<p>‘Considerring that Cambridge was founded 545 years earlier and Harvard 19 years earlier than Columbia’</p>
<p>Harvard is indeed 118 years older than Columbia, and Cambridge was founded in 1209, but that’s hardly a factor when it comes to Nobel prizes, as the first one was awarded in 1901…sure, the age of the university can be an important factor as older universities had more time to gather wealth and establish an educational system that produces geniuses, but it is not everything. (Just as endowments; there are many US schools with enormous endowments (Notre Dame and Virginia come to mind) that perform quite poorly when it comes to international rankings). The ‘List of oldest universities in continuous operation’ (univs founded between the stone age and 1500) where Oxford and Cambridge comes as 2nd and 3rd respectively, features more than three dozen universities, yet only the mentioned two belongs to the list of super-elite institutions. In the US, while it is generally true that a large part of the old colonial colleges form the ivy League (save Cornell), the second oldest university is the College of William and Mary, which is an excellent institution, but hardly on pair with the ones as Brown or Penn. </p>