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Comment by skippyboxedhero | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

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