not to mention the US administration’s a) war on said schools and b) immigration mayhem.

In British English, "middle class" refers to the well off professional classes or merchant traders. In American English, if I understand correctly, everyone who works is considered middle class.

I think I read that US middle class are people who only have to work one job

Yeah having a single full time job but not being part of the executive class is a decent definition. It's much more wide than the UK's usage for sure.

In America, we have a classless society and everyone claims to be middle class.

USA class system is based on income ranges. USA is also segregated by income and wealth.

I think usage in the UK can vary a lot. And different people may mean anything from the haute bourgeoisie to something much broader including a majority of the population. Another thing is that obviously class in the UK is a social distinction and includes a lot more than just income or wealth brackets.

The beauty of the term middle class is that it can be whatever the writer wants it to be, including leaving it up the reader’s imagination.

indeed, I'm personally fond of using it to disparage things I don't like.

It's a most excellent insult.

You get the implied snobbery of an upper-class person looking down on their inferiors, whilst also maintaining some street cred via not insulting the painfully poor.

examples: "stupid middle class French boys" "god-awful, self-indulgent prose that only the most basic of middle-class housewives could appreciate" "a speech reeking of vapid middle-class cliches" ...

I’m not sure Paul Graham’s use of “middle class” matches the colloquial one here in the UK. The students who are not getting in to Oxbridge because of their background are broadly privately educated.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Oxbridge has historically admitted a lot of kids from quite a small group of high cost private schools. The fact they’re adjusting their intake to somewhat reduce that is something to be celebrated.

Unless you’re a very wealthy person with kids at an expensive private school in southern England hoping that they’ll get admitted to Oxbridge, of course.

> refers to the well off professional classes or merchant traders.

Class isn't tied to money as much as the US.

For example, I grew up poor (as in eligible for free school meals in the 90s poor) however I was one of the posher kids in the school. Class is fucking hard to explain definitively.

Who still can't afford US universities, as UK professionals are (excepting the very top executives, public servants, finance and legal professionals, of whom there are relatively few) paid a lot less than the US equivalent.

UK middle class also includes university lecturers, teachers, various health professionals, graphic designers and so on, most of whom make less than 100k USD/year and some not much more than 50k.

Average student debt is £53k (~$71k USD): https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...

Given the disparity in middle-class household incomes between the UK and the US, I suspect a majority of UK middle-class students would be eligible for some form of financial aid from US universities (assuming Oxbridge vs US equivalents with need-blind + full-need international admissions), meaning their net cost to attend could be lower than studying in the UK.

> I would suspect that the majority of UK middle class students would be eligible for some form of financial aid at US schools

Very unlikely, most financial aid is not available to international students.

Very few schools give international students any aid.

Merit-based, in a lot of cases certainly. But need-based, you’re there to subsidize the university and not the other way around.

But the difference between UK student debt (basically a regressive time limited tax) and the US version of student debt (actual loan that will fuck you up) is key here.

I don't think its possible to have a full student loan from the UK and study abroad the whole time. (you can do a year abroad though)

The comic in https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w... is, as ever, very relevant.

This is basically 100% backwards. In Canada it's large corporate lobbies pushing for more immigration. Why? Because it lets them keep wages low and makes unionization impossible.

See also, Bernie 10 years ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0&pp=ygUVYmVybmllIG9...

I don't know at what point people were convinced that the push against immigration is some kind of billionaire plot, but is has been great cover for said billionaires.

You also end up with a voter base that demands relatively little from their political leaders. The left-wing parties can win elections just using some feel-good measures targeted at recent immigrants and promising to make it easier for their co-ethnics to either immigrate legally or stay if they have immigrated illegally. That enables them to move right on economic issues to capture the politically powerful knowledge worker class.

Do you think billionaires care whom they exploit?

It’s a distraction and divide et impera to prevent that immigrant and lower class local workers join forces.

Some kind of employment ping pong. At the end it‘s always cheap labor

> I don't know at what point people were convinced that the push against immigration is some kind of billionaire plot

Much like most other leftist rhethotic, this belief is not based on any real logic. Basically, the entire process went like this:

1. Corporations want more immigration to suppress middle class wages and workers' rights

2. They run propaganda campaigns targeted at the left and their virtues ("the poor immigrants are suffering and need our help! only racist nazis disagree!")

3. Said leftists, desperate to virtue signal and avoid being seen as racist or xenophobic, immediately move to support the cause unconditionally

4. They see the world as purely black and white, good vs evil, so when they ask themselves "do billionaires want immigration?" the thought process goes "billionaires=bad and immigration=good, therefore billionaires hate immigration"

No, I don’t think it is. There is no billionaire secretly hoarding all the top university spots. And no one is saying immigrants are taking the spots. This seems like completely unrelated political posting

> There is no billionaire secretly hoarding all the top university spots.

Do you think Trump got into Wharton on his academic prowess? Legacy admits and donor kids take spots from both middle and lower classes.

> And no one is saying immigrants are taking the spots.

Sure they are. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/08/27/trump-administration-pro...

This is about UK universities.

This is extremely unfair framing.

Oxford University has been discriminating people from independent schools for a while now. To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.

That's not "letting in poor people" as you framed it. It's letting in dumber people, worse students. Lots of that is mainly based on classism (against people from middle class), racism (against white people).

Oikophobia is a cancer, and Oxford getting worse ratings is the direct result of that.

> It's letting in dumber people, worse students.

Is it?

Maybe a kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder than, say, Prince Charles with his private school and dedicated personal tutors.

The context is explicitly statistical, so yes, of course - but your point is valuable to keep in mind to avoid subconsciously painting individuals with the same brush as the big picture.

Maybe. Unfortunately it's very hard to measure that. Moreover, how hard you have to work doesn't necessarily correlate to how good you are. The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".

> The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".

I think the point the OP is making is that getting 4 A*s when you benefit from exemplary schooling and personal tutoring doesn't necessarily make you the best nor the brightest.

>The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".

Maybe they are supposed to do this, but let's not act like the filter doesn't quite apply the same way if your parents are rich and or well connected. They're however very effective in filtering out bright kids whose parents can't afford the tuition and aren't lucky enough to get a scholarship.

>Maybe a kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder

It sounds like you think admissions should be based on how hard people think they worked relative to others.

Maybe they should be based on a range of factors that influence how successful the university thinks the candidate will be as an undergraduate? Not just exam results?

It means I think admissions officers sometimes know there’s more to a human than their raw test scores. They likely also know that a decent result at some schools requires more work than a great result at others.

I’ve met smart people who do poorly on exams. I’ve met dumb people who do well on them.

We're not talking about individual cases, we're talking about statistical averages.

Statistical averages would tell you that you wouldn't have some schools getting 150 pupils into Oxbridge while others only get 2. But has long been the reality.

No, they absolutely might, because schools group a load of students together with similar attributes relevant to academic success (quality of teachers, school funding, wealth of the surrounding area).

Maybe the statistically average kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder than, say, the statistically average Prince Charles with his private school and dedicated personal tutors.

This is quite the insult.

We could fill the world with Maybes, but the one thing I’ve noticed about people who succeed, is that it’s generally their work that performs, while anticlass-based triage has only made hateful people reach high positions.

Maybe statistically gifted child is more often than not born to parents who were gifted too. Then, they read more to the child, speak more with him. And maybe either have higher disposable income, or liberty to recommend books, and learn with the child.

In the future, it's going to be a nil argument anyway, as world-class AI tutors are going to be available for every child 24/7 for a penny.

But does Oxford want the best student or some that had to work harder but ultimately aren't as good?

In France, our elite scientific schools recruit students based on anonymous nationwide tests. It turns out most of the recruits come from privileged backgrounds, and I've heard this is more the case today than it was several decades ago.

I'd love to see more diversity in these schools, but I prefer to maintain our educational excellence rather than dilute it artificially with worse students. I'm all for paying tutors to poorer but promising student, but they should be admitted against the same criteria as anyone else.

Clearly, it's because talented people grow to the top (not just economically, they might be cultural elites, like people working in news, academia). Then, they marry people who are on the top. And they pass their genes and habits.

It's nothing bad that their kids end up good students again.

I think that French system is superior. It gives fair chances to everyone.

Honestly I feel like anonymous mass test in general is least worst way. Yes, parents can invest in tutoring and such. But there still needs to be effort and learning to do well on the test.

This is not 'clear' at all. What is clear is the correlation. You imply that the cause is 'good genes and habit'.

An equally, if not more valid cause is that having money makes it much easier to get good condition/tutors etc for preparing for the exams.

There are studies that show how heritable intelligence is. Very.

It is quite common people say, that something is only a correlation and not causation. But if you can point to a common denominator, that has been shown multiple times, to have a massive effect, it's not likely to be just a coincidence. Genes are this common denominator. Society and habits (for example, protestants vs catholics) are another.

Things that consistently impact the whole population are not just a random process that picks: "You will be clever, ugly.", "You will be pretty, sporty, but will be dumb." It's always genes, society and habits.

Which gene gives me a tutor to support me at the most critical point in my intellectual development?

The genes of your parents?

Or now, for $20/month OpenAI? Or for pennies through OpenRouter?

Some research on the subject here : https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20180905-how-genes-infl.... Personally I question how one can definitely prove to what extent genes are the factor as there are so many other factors in play, but those researchers know more than I.

It's clearly not purely genetic though is it? A lot of it is wealth and opportunity. That's why there's "dynasties" in so many areas of the developed world, particularly in cultural spheres where that opportunity matters more than in scientific worlds.

If you can pay to be better at the test, then the test just becomes a test of how wealthy you are.

When you have well off parents, you can literally be sent to prep schools which drill for these tests.

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 notion of school itself as a way of training people to be able to think by themselves will not have any sense.

And that is just training. Even with the same amount of class hour, kids who don't have to worry about take care of their siblings, of the house chores, or of even having access to decent relaxing conditions will get higher score even if they are in fact less smart.

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.

That's the point: people with more training that reach high grade are LESS GOOD than people with low training that reach lower grade.

You are saying that you don't want less athletic kids being accepted artificially. That's exactly the point: the score does not correspond to the talent, you have to correct for it: to compare 2 persons on their merit if they have had different training, you need to calibrate to get a variable that correspond to the merit.

It's always the same argument.

If you are world-class talent (someone who gets to Oxford), you should be capable of similar results as kids from independent schools. Like Joe Seddon did (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Seddon - growing up with a single parent mom, working as a therapist in NHS).

It isn't fair to ask ones to have 4A* and others to have just 3As.

Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A.

And 1 in 83 gets 3 As.

Making it 31 easier for people from state school is discrimination so bad, it should be illegal.

If it's so much easier to get into Oxbridge from a state school, why do you think people with the means send their kids to private school? They'd save so much money not doing so.

Maybe they aren’t doing it purely as a numerical exercise to get into a specific university 13 years in the future?

Most people sending their kids to the very best British schools are not expecting their kids to get into Oxbridge.

There is a growing number of parents who, because of this exact overt and known discrimination against applicants from private schools, will first send their kids to elite private primary schools and then they switch them to the best secondary state schools they can find, using the money to supplement their education with private one-to-one tutors.

This is an entirely expected outcome. Water will find a way to ground.

Oh yes, I have kids in a prep school where half of the class goes to Eton, and the rest to Winchester, Harrow, Seven Oaks, Derby... Now, for the past few years, almost no parents want to send kids to Eton. They know how much are those kids discriminated against. It's better to send them to a school with lower profile.

Doesn’t this prove the reason for the existence of the disparity? The wealthy kid’s parents want tutors to supplement the education they get from their state school.

I understand an argument saying people will game this setup, but arguing that state school kids are not disadvantaged is indefensible, in my opinion

There is absolutely a disparity between private and state teaching quality.

I don't think thats an objectionable statement.

Also, while not wanting to paint with a broad brush, people I know who work in state run schools are aware of how many other challenges students must face when they're on school grounds. They're fighting more than the test criteria, they're fighting their peers, outside criminal influences, prostitution, drug dealing etc etc.

Meanwhile this stuff is rarer and more swiftly dealt with at private schools because the parents won't have it, and they pay the bills and have some leverage, the financial incentives are different in the model and it shows.

I personally don't have a problem with loosening the grade criteria, even if it's gamed, the candidates are all interviewed anyway, it's not like a free pass, more an opportunity.

At my secondary school it wasn't possible to do more than 6 GCSEs vs. many of the most academically gifted independent school attendees who obtained at least double that number of GCSEs.

At A level my secondary school couldn't accommodate most A level subjects: students were sent off to many different schools for different subjects, and forced to choose which A levels they did based on complicated scheduling arrangements. The only reason some of them could afford to do A levels was because of the £30 benefits payments they received which covered their transport costs (I believe it was called EMA (something like "Education Maintenance Allowance") at the time, but it was a long time ago).

As far as I recall, the maximum possible qualifications from my secondary school was 6 A* GCSEs and 3 A levels.

> Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A.

> And 1 in 83 gets 3 As.

And what if that’s not always an indication of which person is smarter?

But we know that it’s true. That’s why we have been using objective metrics like test scores for millennia, across societies are different as China, India, and Britain.

Your best argument is "we've done it for a long time, so it can't be wrong"?

Quite the contrary: there is a long history of "objective" tests being shown to be deeply flawed and biased towards certain factors (often cultural and class based), we explicitly know it isn't the case that test scores are purely about some innate intelligence characteristic: there is a reason the rich spend a lot of money to raise their children's scores.

My secondary school claimed to have the best results for Business Studies A-levels in the country. They achieved this by taking the pre-released case study, writing every possible question they could think of about the study, writing model answers, and telling the students to memorise them. The idea that these scores represent some innate intelligence of the student is obviously nonsense if you interact with the system at all.

The notion that the British A levels have “cultural bias” is absurd, given that Asians outperform white British: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education....

In the U.S., research shows the SAT is highly predictive of college performance: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-week-educatio... (summarizing research).

It is strange to pretend that there is no cultural bias and then given an example that is usually explained because Asians seem to culturally value more education than white British.

How will you explain that Asians outperform white British otherwise, knowing that the idea that Asians and white British are genetically different enough to explain this has been scientifically debunked, or that adopted Asians don't show the same pattern as not adopted Asians?

(and, yes, of course SAT is highly predictive of college performance, isn't that the point: people who get better training get better college performance while not being "smarter", just "better trained")

I’m talking about the supposed cultural bias of the test itself, not cultural differences among test takers. A culturally biased test is one that requires familiarity with a particular culture, generally that of the people who wrote the test. If Asians do better on a test developed by British people, that suggests that the test itself is not culturally biased.

Your argument would have been more convincing if the Asians were getting the same as British people. But as soon as the Asians do better, it means that the whole comparison is meaningless. It means that Asians and British scores differently. Maybe Asians normally should score 14 and British score 10, but they score 12 because the test is culturally biased.

(sure, we expect that a small difference in "normal situation" should be relatively small, but the samples are defined as biased, so you cannot really rely on them unless making unproven assumptions)

There is no reason to expect that the test results would be the same across all demographic groups, and in fact, everything we know about psychometry (i.e. the science of mental testing) suggests that we should expect exactly opposite. See e.g. "Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns", which described the consensus position of the American Psychological Association as of 1995:

> The cause of [test achievement] differential is not known; it is apparently not due to any simple form of bias in the content or administration of the tests themselves.

https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/APA%201985%20Intelligence%2...

Not sure what is your point, the "test achievement" mentioned in the document refers to totally different "test" that the ones we were talking about.

Also, on just pure logic, I don't think the document shows what you think it shows. The document you provide (which is 30 years old, so with just this one, we should not assume it reflects today's consensus) explains that the difference is not understood, and that there is no _obvious_ answer, neither from biology, from group culture or from bias in the tests. In other words: the difference is due to something _not obvious_, for example (but not limited to, of course, it's just an example), _not obvious_ form of bias.

You could fairly say that China’s pre-Opium Wars obsession with testing and meritocracy based on said testing is what brought them into all that mess, I’m pretty sure that the Portuguese that had gotten all the way from their small country all the way to Southern China using some stingy boats were not clerks nor great (potential) test-takers, and yet it was those Portuguese seafarers that were to change the fate of most of Asia forever, not the test-taking Chinese.

Testing and meritocracy of what, though?

Don’t forget that China chose Confucianism to put a halt to the perpetual, European style wars.

Stagnation was by design, and caught up with them after 2000 years.

I got six A's at A level, over 20 years ago.

Am i objectively smarter than every single other peer who only got 4 As?

(I, for one, am confident I know the answer to this question).

Close. If you take a group of 50 people like you, who got six A’s, and a group of 50 people who only got 4 A’s, then the former group will be smarter.

So people who've been taught more things are "smarter" than people who've not been taught as much?

All babies are stupid, I therefore assume?

What about the people who never get the chance to do any A levels? Are they all less smart than those who do?

I'm confident you're a better judge of the worth of A-levels than the people who've never even taken them furiously insisting they're objective indicators of merit, and not high school syllabus-recollection/essay-writing tests which are easily taught to, actively fudged by some schools and greatly variable in actual difficulty from one subject and exam board to another.

Still, your grades (and mine) pale in comparison to all these youngsters with an opportunity to get A* grades...

We’ve done all sorts of dumb things for thousands of years.

It’s one metric of many. We know that paying for a tutor can change test scores. We know that a shitty home life can, too. They’re just harder to measure.

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?

> In total, almost half (49.4 per cent) of A-level entries at independent schools this year were awarded A or A*, compared with less than a quarter (22.3 per cent) at comprehensives.

https://www.schoolmanagementplus.com/exams-qualifications/a-...

Much more on the disparity if one cares to search.

How would you measure this?

Before you continue, there are governments in the UK that have created formulas to mathematically measure your level of "struggle"...these happen to, in a massive coincidence, benefit areas that vote for them.

The same logic is also being applied within universities to boost grades as managers at universities have quotas to hit from government. This leads to odd situations where a subject like Scottish Law at Edinburgh has no quota for students without appropriate social credit because it is a subject which, unlike other courses at that university, gets largely Scottish students applying so it has to be used to fill quotas. And these students have to be carried to the end of their course because they are there to fulfill a quota.

Sounds like a great idea but, as with everything like this, the assumption is that a university administrator or bureaucrat can accurately measure your struggle...they can't, I am sure the wisdom of this approach will dim when you are being operated on by someone who filled a quota at medical school.

>To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.

Or ABB for the incoming president of the Oxford Union, the one who cheered Charlie Kirk's murder a few months after debating him in person. <https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2025/09/oxfo...>

It would be wonderful if we could, just once, have a conversation about something happening outside the US without bringing in US culture war talking points.

Publicly cheering Kirk's murder is what made Abaraonye notable. I provided a citation for the ABB grades, which is relevant to the comment I replied to.

> I provided a citation for the ABB grades, which is relevant to the comment I replied to.

An extremely tenuous connection. Abaraonye (and even less his words on Kirk) had absolutely no relevance to the criteria by which the Times assesses universities, thus had no impact on Oxfords placement, thus has no relevance to the conversation.

Patanegra wrote:

> To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.

In reply, I provided a recently prominent example of someone recently admitted to Oxford with lower than 3 A grades on the A-Levels. I only mentioned Kirk's murder as context because, as I keep repeating, the person a) only became prominent because b) he publicly cheered said murder c) after debating Kirk in person. I don't know what else you can ask for here.

> I don't know what else you can ask for here.

Perhaps a demonstration of any kind of connection between his grades and his views on Kirk? The implication in what you're saying is that an ABB student is saying bad things than a 4 A* student would never say. I'd love to see anything backing that up. There are plenty of ABB students who said nothing of that nature and I'd wager you could find 4 A* students (albeit with a lower profile) who did.

Absent that connection it just looks very much like you're using the person's grades as a tenuous excuse to bring them up.

I believe you're being purposefully dense here. I get it, and probably do the same sometimes, but the connection is pretty obvious: someone gets in (allegedly) due to ideological fit instead of merit, and then becomes one of the most prominent voices for that ideology at the campus. It shows "wokism" has finally solved the reproduction crisis, and for people opposed to certain aspects (like affirmative action), that's pretty worrying.

But that isn’t a connection. It’s a coincidence. Where is the evidence that an Oxford with only 4 A* students would not have any such language on its campus? There is none.

If I argued that his comments were an obvious sign that Oxford needs to stop admitting people whose last name starts with A you’d rightly say I was being absurd. But basing the argument around his grades is no more valid.

“allegedly due to ideological fit” says it all. We’re just making stuff up to fit preconceived notions.

If you already believe he got in on merits, then obviously this is all a coincidence. But obviously the other guy you're arguing with believes he got in due to ideological fit, so it's no coincidence he espouses the ideology. You're dismissing your antagonist's cruxes as if they never existed. That's so rude.

> You're dismissing your antagonist's cruxes as if they never existed

Because there’s no evidence for them! They themselves used the word “allegedly”. Asking for evidence to back up an assertion is not rude, it’s table stakes for any kind of debate.

No? That was me. Also, it's very strange to say, "there's just no connection at all," instead of, "I don't think his lower offer letter was due to affirmative action, but probably due to skills in other areas (heck, he's the president-elect of the Oxford Union!)."

Apologies, I misread. But my point still stands: there’s no actual evidence for OP’s assertion. Why is pointing that out “rude”?

EDIT: This rant isn't directed at you specifically. It's more just frustration at a phenomenon I see a lot on Reddit and (to a lesser extent) Hackernews. I'm fine if you feel personally attacked, I'm just putting this edit here so you don't feel specifically attacked.

This is what was actually said:

>> I provided a citation for the ABB grades, which is relevant to the comment I replied to.

> An extremely tenuous connection. Abaraonye (and even less his words on Kirk) had absolutely no relevance to the criteria by which the Times assesses universities, thus had no impact on Oxfords placement, thus has no relevance to the conversation.

>> I provided a recently prominent example of someone recently admitted to Oxford with lower than 3 A grades on the A-Levels. I only mentioned Kirk's murder as context because, as I keep repeating, the person a) only became prominent because b) he publicly cheered said murder c) after debating Kirk in person. I don't know what else you can ask for here.

> Perhaps a demonstration of any kind of connection between his grades and his views on Kirk? The implication in what you're saying is that an ABB student is saying bad things than a 4 A* student would never say. I'd love to see anything backing that up. There are plenty of ABB students who said nothing of that nature and I'd wager you could find 4 A* students (albeit with a lower profile) who did. Absent that connection it just looks very much like you're using the person's grades as a tenuous excuse to bring them up.

Do you see how this comes across to a third party as @TMWNN vaguely hinting about ideological picks doing ideological things, you knowing this is what they're doing, but then stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that and just repeatedly saying, "show me the connection!" when you know very well what it is?

This is what worries me about the left. Why must you refuse to even acknowledge someone can hold views antithetical to your own? My best guess is the left has stricter ideological purity tests, and just saying something that can be misinterpreted as accepting anti-left views is dangerous. So, you cannot have an honest conversation with a racist because just saying, "maybe you think some races are superior, but..." could be weaponized in inter-party fighting as a tacit endorsement of racism. And so, you pretend to stick your head in the sand as if racists aren't out there, and the person vaguely hinting at racist things is literally babbling nonsense instead of sensible-through-a-racist-lens ideas.

The issue with this kind of discourse is it's entirely ineffective. I like to say, 'racism is stupid, because people usually only use race as the explanation when they're not smart enough to figure out the actual problem.' The solution to racism isn't to pretend the problem doesn't exist (to deviate from racism for a bit: OBVIOUSLY Abaronye's comments are a symptom of Oxford losing prestige; don't pretend you couldn't make that connection), it's to offer a better explanation. This is why I said,

>>> It's very strange to say, "there's just no connection at all," instead of, "I don't think his lower offer letter was due to affirmative action, but probably due to skills in other areas (heck, he's the president-elect of the Oxford Union!)."

Obviously the right has issues with obfuscation and dishonesty too. They're just worse at it. @TMWNN's vague hints were... anything but subtle. I don't like to play these obfuscation games, because pretty much tautologically they make it harder to agree on reality. But I find it very worrying when calling out obfuscation and explicitly writing down what everyone is already thinking is met by digging one's heels in and moving over to another patch of sand. Why not just actually try to reach common knowledge? Why do I have to drag you around, kicking and screaming, before you'll even acknowledge your actual point?

> My point still stands: there’s no actual evidence for OP’s assertion.

You're making this out to be some kind of final stand, when this is the first time you have even gotten close to putting your point in writing. But which assertion are you referring to? There are lots of implied ones, and no explicit ones (again, why obfuscation is frustrating). I think your point is:

> Abaraonye was admitted on his merits, and there is no actual evidence for OP's implicit assertion that he is an affirmative action admit.

If so, why wasn't this your entire reply to @TMWNN?? It's rude to start a debate without doing your due diligence of actually saying what you mean, and giving your best effort to parse what they mean!

> vaguely hinting about ideological picks doing ideological things, you knowing this is what they're doing, but then stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that and just repeatedly saying, "show me the connection!" when you know very well what it is?

> You're making this out to be some kind of final stand, when this is the first time you have even gotten close to putting your point in writing.

“show me the connection” is a request for evidence. You’re saying I’ve said that repeatedly then you’re claiming I’ve only done it once at the end. What else would “a demonstration of the connection” mean?

> So, you cannot have an honest conversation with a racist because just saying, "maybe you think some races are superior, but..." could be weaponized in inter-party fighting as a tacit endorsement of racism.

I’m not a member of the left wing debate club you have in your mind (if it exists at all) but my starting point when having an honest conversation with a racist would be to ask “what evidence justifies your racism?”, because absent that we’re not having a conversation based in reality.

Same here. The reason I’m asking for evidence is basically what you’ve already said: OP’s assertions are vague at best. Yours haven’t been a lot better. It’s all attributable to “ideology”. Then you say he’s “one of the most prominent voices for that ideology”. What ideology? And by what metric is he one of the most prominent voices?

This is my problem with much of the right: it’s gotchaism. The only reason he’s prominent is because statements he made in a private WhatsApp chat were leaked and circulated in right wing circles. The president of the Oxford students union is not normally a person you ever hear anything about on the national stage. The vast majority of Oxford students don’t even care about who they are.

So the right makes a relative unknown prominent by excessively hyping their statements then turns around and says “look at this prominent spokesperson!”. The union have disowned his comments. He has disowned his comments. And yet, despite his views being endorsed by absolutely no one, he’s still held up as emblematic of a larger, completely unattributable larger movement (the “ideology”) that is responsible for all kinds of problems, apparently including Oxford university’s ranking. And anyone associated with that “ideology” (vague enough that it encompasses whoever it needs to) must atone for the sins of this newly prominent spokesperson they never even heard of a week ago.

That’s why I have asked repeatedly what these supposed connections are. Because when we actually get into the details none of this adds up to anything. And none of it has anything to do with Oxford’s university ranking, the actual topic at hand.

> “show me the connection” is a request for evidence.

Evidence... yes, that narrowed it down a lot. You're looking for evidence! In a debate! I never could have guessed! Luckily for you, @TMWNN did, and tried to help twice, but clearly they didn't know you were looking for evidence, not whatever they provided.

In case it wasn't clear, I'm being sarcastic. You asked for evidence of a connection, they gave you it twice, and yet it clearly wasn't the evidence you actually wanted because you wouldn't just tell them what you actually wanted!

Also, btw, I never said this guy was prominent. I meant what I said, not something slightly different to further a not-so-hidden agenda.

[EDIT: forget it, already spent far too much time on this thread today, not falling victim to sunk cost fallacy! Any more than I already have, that is…]

> incoming president of Oxford Union

> debated Kirk [at Oxford]

> cheered assassination of Kirk, which happened within months of debate

Is this really dragging American culture war into things? This is clearly relevant to Oxford

Anyone logical knows it’s relevant, but people putting their head in the sand about the most significant political assassination in over 50 years isn’t a surprise.

As somebody that's not from the UK and not from the US, knowing this guy cheered the murder of Charlie Kirk gives me a strong hint about the kind of person it's being talked about.

So yes, in that sense it's an useful piece of information.

Given the violence Kirk paved the way and how he shrugged off gun related deaths as necessary evil for the 2nd amendment, I see no great difference in unsympathetic behavior of both.

> gives me a strong hint about the kind of person it's being talked about.

There was no person being talked about, though. This is a discussion about Oxford's university ranking. The GP brought up a person entirely irrelevant to that discussion and informed us of his views on a topic that's also irrelevant to the discussion.

How are the grades of a student in a prestigious position at Oxford not relevant to the academic reputation of Oxford?

My objection was not the student in question being mentioned. It was why he was mentioned: his views on Charlie Kirk, a US culture war topic that has nothing to do with the discussion and nothing to do with the student’s admission grades.

Oxfords name is currently being trashed globally because of this though. It sucks, but it must be dealt with. Celebrating violence against free speech doesn’t make sense for Oxford’s name to stand behind.

> Oxfords name is currently being trashed globally because of this though

Entirely depends on what circles you move in. The vast majority of people, especially those outside the US, are not talking about Charlie Kirk at all. Hence my objection to him being brought up. At bare minimum it has no relevance to the ranking being discussed in this topic.

> Celebrating violence against free speech doesn’t make sense for Oxford’s name to stand behind.

And they do not stand behind it. Oxford does not control the students union. I don’t buy any argument that they should somehow be policing free speech in the name of free speech. Makes no sense at all.

Supporting violence against free speech advocates is anti free speech.

The current president of a verbal debate club representing Oxford cheering political violence against someone he just debated is actually quite relevant.

The society leaders decided it’s okay for him to do that because of racism based on their most recent response.

Where is his reaction different to Kirk‘s statement that some gun deaths are a necessary evil for the „god given right“ of the 2nd amendment? Both seem to have lost basic human empathy.

Shall we ask the parents of the victims of the school shootings?

BTW why is a god given right not mentioned in the bible?

Clearly you need to reread The Bible:

> To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations—that one 'will rule them with an iron scepter and will dash them to pieces like pottery'—just as I have received authority from my Father. (Revelation 2:26–27)

Any good Sanctuarian[^1] would know this refers to the AR-15, and Americans' right to bear arms.

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

Sometimes colleges make deliberately easy offers for students they like, or they later accept students who did not meet the criteria that were set (if you set offers such that fewer students pass than you have places for, it is much easier to control class sizes – look at the chaos with Covid grade inflation). So I think it’s wrong to assume that the offer made to someone being high is a particularly strong signal for how clever they are.

Clearly this PPE student has some talent for politics to be elected president of one of the more prestigious societies, so it seems right for him to have been given a place.

And it’s being reported that the new president of the Oxford Union only had A B B.

> It's letting in dumber people, worse students

It's a very bold assertion that A level grades are the ultimate arbiter of "dumbness".

When you compare 1:83 vs 1:2600, it is so big difference, it deserves bold statements.

In the UK, there's 1.5 million kids playing footbal. 1:83 ~18000 kids play in any professional club. 1:2600 ~580 kids get to play in Premier League, EFL Championship in a season

What is Oxford doing is letting kids who play in absolutely any club, if they go to state school, or only those who got to Premier League, if they go to independent school.

Again, it's discrimination so bad it should be illegal.

Why do you think the school & A level system is perfectly meritocratic when the evidence squarely suggests it's far from it?

And yet students at independent schools are twice as likely to get all As than those at state schools. Do you think it's likely that all the smart students happen to have the means to go to the independent schools? Keep in mind the grades are not the main filter for oxbridge: probably the largest is whether the students apply in the first place, and then the latter is the interview, which matters a lot for determining which people with good enough grades are actually good enough to get in.

Well, isn't it because kids in independent school are in the school from 8am till 6pm, including Saturdays, since the age of 9, and by the age 11 they board, and all their lives revolve around learning?

In my sons' prep school, I have seen kids playing musical instruments so good, they could do concerts for a general public. I have seen boys taking GCSEs in Year 6.

And 100% of parents are university educated, often high achievers. Don't let me start speaking about Chinese, where kids come from school 6pm, and they often get two more lessons at home (Chinese + music instrument most often).

Parents in state schools don't put in even half of the effort on average.

> 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".

As if it isn't true.

And I say it as someone who went to a state school, just like my parents, grandparents...

Poor people just need to try harder, right?

Or do they need to just be luckier?

Well, yes. Everyone needs to try harder.

In China, they speak about 996 (working 9am to 9pm 6 days a week; and since we speak about education, Chinese kids often learn from 7am up to 9pm, and when they are getting ready for University, they pull 12–14 hours a day consistently), in Europe, we speak about working only 4 days a week, and whether it is bad for kids to have homeworks.

We all, in Europe, should speak about working a bit harder. Especially those, who are not happy with where they are.

> We all, in Europe, should speak about working a bit harder. Especially those, who are not happy with where they are.

There are plenty of people who are not happy with where they are despite working hard. This "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality is cancer to the problem, it solves nothing.

Talking about a 6 day work week aspirationally is truly odd. There are parents of independent school kids who do not work 6 day weeks, I'd dare to wager many of them. It's foolish and naive to assume that grinding harder is the way to make up the difference.

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 a surprise, because independent schools hothouse children to ensure they peak at a levels, whereas what universities want is students who will continue to improve at university.

I have two children (3xA*, 1A for one and 3As for the other) who were not interested in Oxford or Cambridge. My experience of Cambridge students (I live in Cambridge) is that I have seen many burn out. You also end up with a very narrow program of study which for children with broader interests forces them into a box very early. It’s also a 3 year undergrad program with 24 contact weeks a year, which is insanely short.

My children have gone to Scotland (Edinburgh and St Andrews) which allows significantly more flexibility than English universities offer in choosing subjects outside your chosen degree pattern. St Andrews even lets you change degree completely if you find something else you like.

If you really really want to be a mathematician at 18 then I can see why Cambridge or Oxford might appeal; for kids with more breadth, I think it’s a poor choice.

>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).

I agree with a lot of this.

> My experience of Cambridge students (I live in Cambridge) is that I have seen many burn out.

100%. I "burnt out" (actually, I think I discovered there was more to life than the academic slog I'd spent my entire schooling immersed in) and despite 6 A levels came 94/97 in my third year.

It happens a lot, and my suspicion is that the burnout is caused by the whiplash of going from a high intensity/pressure school environment (where you're likely told you're the smartest person in the room), to a more adult, self-driven one (where it's clear you're not).

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

This depends on the course I think. I did natural sciences which is extremely broad, and allows much later specialisation. Other courses are far narrower d think.

> You also end up with a very narrow program of study

This just isn't true in my area (Physics), the courses at Oxbridge are just as broad but go much deeper than you'd study in another University.

I don't think it's true of written subjects either, from friends that studied there it sounds like the cranking out of essays is weekly or more at Oxbridge whereas my housemates at University were doing termly stuff.

By narrow program of study I don’t mean “breadth within the discipline” I mean “credit for work outside the discipline”. My son is studying maths but has taken two semesters of biblical Greek, previously did a music subject and this term is doing Hebrew. Can’t do that at Oxbridge.

>Well, isn't it because kids in independent school are in the school from 8am till 6pm, including Saturdays, since the age of 9, and by the age 11 they board, and all their lives revolve around learning?

No, it's nowhere near that intense on average. And also, this sounds like it very much is about the quality of the schooling, no? But, if you're also going with 'all kids aren't equally smart', then that would suggest that the results from that stage of schooling are not necessarily indicative of how well they would do at a given university, where there's a lot less support in general.

I am not sure, if it isn't so intensive in other schools. It is so intensive in our prep school.

All kids aren't equally smart. Not all kids can also handle such a regime. It isn't for everyone. Those, who succeed in such schools, deserve not to be discriminated against, because their dad has a Range Rover and tweed suit.

If a good independent school prepares a child better than a state school, the child should have a preference. Otherwise, all those years of preparation and all that talent is wasted.

> Otherwise, all those years of preparation and all that talent is wasted.

In other words, the parents should get a return on their investment?

Your child is not entitled to an Oxbridge place over a state-educated child because they might have more potential and ability, they're entitled because you paid extra for it?

Well, when you as a parent, basically get your 9-year-old, work as many hours per year, as a full-time employed adult, so your child reaches its full potential, you expect, that this possibility will continue in all levels of education.

Anyway. If Oxford is going to pass on those kids, who are often multiple years ahead of the average, some other university will accept them. And then, this university will likely beat Oxford in ratings.

I'd be extremely wary of asserting that privately educated kids are any more successful at university than state-educated kids (on the same course) when there's no evidence to bear this out.

If, however, you want to convince yourself that the amount of money you've spent on your child's education means they're smarter than the rest, go right ahead and believe that.

Universities don't select for whether a candidate has "reached their full potential". They select for what that potential is.

It depends on how you measure it. A kid from independent school with AAA is going to be worse than a state school AAA kid. But state school AAA kid might be 3-A* kid in independent school and might do better.

For smarter. My narrative is more prepared, used to working harder. And also, it's self-selection. If you are not made for that type of education, you are going to leave.

No matter if universities select for potential, or operating near it. Both would be nice. Now, it is increasingly also how they will shape the society if they accept student A instead of student B. And they want to shape society in a way that discriminates against certain kids for who their parents are.

The kids at private schools are specifically primed for every part of the application process, including the interview and interview questions in a way that state schools simply cannot. It does not matter how smart you are if your competition is able to practice in a way you cannot.

Why the process is not fixed from that part? Redesign in a way that private schools will not get any benefit from the process itself.

It is, via the interview. This is why A-level results are a coarse filter, and why they have different standards for state vs private schools; state school kids with 3 A's presumably excel in the interview to the same extent as private school kids with 3 A*'s.

It cannot be understated how much of an advantage someone who went to a private school has over someone from a state school, with respect to the entire process (exams/admissions tests/interview prep).

What is your specific proposal? Anything you do, the private schools will do their best to adapt.

How exactly? the way it's managed at the moment is that the admissions tutors keep an eye on what different schools are doing in terms of prepping their students and keep that in mind when assessing them. Which is exactly what causes the 'bias'. I am significantly more impressed by someone who manages to get good grades with little help than someone who manages to get excellent grades with the most effective teaching of the test that money can buy (having gone to an independent school, I was one of those being 'discriminated' against, but I can well understand that many of my classmates, who primarily good at cramming for the exam and not understanding the material, got very good grades but would not do nearly as well at university. Heck, I got in and struggled way more than I had done before, and more so than many in my year who had worse grades in less good schools)

(I would, in general, be in favor of fixing GCSEs and A-levels. They have persistently moved in a direction that rewards memorisation of particular keywords, something which especially rewards teaching the test, as well as getting easier and especially less good at discriminating the top end of ability accurately. But it's still not going to be enough to remove this difference)

Went to private school and gotta say I went into the whole thing entirely blind - zero priming or coaching, just a begrudging allowing me to escape the prison camp for a night to go for my interview.

To me, the whole Oxbridge education must be distorted by this fierce competition to improve one's "personal brand" by getting a prestigious school on your c.v /resume (or misperception that going to Oxbridge gets you in contact with the best people to learn the subject from, which is clearly untrue, as for starters many great academic staff stay away, unable to afford a family home in such areas). It just means your peers will be rather "type A" , pushing very hard. but does it mean they're actually brilliant minds with novel ideas? Some of them for sure but Oxbridge hardly has a monopoly on that. There must be people whose parents sent them to amazing private schools, and they got pushed towards Oxbridge and one day they wake up and say "I've no idea why I'm doing any of this, its not making me happy and I wish I could be around normal people" ;)

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 knowing that even if they aren't currently at some elite high-fee school, they might still have the ability and capability to do well.

I am all in favor of this style of selection. The dark old days of "this kid's dad went to our college, we should do them a favour and let them in" are long gone, thankfully.

Can you point to any kind of evidence that Oxbridge are dumbing down their teaching, or lowering their standards of teaching? I doubt it.

Full disclosure: cambridge alumni, from a state school!

On student evaluations, I wouldn't be surprised of Oxbridge do badly as so many pf the dons were at or near the top of their year at the university, weren't employed for their teaching abilities, and seemed unable to comprehend they were not teaching cohorts entirely full of clones of themselves.

Dumbed down it was not, in my experience. Dumbing down would be a way to up the score on these rankings, though.

And is this new generation doing paticularly well in solving our problems or advancing the nation over the previous one? I can't see much examples, I do remember going through some of the science projects shown in undergrad showcase but none of them were tackling key bottlenecks or doing something novel.

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, applicants are scored so they can be stack-ranked, and the top N given offers. Then, for the students that are accepted, and get the required exam results, the college also records their marks at each stage of their degree. To verify the admissions process is fair, these marks are compared with the original interview ranking, expecting that interview performance is (on average) correlated with later degree performance.

I don't know if they go further and build models to suggest the correct offer to give different students based on interview performance, educational background, and other factors, but it seems at least plausible that one could try that kind of thing, and have the data to prove that it was working.

Anyway my guess is that of the population of people who would do well if they got in, but don't, the majority are those whose background makes them believe it's "not for the likes of me", and so never apply, rather than people who went to private schools, applied, and didn't get a place.

(also a Cambridge alumni from a state school, FWIW),

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?!')

What an appalling point of view.

Growing up without privilege is (obviously) markedly more difficult than being provided with the best education money can buy throughout childhood.

The students aren't necessarily worse; but they will be unaccustomed to the codified approach that other students from independent schools understand.

The system has been built to serve the privileged.

While you might feel blame can fairly be placed on differing entry requirements; the truth is more complex.

A 'sticking plaster' solution has been lazily applied to address disparity, when in reality, the whole system needs to be reworked.

'Dumber' and 'worse', are not labels that should be used here.

It might come over as appalling, given the whole culture has shifted towards: "Nobody is dumber! Every child deserves a medal."

Which isn't true, and never was. I get why we do that with kids in Reception and Year 1. With young adults, like University students, the fact of inequality of potentials of individuals, is just a fact anyone has to live with.

I am clever, but I am a fat, average looking guy. So that's what I have to live with. David Beckham is not so smart, but he is sporty and looks great. He uses his innate talents, and I use mines. Nobody is discriminated by being different.

The system has been built by those with means. And those with means more often than not are clever, hard-working people. That's how you get successful in the first place. And when you are born with great talents, you will go up too. That was the point of aristocrats being replaced by bourgeois, and now people in tech growing no matter where they are from.

I understand what you're trying to say, but I think you're making a false equivalence between socio-economic disparity and innate talent.

Imagine the same person, cloned. Clone A is born into an economically challenged household; while clone B is born into an upper-middle class household.

Now consider whether both clones would achieve the same results at A level.

One could expect the child born into the poorer household to experience more challenges, and perhaps achieve worse results as a consequence.

In this instance, how would it be appropriate to call clone A thick or less intelligent than clone B?

When you are a talented child born into a bad family, your success is to go from £1 to £10M.

If you are a talented child born to a millionaire, your success is to go from £10M to £1bn.

If you are a dumb child born to a millionaire, you go from £10M to £1.

You probably assume that people with the same skills should have the same absolute outcomes. I don't. There shouldn't be glass ceilings for talented ones, so a son of a carpenter has a right to become a billionaire, or earn a Nobel Prize in science, or apply his talents in any field. But I don't think there exists any socioeconomic system that would deliver more equitable results and had more pros than cons, especially compared to the current system.

You've lost me on your reasoning, but I would like to state that I wholly disagree with your politics.

Describing a family that doesn't have money as 'bad' is outrageous.

By bad, I mean being in a bad situation.

I don't say people are evil for not having much money.

I grew up in a family with very low income (my dad was earning about £12000 per year, when he retired a few years ago, my mum about £6000, I am from Central Europe, so things are a bit cheaper there, but not much). He worked shifts, and my mum worked 1.5 jobs.

Yet, I was able to achieve everything I wanted.

Maybe you should re-read what I write to understand it better.

I see your point, I really do. We all have the ability to achieve, and there shouldn't be a limit on that potential.

However, that's exactly what the class system in the UK does. The potential of oeople born into lower classes of society is actively limited.

I have to laugh anytime anyone talks about the students being brighter.

I went to a relatively poor state school. I did very well regardless but on average the results were not that good. I remember sitting in my history GCSE class and a teacher chasing a student around various classrooms on multiple occasions. I remember not having a permanent teacher for Year 10 English. I remember my GCSE Spanish teacher bribing everyone with chocolate when OFSTED came around because this was the third time doing the same lesson and he wanted us to look stronger than we were.

Fundamentally Oxbridge entry has never been based on academic results directly as you're implying. You needed near-perfect grades to be considered, but the vast majority of people applying with those grades fail the interviews regardless.

The interview is absolutely the primary test here, with the grades just acting as a filter to provide a manageable number of applicants. Widening that filter to allow more disadvantaged students the chance to interview seems perfectly reasonable - given that the interview itself remains equally demanding (and I've seen no suggestion or evidence against this).

I think it’s a mistake to think admissions can ever be some neutral objective process.

You are designing a contest, and students compete. You have to try to represent your goals in terms of the contest, this is very lossy. It’s just never going to be very accurate, and in highly selective institutions much of the selection will be random no matter how you structure the contest.

It is a very fair read of Paul's take.

I attended one of the worst secondary schools in the country. Less than 10% of my year earned the qualifications necessary to go on to university. I know that many of these people, who have gone on to be successful in life, would have excelled at an independent school and would have excelled at university. They were in poverty, not stupid.

You cannot compare the achievements of a student at an independent school to those of a student at a state school based on grades. State school and independent school are a fundamentally different educational experience.

If you think Cambridge and Oxford exist to accept the highest graded students in the country, rather than to accept the students that have the most academic potential, then sure, let's only admit students who have 3 A*s.

Paul is talking his book, he wants it to change to increase the probability that his kids get in. Of course what we get to hear are the "reasons", and this conflict of interest goes unmentioned.

> You cannot compare the achievements of a student at an independent school to those of a student at a state school based on grades. State school and independent school are a fundamentally different educational experience.

While I agree with this as a conclusion, I believe you cannot really go there without acknowledging that this has been a deteriorating situation ever since most of the UK abolished the grammar schools.

"Comprehensive" education has done nothing except result in the oppression of the very people it claims to be liberating.

As someone who went to a grammar school, they are a terrible idea and comprehensive schools are a better system.

Students are not equally capable across all subjects, and their ability changes over time. Grammar schools mean there is no room to give you what you need in subjects you fall behind on, and students who start to struggle or start achieving post-11-plus have to transfer schools to fix it, creating huge friction and basically ensuring they'll miss out on the education they should have.

Comprehensives that have a full range of sets to teach at the skill level of the student for each subject are infinitely better for actual education.

I was one of the fortunate ones who was pretty generalist and so I didn't suffer too much by it, but I consistently saw people just give up on subjects because they were too far behind and the school had no other options because there were no lower sets.

There is also the issue of "contextual offers" at most Unis. Offers can be made at a significantly lower level just based on the postcode of the applicant. So someone might get an offer at AAB or ABB purely based on their address while the standard offer is AAA or higher.

Contextual offers are just that -- contextual. Cite your sources if you're claiming all independent schools get one tariff and all state schools get another, because AFAIK that's not how these contextual offers work.

Oxford admissions have a heavy interview component: if they think you're really smart, have great potential, and then you'll be of the caliber to get 4 A* no question if you had rich parents and went to a top Public School (but don't, so may not), then -- yeah -- they can make you a lower offer. Their place, their rules.

It isn't dumbing down or taking worse students, it's easing out the rich types who will drink/play lacrosse or rugby/bore to at least Blues standard, are pretty bright but have been spoon-fed to get there so will turn out to be dumber and worse students that people whose potential hadn't been fully revealed by 17/18, even if the spoon-fed cohort get better A Level results.

> if they think you're really smart, have great potential, and then you'll be of the caliber to get 4 A* no question if you had rich parents

Assumed, they really are 4 A* material.

If not, what might happen is, that Oxford might get worse in ratings. Is Oxford getting worse in ratings?

> It isn't dumbing down or taking worse students, it's easing out the rich types

But those rich types already have 4 A*, or they are close to it. Their kids have spent 10 years boarding, learning 10 hours a day, including Saturdays. And then, they are discriminated, because of hate towards the rich.

I guess, what will happen, is that some other universities will pick them up. Kids, who are used to work extremely hard. Kids, who know how to learn. Kids, whose parents and grandparents knew how to apply themselves and who instilled all this in them too.

And Oxford will be dethroned. Cream always rises to the top.

This obviously doesn’t follow, and you should feel a decent amount of embarrassment for ignoring the fact that exam grades don’t correlate with “dumbness” or lack thereof.

It should be trivially obvious that a student who is perhaps from a less well-off background, attending state school and achieving decent grades, can be equally as talented and deserving of a top-tier education as a better-off, privately-educated student.

Access programs go some way towards trying to tackle snowballing generational inequality - which essentially results in a bias away from merit, and towards those able to afford private education.

If you want to argue against that, then fine - but at least don’t start with such faulty assumptions.

> To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.

where does it say that here?

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/admiss...

Although I do note that foundation PPE only requires BBB, which given the current crop of people in westminister, it makes sense.

It's interesting to see that conservatives have quietly moved on from the idea that affirmative action should be done on the basis of household wealth instead of ethnicity. At least now we are being honest.

Alternatively, the gap between the classes for access to educational resources has significantly declined in the past twenty years (due to stuff being posted online).

And yet those kids from state schools then come out with more firsts than those from independent schools, showing they were not “dumber” at all - they were smarter.

Really, oxford and cambridge as well as other top universities can have a simple algorithm. They should bias against those from private schools in terms of admissions criteria until the point at which outcomes (as measured by graduating degree scores) are equal. This wouldn’t happen though because then private schools would drop to 5% of enrolments and there’d be no advantage gained from paying for a private school education. Unthinkable!

Keep in mind that the rating here is mostly about the student's opinion of the university, especially in terms of the teaching. And a dirty little secret of oxbridge I feel is that the teaching isn't particularly great. It's not bad, to be clear, and supervisions are something that you don't really get elsewhere, but it's very much a 'chuck people into the very deep end and let them sink-or-swim' approach with the sheer amount of material that they expect you to get through in a pretty short amount of time. The reputation they have is because a) they can afford to be (and are fairly good at) being highly selective in admitting those who can cope with this, b) if you do manage to swim, you've shown a higher level of aptitude for the subject than other universities, and c) because of said selectivity, you'll tend to be around other students who are able to support you. The actual level of support and teaching from the university itself is not as top-class.

> It's letting in dumber people, worse students.

Is it? That assumes that the grade is a fair differentiator between two students. But we know that that's not true because the gulf between private education and state education is enormous.

> To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools

This is not, generally, true. Cambridge tends to have higher offers, and I had a friend offered 5A*+S1 (STEP), but that’s mostly because he buggered up his interview (and he was taking 5 A-levels). The standard offer at Oxford for mathematics is A*A*A, which is exactly what those applying from any public school will be asked to achieve.

> or just 3 As from state schools

Not for maths. For easy courses like PPE, someone who misses a standard offer of A*AA might be let off by a few grades. People at public schools who miss their offers are much likelier to be a bit thick.

Not familiar of Oxfords admissions, but if they apply affirmative action as done in other universities in the US, this take of Thomas Sowell is very relevant: https://youtu.be/7AyhaYkikCs?t=57

1. They don't.

2. As usual, the question doesn't really make sense in the context of the UK. The UK is far less diverse than the USA as a country: 80% of the population is ethnically white followed by 9% of Asian from former colonies.

3. Without affirmative action, Oxford is already noticably more diverse than the UK overall because it attracts applicant from all over the world. It's mostly true for Asian students but remains true for black students.

While your link is helpful, he did not say that. He specifically mentions changing the admissions standards. Specifically having different standards for different social classes.

I have second handedly seen the effects of such discrimination in other societies and it really is crippling to the economy. Be wary of any kind of discrimination specifically one that lowers expected grades.

> Now they have lower standards for applicants from poor families or bad schools. As a result Oxford and Cambridge have sunk to fourth place in the latest Times Good Universities Guide.

He did say exactly that.

He also provided no numbers or evidence - did his children fail to get in or something?

Yes, eldest was rejected

Your link bolsters the point of the person you are responding to. The lowering of standards is the relevant portion. It would be relevant if they lowered standards for any group, just happened they lowered them for poor families.

> Kids worrying that Oxford and Cambridge will discriminate against them are among the smartest in the country.

pg's lack of awareness that this has basically always been true smacks of naiveté.

Target Schools was a thing in the 90s. This isn’t even slightly new. (And last I checked the Target Schools students had, if anything, slightly better outcomes than the main pool.)

To add to this: Oxford and Cambridge always get the smartest in the country, and they don't struggle to identify them. From what I know of the admissions process, there's three fairly obvious groups of applicants to oxbridge: people who are obviously ludicrously smart and driven and will not struggle at all with the course, who are obvious accepts but are not nearly enough to fill a year group; those who are obviously not cut out for it and are rejected outright, and those who are probably going to be OK but it's not a slam-dunk. The main challenge for them is picking those with the best chances out of the third group.

Interestingly, some colleges tacitly subdivide these groups further.

Christ's Cambridge famously used to hand out "2 E" offers to those in the first group who they know would put the effort in anyway, but "3/4 A" offers to those in the first group they thought might just coast with a 2E offer.

A "2E" offer was certainly a mark of prestige.

(You get your offer in around December time, but sit your A levels in the summer).

Is pg generally aligned with this line of thought or is this out of character? Not what I expected but also not unexpected given most powerful tech bros slides into that side of politics

> Is pg generally aligned with this line of thought

Yep, but this is a fairly common take I've noticed in England (not as severe in Scotland).

The air is thick with a semblance of classism, and I've found the business culture to be horrid due to this "old boys club" mindset.

Imagine an America where the only way to open doors to the upper echelons is to attend only an Ivy.

And I say this as an Ivy grad.

To a large extent I feel this is because the British economy is so heavily tied to legal, financial, and media services, and as such the "Magic Circle", "The City", and the media consolidation in Greater London has such an outsized impact.

Ironic too because there are fairly decent clusters of engineering research like DefenseTech in Southwest England (which tbf is fairly posh) and Robotics and HPC in Edinburgh.

> [LSE's] stellar academic performance was boosted this year by improvements in teaching quality and student experience.

The list is semi-bullshit and not just based on student performance, so I'd say he's talking out of his arse.

None of my Cambridge uni friends would have applied to go to America because of contextual admissions criteria.

In any case taking someone's background into account is actually the logical thing to do. Who do you think would do better: an Eton student who scored 50% on the test, or a comprehensive student who scored 49%? The answer is pretty obvious and they're right to try and get the best students; not just those that score best on admission tests.

My prior would have been brexit-related changes reducing the number of smart but non-rich students coming from the EU, but I don’t actually know how the numbers there changed. Also, what are the rankings based on? When I was applying, I think it was lots of stuff like:

- grades of incoming class (the changes 'pg alleges could lower those grades even if th actual quality of the incoming students don’t change. Balance by subject can affect this too as eg science students tend to have more UCAS points. Private school students may also have more UCAS points because their schools are more likely to do things like putting students in for extra A-levels or GCSEs (taking those exams costs the schools money)). Alternatively, university funding is in a dire state in the U.K. (though less so for Oxford and Cambridge given their endowments?) so maybe they can trade prestige for letting in a larger number of international students who pay full fees but who would have otherwise not met the bar.

- research output metrics, which seem quite unrelated to undergraduate selection – there is a high lead time and if you get the selection wrong you can still hire researchers from elsewhere. These metrics also seem somewhat gameable

- metrics around outcomes for graduates. I wonder how biased these are by subject mix (ie how much is this just a measure of what percentage do courses that lead to good programmer/finance jobs) and how much they are affected by students perusing further education. I think to some extent this can also be affected by class mix because more privileged students may find themselves in better jobs (either because of parental connections or just class filters in hiring though one would hope that the university would train students to be able to pass such filters)

I recall being sceptical of these league tables when I was applying many years ago for reasons like these (not that it stopped me from applying to highly ranked universities).

Though comparing to American schools, I do think there are reasonable advantages to going to the US – you’re much more likely to work in the US (and therefore likely to get paid a lot more) if you go to a North American school. If you’re trying to compare Oxford to Harvard (with offers) and the financing works out either way, it seems to me Harvard would obviously be a better choice today and 10 years ago before the ranking changes. I’m not sure what the quality of US school is where you prefer Oxford.

One other thing: Oxford and Cambridge delegate a lot of admissions to colleges so I’m not sure how much one can claim that it is a global shift in attitude, though there are some ‘second chance’ mechanisms and schools that send many students to oxbridge will have better recommendations for which colleges to apply to, and the policies between colleges can still move in a coordinated way even if each college does its own policy.

If you replace 'middle class', with 'upper class' .. you get a much more realistic reading of this thread; which is undoubtedly an apologia for upper class paid education.

I felt the original thread wasn't recognising the social disparity authentically.

I love how logic escapes PG.

If it was because of the poor people, then Oxbridge would still be winning, as they are the only ones that have entrance exams & weird interviews still.

Yep. The beneficiary of this ranking update, for those who take it seriously, is a place where the same comprehensively educated kid that disgustingly and outrageously get a place at Oxford with three As after also passing additional selection hurdles in the form of an entrance exam, a special application form that certain schools are very good at teaching their kids how to pass, and an interview with a probably privately-educated Oxford don gets an offer of 3 Bs based on the vanilla UCAS application, and might well get in if they miss out if the course isn't oversubscribed, especially if they have a good story about going to a bad school.

Also, nobody thinks gaming a teaching quality survey ranking (something traditionally focused on more by much less academically selective universities) to jump up the Times list means that Durham is on average outputting more elite students

When I was a student, no one would seriously say they had a ‘doxbridge education’ for the same reason that saying you went to an ‘Ivy League school’ meant you went to a shit one like Brown (idk about the US rankings tbh; basing that on a Lisa Simpson nightmare). That’s still obviously true today.

I expect new hires at my employer and our competitors to continue mostly coming largely from Oxford and Cambridge (plus to a lesser extent Warwick, Imperial, and some European schools) and not much from Durham.

Brown is a shit school?

That's a level of elitism I don't often encounter.

yup, that's where the brown color comes from

There's a weird intersection in ultra-elitism where true blue-blooded snobbery is indistinguishable from middle-class envy.

You don't watch enough The Simpsons. (-:

It's the daydream sequence from series 10 episode 7, 'Lisa Gets an "A"'.

“Mmm, heck of a school. Weren’t you at Brown Otto?”

I think you’re confusing a statement about ranking in a small set (Ivy League schools) for a statement about a bigger set. This isn’t uncommon – iirc there was some big furore a few months ago about admissions to US schools where much of the disagreement seemed to be downstream of different people thinking about different numbers of top or acceptable universities (and then sometimes having a big difference between the intuitive percentages of possible university options and the actual percentages they made up)

I think it’s still the case that people who describe themselves as having gone to an Ivy League school mean a school like Brown. If you went to Harvard then either say it directly or mumble something about a school in Boston – why say something that sounds similarly fancy to the truth but that could also be interpreted as something less elite? Saying you went to school in Boston is much lower in fanciness than Harvard or Ivy League except that most people know what it is code for.

it’s like saying you earn six figures, everyone knows that means $110,000.

I’m not sure that’s true. It’s true in the sense of being around where the mode is for the distribution of incomes over 100k, but people (I know) tend to not like boasting about money, either out of humility or some expectation that they might be taken advantage of for revealing a high income, so they may be happy to understate it. I don’t think 100k is elite enough anymore (most programmers in the US, managers at some fast food stores, etc) for the difference between 100k and 500+ be an insignificantly polite downgrade.

I think Harvard and MIT students mostly say, "Cambridge," rather than Boston. Then, when the inquirer frowns in confusion, they mumble, "Boston".

> Saying you went to school in Boston is much lower in fanciness than Harvard or Ivy League except that most people know what it is code for.

At one point, I identified at least 4 categories of how Harvard alumni may mention or not mention where they went to school.

The funniest category is the one you mention: saying something like "back East", as a way of avoiding saying that you went to Harvard, as if you don't want to brag, while still making sure they know you went to Harvard, because you actually do want to brag.

That category might still be a thing, but I bet only for a very small minority. Most Harvard people are decent people. And even most of the minority who graduate and eventually do things you don't like, from positions of power, will have some poise. Living in the neighborhood for a long time, I have a suspicion that there's a respectable decorum that new students pick up on almost immediately from the student body culture, if they don't arrive with it. Each academic year, I almost never see any kind of public douchiness after the first week of September, until guests arrive for graduation/commencement. Then, I will probably notice at least one bit of overt jerkiness by a visitor, who, my theory goes, didn't attend Harvard themselves.

> basing that on a Lisa Simpson nightmare

https://quahog.org/FactsFolklore/Trivia/Limelight/TV/The_Sim...

> Brown ('81) alumnus and Simpson's writer Ian Maxtone-Graham takes credit for chosing his alma mater as Lisa's less-than-top choice: "I chose Brown because I went there, and I felt like the school could take a joke,"

Incidentally, from what I saw of undergrads at Brown University, I think Lisa Simpson would've fit right in. I mean that as a compliment to both.

Helping someone practice Oxford Maths Assessment Tests at present, and whatever else may be happening in the admissions process, those test papers are not getting easier over time.

I don’t think many people place much stock in these rankings, and if they don’t have “shocking” moves then how are they gonna sell papers and get people to click!?!

An article on the site says “Durham wins University of the Year and dismisses Oxbridge reject stereotype.”

Not to be cold, but willing to bet that a good chunk of the Durham student population are those that were passed over by Oxbridge.

I’d be willing to bet the number of students that pick a UK university over Oxbridge in the next year will round to 0%. The times rankings mean nothing at this granularity (whereas being top 20 vs top 100 _is_ significant)

When I was a student you would buy a book which had overall rankings, per subject rankings, and descriptions of all the ranked universities. I assume the book is what they are trying to sell rather than the papers and you want the latest edition to have up-to-date information about the universities. I’m not sure shuffling the rankings to sell papers makes that much sense but maybe the economics are different today.

Now Durham has everything to lose... While Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial will live on regardless...

That's the price of fighting for a stupid prize.

Rankings are just meaningless. And this isn't the evidence for it! Actually in the past they've more or less admitted that they play around with the weighting and discard if the outcome is unexpected, meaning that even by its own standards it's circular. But the fact is that rankings are one dimensional and universities are very obviously multidimensional. You can't get anything meaningful out of such compression. The researchers and students at oxbridge are higher quality, that's more or less undisputed. Other than that though, it's so subjective and personal.

David Spiegelhalter has had a lot to say about rankings over the years. The paper below contains concrete examples in the educational sphere and in the medical sphere, mostly UK based. TD,LR: confidence interval(s) in the measures that you are ranking on.

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmm/migrated/d...

iirc the Times ranking has always been garbage as it weighs some "student experience" metric way too high. Do I really care about the result of some online survey equally or more than the academic achievement of the staff?

Back when I chose a UK university to attend, I valued the QS ranking much higher.

I compared this to the QS ranking, where Oxford is still second in the world, and Durham, the new third place in the ranking mentioned in the article is 341. QS ranking does not even rank the first two, London School of Economics and University of St. Andrews. Does anybody know why?

Edit: Sorry, I only looked at the Engineering ans Technology ranking. Anyway, QS ranking is vastly different from the Times' ranking.

> Oxford and Cambridge are tied for fourth in the 2026 rankings, after falling due to their relatively poor performance in the latest National Student Survey.

Nobody reads the article. Apparently not even pg.

The Wikipedia article on UK university rankings has an entire section on the differences to world university rankings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankings_of_universities_in_th...

Why does MIT get a 91.6/100 for the "International Student Ratio" while Peking University gets 37.3/100, when they have nearly identical undergraduate ratios? EDIT: Ah, it also includes graduate students.

> Durham University improved by 30 places year-on-year in its students’ evaluation of teaching quality

To me an improvement of that magnitude needs a plausible explanation of what they changed, or else my immediate assumption is this is an example of metric gaming.

> Durham University improved by 30 places year-on-year in its students’ evaluation of teaching quality, which was the main driver in securing its third place in the overall university league table.

How can a scoring rely on the assessment from the students who will then benefit from the rank of their university. Sounds like a recipe for gaming the metric …

There are tens of these ratings with different weights to different things. Obviously the universities prefer to brag about ratings where they are higher. Also realistically reputations of different of unis across various subjects are vastly different. So the actual title of this article is just clickbait.

What is the ranking supposed to reflect, exactly? Quality of education? If the programs have the same instructors, same facilities, same curricula, etc., why would we expect a small change to admission criteria to affect rankings of the program?

I feel like this kind of change most likely reveals that rankings likely have little to do with quality of instruction; just another case of selectiveness being used (by employers, by graduate schools, whomever) being used as the proxy for "quality" of candidates and the whole process of education is of secondary importance if it's considered at all.

> The list is based on analysis of student satisfaction with teaching quality and experience, entry standards, research quality, sustainability and graduate prospects

To quote Mean Girls: "Stop trying to make Doxbridge happen".

About ten years ago I went to Oxford to study as a postgraduate. The quality of the research I was supposed to be conducting was very, very poor, and I consider some of the practices I witnessed to be borderline fraudulent. It was quite a shock. (I eventually dropped out and studied at a non-famous university—which had its own problems but at least the research was sound.)

It's frankly heartening to see it drop down the rankings, although IMO generally too much emphasis is placed on these sorts of lists.

Anyone who has ever worked in a University department knows full well how ridiculous these rankings are. They are largely gimmicks. The Guardian's one has been literally compiled by one person for decades. The others heavily weight 'student experience'. Student experience is a terrible way to rank the quality of the University education, because students complain when material is difficult.

When I worked at one University, I remember sitting and having a coffee with the admissions tutor for my department and another staff member, who'd got a teenage kid who was going to University to study the same subject he was a lecturer in. He'd gone round taking mental notes for the admissions tutor and was relaying all the good and bad things that they'd done at each of the Universities he'd visited with his son for open days.

Frankly in the UK, there's basically a few Universities that are incredible at everything (Oxford, Cambridge), some that are good at specific things (LSE, Imperial), and then the remainder of the Russell Group are much of a muchness in quality with some departments better than others. There's really not much difference in quality between a student from Durham and a student from Nottingham or a student at UCL; they have similar entry grades, the quality of education is similar, the departments are staffed similarly.

One of the biggest differences which actually has an impact is more about the later year courses and what is available, usually as a result of the research interests of staff. For e.g. where I did my undergraduate degree in physics had a very strong condensed matter theory group, and so there was a focus on that sort of thing in some of the more advanced mathematical courses, where in another University there might have been more of a focus on astrophysics or particle physics.

If academic performance is no longer the main criteria for admission then it's no surprise that Oxford's ranking has gone down.

Elaborate?

It is still the main criterion.

The ranking is based on what exactly?

If you'd bothered to research then you can see the academic performance is the main criteria for entrance. They spend the rest of the time sifting the top 10% academically to boil it down even more.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/admiss...

Times articles on the rankings: https://www.thetimes.com/uk-university-rankings

It's just a random weighting of things. It's unlikely that their index matches your own. All these indices are garbage.

That's right! Oxford's a complete dump!

One of the metrics is how many international students you can cram into a university for some of them. Rankings are suspect.

Surprised to see CMU (Carnegie-Mellon) so low in the rankings.

If it's anything like the states, the rankings will only matter when the elites say they do.

I remember one particularly sexist and racist NGO coworker who used to point to "merit" whenever possible to quash a CV who lost their shit and crashed out when I pointed out UT Austin had surpassed Georgetown in the rankings, so moving forward we'd be throwing Georgetown CVs in the trash like they'd insisted folks from Austin be done (but weirdly, only seemed to notice when the person was not rich and connected).

These are people who massage the statistics to favor themselves and when they cannot, give up all pretense.

oof. painful to see my alma mater (liverpool) so far down the list.

So it's fourth place?

Still too high.

Local UK rankings have always been BS. The only rankings that really matter are international ones. Even then, I'm a strong believer that the best you can do when ranking universities is ranking them in tiers. The ranking within the tier is useless.

Oxbridge will always be tier 1. Undergraduate teaching quality + a rigorous selection process cannot be beat.

It doesn’t matter. UK education is flawed already by the time a student reach tertiary. A levels leave such a gap in people that I would go as far as adding it to the reasons for the country issues. People in the UK, even if they study at Oxford, are likely more ignorant than many Europeans having done classical studies in high school.

> People in the UK, even if they study at Oxford, are likely more ignorant than many Europeans having done classical studies in high school.

wait so you're saying an entire country is rubbish because oxford has a worse classics degree than an unspecified country in Europe?

I am saying that these rankings are onanistic if you factor in that post industrial education has already fucked up British education. I don’t mention which country in Europe because it could be many, most of them actually have classical studies with schools up to 18-19 where you study all the subjects.

The UK system ranks a fair bit above the antiquated German system, you should be aware that there are 3 types of schools, with only one that teaches Latin etc., and the other two of them are considered shit, one German even told me that if you go to the lowest level of secondary school, your best bet is to just kill yourself. But it's certainly neat meeting lots of young Germans who studied Latin in school but nevertheless know absolutely no Latin once you ask them about it. Fabulous system.

Ask anyone from French, Spain, Italy, Greece, etc. living in London and in tech if they believe their British peers are their equals intellectually.

There is a reason why these people dominate the top 1% jobs in tech in London.

I am flattered you read my bio but I don’t actually live in Germany lol

I suppose you must simply have a planet-sized chip on your shoulder in that case.

Terribly sorry a British woman broke your heart, or whatever it was that someone did to you. All the best.

Then explain why people from southern Europe who can stomach English weather can come to London with a 2:1 degree or lower bachelor degree, speaking a language that its not theirs and compete on the job market with people with a 1st degree from a brick lane university?

Also those people don’t say full fat coke referring to a regular coke because they did biology instead of just math and physics from 15 years old and don’t have £80k of student loan to repay.

UK is suffering from the education it offers its people.

This is apparent in the law system having to be super simple to be understood to a point that it is not fair. For example, the £100k treshold for child benefits that is per person instead of per family income because people would struggle to follow it.

There are many examples to this. I wish all British people would speak another language properly and spend some time in continental Europe instead of comparing themselves to USA on matters of education and welfare.

What is there to explain? Your examples make no sense, aren't even bad things, or are purely anecdotal. For example, that smart people from Southern Europe can move to London and thrive is something Britain can be proud of. There certainly aren't any immigrants moving to any continental European countries and getting the top jobs, they're invariably reserved for the locals. The fat coke thing is nonsense, it's just a turn of phrase, that you never came to understand that says more about you than anyone else. Having a shit tax system like the household vs personal income thing is nothing unique to Britain. And if Britain was so uniquely poorly governed, the continental countries would be wildly better governed, but they're not. Some are, some aren't.

Anyway I don't know what happened to you in the UK but I'm sorry that it did.

I am just in the 1% top UK earners working 25 hours a week from the comfort of my sofa with my average European education, broken English and working class background.

I feel shame for how easy was for me to get a great life in this country when most locals struggle with social mobility.

I get that full fat coke is an idiomatic phrase but it stems from honest ignorance towards macronutrients. I am a diabetic type 1, I had to explain that carbohydrates and alcohol can affect your blood like sugar to endless British people lol

Please, if you are monolingual and monoculture, just have some healthy skepticism about well eradicated habits in this society. That’s what I want to inspire in my friends

I lived here for over 20 years. Speak other two languages natively because my parents were from two different European countries. This is an informed opinion not hearsay!

> I get that full fat coke is an idiomatic phrase but it stems from honest ignorance towards macronutrients

You don't understand. It's literally just a reference to full-fat and semi-skimmed milk, like a small joke. It's OK to not understand, you're not from the UK, but it's a bit outlandish to turn your own failure to understand a very basic joke into grand claims about British education lol.

I think you've just been living in the UK too long and should probably go home. You sound completely depressed. 20 years in a country you hate populated by people you despise sounds like Hell. It's not too late to make a change. Where's home for you then?

I don’t hate UK, otherwise I wouldn’t be so critical about it, I wouldn’t care if I hated it.

It’s okay if you wanna keep the head in the sand. I get it. It’s better if you don’t know any better. People who are themselves ignorant cannot see other people gaps.

Btw look up the reasons Coca Cola rebranded the Coke Zero to Coke Zero Sugar, and why it all stemmed from UK.

I live in Germany and speak German so that criticism doesn't really apply to me and as far as I'm concerned you're not talking about me, just my home country.

But yes, you hate the UK clearly, though I guess you predictably now refuse to admit it to the person you're trying to troll, because that would be far too vulnerable. To admit to me now that you've indeed wasted 20 years of your life in a country you hate is absolutely tragic, that's a life wasted right there, and there's no way of getting that time back. No wonder you're so angry.

> People who are themselves ignorant cannot see other people gaps

Literally seeing other people's gaps is the easiest thing of all lol, another gem from you, the enlightened continental European who nevertheless refuses to say where they're from (quite cowardly I might add, after all, why do you care what I think?). That's how we can critique, for example, top level footballers despite not necessarily being any good at football ourselves. It's introspection that is hard.

>Ask anyone from French, Spain, Italy, Greece, etc. living in London and in tech if they believe their British peers are their equals intellectually.

Why are they in the UK then?

And yet, the Times Higher Education (no longer associated with The Times) global rankings place it number 1 https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

It doesn’t matter.

UK education is flawed already by the time a student reach tertiary.

A levels, by focusing pnly on few subjects, leave such a gap in people that I would go as far as adding it to the reasons for the country issues.

People in the UK, even if they study at Oxford, are likely more ignorant than many Europeans having done classical studies in high school.

This is what happens when the didn't-earn-it crew roles in

I guess Scumbag College's University Challenge performance must have edged them out.

Wait till they find out what happened to Columbia’s rankings.

So what? Who cares if Oxford is ranked 1st, 2nd or 10th in the UK? It is normal for universities to trade places on these rankings. The Anglo-American obsession with Oxbridge, Harvard, MIT, Stanford etc is tedious

LSE is top... lol, economics isn't even real.

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong" .... unless it's economic theory.

Sadly most UK universities are just visa mills and status symbols for overseas parents. This means they do token teaching and locals actually wanting to learn something are left with little. Lecturers literally tell you to just use YouTube or Udemy to understand subject matter while themselves barely speak English and presumably get their presentations done of Fiverr. Complaints get dismissed because they want to maintain facade and students themselves won't speak up, because it would mean the degree parents paid for is not worth the paper it is written on. If you plan to study in the UK, do your research and be careful.

I cant help myself, I have to chip in. Having lived in Oxford for about a decade my most memorable local ( and in one case international headlines) which maybe me tut and wonder what on earth they are doing were these ( feel free to look them up).

a) Banned clapping in the student union. Literally incase it offended people for being loud. This one was even mentioned on Joe Rogan.

b) About a year or so later, the SAME student union, then had to fire ALL (or was it just one) ( correct me if Im wrong) leadership in the student union, for literally seeing a student stand in the wrong section - who he himself could not see he was, and instead of you know talking to him, ordered security to take him out, in such a way that the student who was as fate had it, blind disabled, was literally dragged across the floor thrown out, and then for good measure, followed up on by having his student card revoked. ( This is actually a really bad thing to do to a student in this particular university as it immediately stops them using basically most of the resources they need to complete their education. Needless to say the whole thing was so messed up leadership was taken to court and ofcourse disbanded. I happened to be told they literally brought in an old leader, back to Oxford to try and stop the weirdness.

Before the usual offended folk turn up to try and moan, I still think the university and its people are great. I am just pointing out there were definately Monty Python type moments there over the last few years.

You have it wrong. The clapping ban was at the Oxford University Student Union (a student union), whereas the blind student incident was at the Oxford Union (a debating society unrelated to the student union).

apologies my bad I knew my memory was terrible thanks for the correction

There have always been the occasional silly "Monty Python type moments" throughout the history of humanity, even in the best of institutions. We just didn't have the right-wing outrage media to jump on every tiny incident to stoke up anger among the base.

I dont see how anything I said has to do with politics, the left or right stuff.

Also I am confused why you are pointing out the obvious. Its as if you have been personaly offended by the suggestion Oxford has Monty Python moments and are trying to reassure everyone its only because all institutions do.

This was not an attack, it was just a couple of anecdotes. Like I said I still think Oxford is a great institution.

You are clearly confused why someone who likes something might criticise it. The reason is to improve it by increasing awareness. Its called positive feedback.

In essense what I am saying is, if all you have is praise for something, then in part you hate it , because you are not being honest, or trying to help it grow.

All of these are very minor incidents that have been hugely exaggerated by the right-wing outrage media. And you're bringing up this unrelated minor years old drama in a "Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK" story, as if its somehow related.

I might be massively autistic, usually get double digit upvotes for my random anecdotes but thanks for the feedback

EDIT > To be honest I just reread your comment, I wanted to keep the good faith of mine so I didnt edit what I said, but I didnt realise you said they were minor. Literally banning clapping is not minor its an almost comical affront to free speech.

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