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Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK

• abxyz 1y ago
  pg thinks this is because of letting in poor people: https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1969334665375813679 https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1969334665375813679
  • afavour 1y ago
    > 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.
    • ceejayoz 1y ago
      Not to mention the US administration’s a) war on said schools and b) immigration mayhem.
    • deleted 1y ago
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    • geremiiah 1y ago
      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.
      • walthamstow 1y ago
        I think I read that US middle class are people who only have to work one job
        • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago
          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.
      • toast0 1y ago
        In America, we have a classless society and everyone claims to be middle class.
        • yndoendo 1y ago
          USA class system is based on income ranges. USA is also segregated by income and wealth.
      • dan-robertson 1y ago
        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.
      • lotsofpulp 1y ago
        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.
        • achenet 1y ago
          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" ...
      • leoedin 1y ago
        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.
      • KaiserPro 1y ago
        > 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.
      • Earw0rm 1y ago
        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.
    • scrlk 1y ago
      Average student debt is £53k (~$71k USD): https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01079/ 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.
      • afavour 1y ago
        > 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.
      • Ar-Curunir 1y ago
        Very few schools give international students any aid.
      • yardie 1y ago
        Merit-based, in a lot of cases certainly. But need-based, you’re there to subsidize the university and not the other way around.
      • KaiserPro 1y ago
        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)
  • ceejayoz 1y ago
    The comic in https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-wants-your-cookie-aba1c536b0d8 https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w... is, as ever, very relevant.
    • AlexandrB 1y ago
      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=ygUVYmVybmllIG9uIGltbWlncmF0aW9u0gcJCeAJAYcqIYzv 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.
      • rayiner 1y ago
        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.
      • croes 1y ago
        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
      • bakugo 1y ago
        > 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"
  • patanegra 1y ago
    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.
    • ceejayoz 1y ago
      > 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.
      • gcau 1y ago
        >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.
        • growse 1y ago
          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?
        • ceejayoz 1y ago
          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.
      • happytoexplain 1y ago
        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.
  • seper8 1y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/7AyhaYkikCs?t=57
    • StopDisinfo910 1y ago
      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.
  • fillskills 1y ago
    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.
    • curiousgal 1y ago
      > 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.
      • hnhg 1y ago
        He also provided no numbers or evidence - did his children fail to get in or something?
        • blitzar 1y ago
          Yes, eldest was rejected
      • WrongAssumption 1y ago
        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.
  • growse 1y ago
    > 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.
    • adw 1y ago
      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.)
    • rcxdude 1y ago
      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.
      • growse 1y ago
        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).
  • soared 1y ago
    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
    • alephnerd 1y ago
      > 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.
  • IshKebab 1y ago
    > [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.
  • dan-robertson 1y ago
    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.
  • lwhi 1y ago
    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.
  • KaiserPro 1y ago
    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.
    • notahacker 1y ago
      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
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• indy 1y ago
  If academic performance is no longer the main criteria for admission then it's no surprise that Oxford's ranking has gone down.
  • zppln 1y ago
    Elaborate?
  • IshKebab 1y ago
    It is still the main criterion.
  • croes 1y ago
    The ranking is based on what exactly?
  • KaiserPro 1y ago
    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/admission-requirements/admission-requirements-table https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/admiss...
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• pxc 1y ago
  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.
  • zero_shift 1y ago
    > The list is based on analysis of student satisfaction with teaching quality and experience, entry standards, research quality, sustainability and graduate prospects
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• ilamont 1y ago
  Times articles on the rankings: https://www.thetimes.com/uk-university-rankings https://www.thetimes.com/uk-university-rankings
• doctorpangloss 1y ago
  Wait till they find out what happened to Columbia’s rankings.
• joefarish 1y ago
  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.
  • afavour 1y ago
    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.
    • fatfox 1y ago
      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/ https://2029.ref.ac.uk/about/what-is-the-ref/
      • KaiserPro 1y ago
        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.
      • cs02rm0 1y ago
        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?
        • 1y ago
• homeless_engi 1y ago
  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?
  • metaphor 1y ago
    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 https://archive.is/QN4Js [2] https://archive.is/KyP48 https://archive.is/KyP48
    • Closi 1y ago
      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.
      • metaphor 1y ago
        Appreciate the clarification and perspective.
      • homeless_engi 1y ago
        Yes, seems I misunderstood the original text. Thanks for the clarification.
• jansan 1y ago
  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.
  • checker659 1y ago
    > 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.
  • yorwba 1y ago
    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_the_United_Kingdom#Disparity_with_global_rankings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankings_of_universities_in_th...
  • programjames 1y ago
    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.
• ksec 1y ago
  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
  • jansan 1y ago
    You can see one international ranking (maybe the most important) from June this year here: https://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings https://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings
  • DC-3 1y ago
    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.
    • notreallyauser 1y ago
      Given this is Hacker News, I think we should definitely encourage all Yes, Minister references.
      • vmilner 1y ago
        It's scary how relevant a 1970's/80s comedy show is... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgkUVIj3KWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgkUVIj3KWY (Salami tactics)
        • Quekid5 1y ago
          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...
• JCM9 1y ago
  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.
  • john-h-k 1y ago
    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)
  • dan-robertson 1y ago
    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.
  • pfortuny 1y ago
    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.
• vmilner 1y ago
  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.
• rjra 1y ago
  And yet, the Times Higher Education (no longer associated with The Times) global rankings place it number 1 https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/latest/world-ranking https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
• dan-robertson 1y ago
  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.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
    Brown is a shit school? That's a level of elitism I don't often encounter.
    • lofatdairy 1y ago
      There's a weird intersection in ultra-elitism where true blue-blooded snobbery is indistinguishable from middle-class envy.
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    • fifticon 1y ago
      yup, that's where the brown color comes from
    • JdeBP 1y ago
      You don't watch enough The Simpsons. (-: It's the daydream sequence from series 10 episode 7, 'Lisa Gets an "A"'.
    • dan-robertson 1y ago
      “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.
• buckle8017 1y ago
  So it's fourth place? Still too high.
• peer2pay 1y ago
  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.
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• Halan 1y ago
  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.
  • KaiserPro 1y ago
    > 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?
    • Halan 1y ago
      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.
  • twixfel 1y ago
    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.
    • Halan 1y ago
      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
• Halan 1y ago
  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.
• rm445 1y ago
  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.
  • madaxe_again 1y ago
    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.
    • ninalanyon 1y ago
      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.
  • exe34 1y ago
    > 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.
• sega_sai 1y ago
  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.
• littlestymaar 1y ago
  > 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 …
• vzaliva 1y ago
  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/ https://csrankings.org/
  • ghostpepper 1y ago
    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).
    • OhMeadhbh 1y ago
      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
  • fsckboy 1y ago
• ionwake 1y ago
  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.
  • joshuaissac 1y ago
    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).
    • ionwake 1y ago
      apologies my bad I knew my memory was terrible thanks for the correction
  • arp242 1y ago
    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.
• ur-whale 1y ago
  Surprised to see CMU (Carnegie-Mellon) so low in the rankings.
• matthewmorgan 1y ago
  This is what happens when the didn't-earn-it crew roles in
• owlbite 1y ago
  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.
  • JetSetWilly 1y ago
    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)
  • andmikey 1y ago
    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.
    • krisoft 1y ago
      > 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”?
• ccppurcell 1y ago
  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.
  • 2b3a51 1y ago
    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/documents/statistical-issues-for-league-tables1.pdf https://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmm/migrated/d...
• _hark 1y ago
  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 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400005 [2]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-oxford/decisions/contextual-data https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...
  • programjames 1y ago
    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.
• tqi 1y ago
  > 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.
• ycombigators 1y ago
  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.
• cfd456 1y ago
  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
• drillbit 1y ago
  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.
• varispeed 1y ago
  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.
• tlonny 1y ago
  To quote Mean Girls: "Stop trying to make Doxbridge happen".
• OhMeadhbh 1y ago
  oof. painful to see my alma mater (liverpool) so far down the list.
• Borborygymus 1y ago
  I guess Scumbag College's University Challenge performance must have edged them out.
• firefax 1y ago
  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.
• jl6 1y ago
  That's right! Oxford's a complete dump!
• William_BB 1y ago
  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.
• OhioMan2943 1y ago
  One of the metrics is how many international students you can cram into a university for some of them. Rankings are suspect.
• renewiltord 1y ago
  It's just a random weighting of things. It's unlikely that their index matches your own. All these indices are garbage.
• physicsguy 1y ago
  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.