I value Rice a bit less highly than Purple Titan – I have it in the same group academically and rep/rank-wise – I.E., the same undergrad peer group – as Vandy, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Washington U, Emory, and Carnegie-Mellon.
But the rest is pretty close: HYPSM; then the rest of the Ivies, Chicago, Caltech, Duke, Northwestern, Hopkins. I actually think, in terms of overall quality of academics, that Columbia and UChicago, and maybe UPenn due to Wharton, belong in the space between HYPSM and the lower Ivies/Duke/NU/Hopkins. But that’s really splitting hairs. Honestly, from Harvard all the way through Emory/CMU, I think you can fairly call them all elite private universities. Tufts and USC are rising. NYU – maybe. The lack of a campus really hurts it in my view – being on campus is such a big part of the standard college experience. NYU academics are, of course, excellent. So sometimes I feel like lumping NYU in with the Vandy/Rice/WUSTL (etc.) group, and sometimes I put them with Tufts/USC/BC et al. NYU is a grouping nightmare to me.
I think it would be helpful to differentiate “general public prestige” from “academia/industry prestige”.
In the United States, many people are unaware that roughly half of the top 20 (or so) private universities exist. I bet most Americans are unaware of Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, UPenn (“You mean Penn State?”), UChicago, Johns Hopkins (“Isn’t that a hospital?”), Washington U, Emory, Carnegie-Mellon, or Caltech. Why? Mainly, because those schools do not have major college sports.
How is it in Britain – is the average Brit able to recite all of the top ten (or so) British universities?
But I think it’s a valid question to ask both Brits wanting to study in the US and Americans who want to study in the UK why they want to do so.
The reason is because the way of assessment will be quite different from what they are use to. Not sure how many people on this thread are familiar with both. In the UK, of course, your marks come down to mostly year-end tests. Specifically, the 2nd and 3rd year ones in England, even for classes that took place in the fall. This just doesn’t happen anywhere in the US.
In the US, there are constant assignments, group projects, papers, problem sets, projects, labs, quizzes, midterms, finals, maybe presentations, maybe grades on participation, etc. and everything counts towards the grade in a class and all classes count towards your GPA.
In the UK, you’re expected to be an adult and study a ton on your own and manage your own time. Almost everything comes down to the year-end tests. If you’re not feeling well that day, well, tough.
@PurpleTitan, I don’t think you got my point clearly. I never said that HYPSM cannot be beaten. I said they normally are ever present in the Top 10.
Even on some UK measures, as much as Oxbridge dominate most, theres are still some measures where they are beaten by others. And members of the Golden Triangle are beaten by others.
UCL beat Cambridge in research power.
LSE beats Oxford and Cambridge in World Leading research.
Imperial, LSE and KCL beat Oxford in average starting salaries.
LSE beats Oxford and Cambridge in top earning 10 percentile after 10 years.
Durham and St Andrews beat UCL and KCL in average entry standards.
Etc.
So my point is not about necessarily being top all the time, but rather ever being present at the top in all measures.
Looking at your list, look at how much HYPSM universities are ever present in the Top 10.
Out of the four or five list you put up as prestige factor, HYPSM hadat least 4 members in the Top 10 of all bar one.
I think this is not a strong argument for the following reasons:
US has a higher population and has a bigger research culture because of its endowment.
I cannot say UCL or KCL is more prestigious than LSE purely because they produce more PhD.
UMich Producing more PhD than Caltech does not make it better tha Caltech.
UMich is a much larger university, so will produce more Alumni.
UMich operates in a decentralise country where you have Federal, State and even elected Local (like Police Chiefs, Mayors etc) officials for over 100 years, as well as School sports which can swell an alumni. UCL operates in a centralised country where everything is in Westminster (only until recently that they had a London Mayor).
UCL also operates in an Aristocratic country and for the first 100 years or so of its existence was treated with disdain and as an outsider because it had the audacity to treat Catholics and Jews equally as Protestants. This is why KCL has a better alumni list than UCL, because KCL was backed by Protestants.
You argument is not strong because your selection of prestige is not carefully qualified and is not applicable generally (across borders), which makes it only applicable when selectively applied.
This is what I was telling you about being careful about comparing universities across borders when I said “That said, you will have to think through their structural differences”.
By saying you will strictly “go off of Alumni factor” is wrong in itself, even if you decide to use many multi-sub-alumni factors in your ranking. Alumni factor is only a singular part of prestige and I keep on telling you prestige is a mix of several factors.
To compund this, you missed a step not knowing people’s perception (that you dismissed) is actually extremely important to prestige. Probably the most important one. Not the only one, the most important one. It is the one all the others help build and determines prestige.
Using Alumni factors for prestige would mean Imperial mightnot even be regarded as Top 10 in the UK. It would struggle to hold a candle to Manchester and even Birmingham.
This is an extremely weak way to qualify something so complex.
You do not take into account foreign students, average school sizes and the number of schools.
For example there are about 900 research universities and about 1600 degree-awarding universities in the US, compared to just about 160 in the UK with extremely differing research focus (maybe only about 70 can be called research universities). So can you see why your way at looking at it is weak?
Going by your way of looking at it (not mine), one can easy conclude that UK universities are more prestigious than US universities because out of the THE’s 100 most prestigious universities, 10 are from the UK and 43 from the US.
@prezbucky, the average Brit will likely be able to recite up to 20 UK universities. But knowing which are the top 10 or top ones beyond Oxbridge would be a challenge for most.
If you ask the kids on TSR for a top 10, the list would be different from one provided by employers/academics.
I am not really sure this is a productive comparison because these colleges and universities are looking for different things in their students. Though I quite like post #17.
Regarding post #2, it’s amazing how many Olympic rowers suddenly develop the desire to do a one year masters at Oxbridge, and how they all end up admitted. Though I don’t think the magic admissions route applies to any other sport.
Prestige means different things to different people. Most people in Britain have an idea of US college based on Legally Blonde or other teen movies. Most people in the US think who or what is Britain (zero geographical knowledge is an almost universal American trait). But it only really matters that your degree is valued in your future career. The view of people on the street is irrelevant. What the student wants to do with the degree is most important.
@LutherVan, we’ll have to disagree on prestige, but in terms of the numbers, again, you’re justifying my point. 900 is roughly 5 times greater than 160 and 43 is roughly 5 times greater than 10, so how do you conclude that the way I look at it is weak or that UK unis are more prestigious? If anything, you’re showing that a top 10 UK uni is equivalent to a top 50 US uni, as I said.
Also, we know that THE, being a UK ranking, uses some bogus criteria that favor British and EU unis over American ones. If you look at neutral rankings, at CWUR, the tally is 53 US vs. 7 UK in the top 100. At ARWU, it’s 52 US vs. 9 UL.
UK, not UL. BTW, @LutherVan, salary is a poor gauge because it is so dependent on profession. If you use salary, a bunch of small health and engineering schools you’ve never heard of beat out all of HYPSM and other Ivies/equivalents besides MIT, Harvard, and Georgetown in the US: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/search/?sort=salary:desc
Also, in terms of research in the UK, what are you talking about? ARWU is generally seen as the gold standard for research ranking, and both of Oxbridge beat out UCL there.
Apart from what you say is “roughly” still indicating the UK is better because it is less than 5 times, I also indicated to you that only about 70 of UK universities can really be said to focus on research. This is against the US’ 900.
So it really is roughly 13 times.
Secondly, rather than you saying “we know” about THE using some “bogus” criteria, I would rather you explain what you found wrong with THE’s criteria and why you find CWUR much better. I didn’t “know”, so telling me what I know is quite freakish.
As for using salary, when I use such, I normally exclude uni-disciplinary schools and only compare universities that are multi-disciplinary. For example, I would never include St Georges Medical School or Institute of Cancer research in the UK. So I don’t think salary is a poor guage.
How did you conclude so confidently that ARWU is seen seen as the “gold standard” for research ranking? Where did you see that conclusion?
@LutherVan, ARWU is what people usually refer to for research rankings. Someone explained to you earlier that THE boosts up those unis with more internationals (which European unis would have more of, as they are all small countries there in a single market), but that doesn’t tell you how good a uni is. You also don’t seem aware that far fewer than 900 US unis really focus on research either.
Even when Forbes includes LACs and directionals than don’t offer PhDs in their ranking, their list doesn’t stretch to more than 600+, so I’m not sure where you get that 900 number from.
And if you’re going to use the logic that the UK has greater than 20% the US representation in the top 100 in THE to say that the UK is better, then by that same logic, I can use CWUR and ARWU to state that the UK is worse. Especially because ARWU is solely concerned with research output (and neither CWUR or ARWU use the silly diversity criteria that THE uses).
@PurpleTitan, I can’t help but disagree with that.
Have you considered the global cultural dominance of the USA in popular culture and the impact that has on attracting internationals from all over the world?
Do you think someone in Europe (or even anyone in the world) is more likely to be more excited about the chance to study in Ireland/Belgium/Portugal than about a chance of studying in the USA?
As a matter of fact, if you are talking about a single market, don’t you think the UK would lose out if that was the case considering that in many advanced countries in the EU, unlike the UK, tuition is free for EU citizens, while it is £9000 in the UK?
And while you criticise THE and then claim ARWU is seen “by everyone as gold standard for research”, did you not consider that ARWU falls short because its rankings is STEM bias? Are you saying the “gold standard” is to ignore research in FLAME, Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities subjects, or treat them as less relevant? You don’t think that is “bogus”?
You have an interesting point about less than 900 US unis focusing on research. I am open to finding out more.
In that PDF you listed, once you get to roughly 300 and below, you’re in the realm of LACs and directionals that offer few or (in the case of most of them) no PhD degrees. Pretty much no one in the US would consider them institutions that focus on research.
It's hard to determine how much faith to put in the THE reputational survey because we don't know the composition of their sample. If, for instance, the number of UK respondents is 50% the number of US respondents (even though the US has 5 times the population of the UK), the UK unis would be overweighed.
The main THE ranking counts the internationalness of the faculty as well as the student body, and being a small country in a big common market, the UK unis naturally would have more foreign profs compared to US unis. Furthermore, simply being closer to the rest of Europe (as well as being far cheaper than American unis) would cause the UK to draw far more internationals (from Europe). Also, Scottish unis would be essentially free to Europeans.
For all those reasons, I prefer the neutral ARWU and (especially) CWUR rankings, which also takes in to account the business success of alums. Yes, some aspects would be weighed more than others, but that would be true of any ranking.
In fact, for all we know, the THE reputational survey draws equally from the UK and US or even more from the UK than US, which would bias the sample even more.
In the UK, roughly only 24 universities are research focused. They are called the Russell Group. The next set do just a fair bit of research and they are about 11. Beyond those, they are not different from your post-300. So it is still, at best, 35:300.
As much as "faith" is a personal subjective position, I think it is clear (if you just did a litter search) to find their methodology.
It clearly states they invited 10,323 respondents from 133 countries, with 17% of these from North America and 27% from Western Europe.
It also clearly states:
“Where countries were over- or under-represented, THE’s data team weighted the responses to more closely reflect the actual geographical distribution of scholars, based on United Nations data.”
One would think that America, a country of immigrants, which has universities payinng faculty about double what they would get in a place like UK, is happy to give visa/green card to the right talents and its unniversities has a huge pot of money for research would not struggle in attracting internationals?
You seem to state you "especially" like CWUR. How come you have no problem with the fact that 25% of its scores relate to the count CEO's of Fortune 2000 companies?
Is that not a “bogus criteria” and gives an advantage to US universities considering that majority of the companies would be American and generally most companies virtually always pick people from their home country, who attended local universities, as CEO? You don’t think that bias adding 25% makes it a “bogus criteria that heavily favours US universities”?
Moreover, it is a table that put Boston University over Brown, which was a point you used a few days ago to invalidate a table as a “joke”.
@LutherVan I have been taken to task for confusing prestige with overall name recognition myself, so I would caution making that mistake with Caltech. I do view Caltech as equivalent to any of the best universities in the US including Harvard and MIT. For a school with an undergraduate population of only about 1000, they have produced 11 Nobel, Fields, or Turing winners. This the largest per capita of any university in the U.S:
Certainly larger universities such as Berkeley are more well-known than Caltech, but prestige derives in part from the perceived academic quality of an institution. One way we can measure this by alumni outcomes. For the sciences, Caltech alumni achieve incredible things, even though its overall name recognition might never be as high as Harvard or Yale’s.
@jademaster, I have absolutely no doubt about the successes and achievements of Caltech being on par with, if not better than, that of any institution in the world when taking into context its size and age.
That said, the explanation I have attempted to give is not about name recognition. It is about prestige.
I think if Caltech has successful transformed its numerous successes to prestige, then students would not be electing to attend other universities instead of taking up their offer at Caltech.
This can be said to apply to Yale too. Despite Yale being a top university and is Harvard’s rival, Harvard has been able to transform its successes into prestige better than Yale has done. Hence why it is more likely a student would elect to attend Harvard instead of Yale, if given offer from both. Even Stanford is increasing being able to do this better than Yale.
I have really never felt Berkeley is more prestigious than Caltech. I think many would definitely pick to attend Caltech over Berkeley.
In terms of quality and capability, I too see Caltech as equivalent to HYPSM. Just not in prestige.
As prestige is in the eye of the beholder, it makes as much sense to quibble over prestige as to to argue over beauty.
On that list, you reach the number of American unis who do any decent amount of research fairly soon before 300. Just look at those research dollars and compare with UK unis.
The US is still an ocean away from everywhere but the Americas while the UK is right by continental Europe. Distance matters. Also, the EU is still a single market. I can't believe I have to point out these simple facts. And yes, the US would pay more at the top, but why would that make US faculties more international? Say that the US gets all top faculty but 2nd-tier faculty all stay in their home continents and the UK only has 2nd-tier faculty. If say, faculty in each tier are roughly 40% American, 40% European, and 20% other, the US would only have 60% foreign faculty. But with ease of travel, say European faculty are spread all over Europe and the UK comprises a fifth of Europe. Then UK faculty would be 80% foreign.
So we see that the THE survey does overweigh towards Europe. Western Europe has roughly the same size economy and population as the US, but the THE survey has more respondents from there. Furthermore, if we take your assumption that the US can get the top scholars, that's even more egregious.
As most students go in to the workforce rather than academia, I do not believe including a measure of alumni success in the workforce is a flaw at all.
Finally, no ranking is perfect. CWUR measures research and business success, not undergraduate success rate. Yet the rankings you favor don't measure that either.
@LutherVan I think it depends on how you understand prestige. If you are not equating prestige with name recognition, then why did you include MIT with HYPS and not Caltech? Or if you are talking about desirability as a marker of prestige, how do you account for the fact that Amherst, a school with a roughly 40% yield rate, has produced more Rhodes Scholars and Nobel Prize winners than UPENN, a school with a 65% yield rate and which has a student body five times larger?
Are we discussing prestige by looking at cross-admit rates? As far as I’m aware, this information is rarely released by colleges. There is no data on cross admits between Caltech and Harvard, to my knowledge. We can only speculate why Caltech has a lower yield rate. It is one of the most difficult colleges in the U.S. I think students understand this when they’re making their decisions, which might explain why its yield rate is below 50%.
Can you clarify what it means to translate successes into prestige? As far as I am aware, Yale and Harvard play in the same ballpark when it comes to prestige. Does Yale lose cross-admits to Harvard? Probably, but how many people are admitted to both in the first place and what is the proportion that chooses one over the other? I don’t know for sure, but I am certain that a non-zero percent of students choose Yale over Harvard. I’m also sure a non-zero percent of students choose Caltech over Harvard. I think this is something that is difficult for UK students to understand. It seems like there is a huge gap between Oxford and Cambridge and the rest of the universities there. There seems to be an ingrained hierarchy as to which universities were the best. While Harvard is no doubt one of the most prestigious colleges in the world, there are simply too many good schools in the U.S for it to dominate unilaterally. The market for colleges here is just much larger. In the U.S, geography, school size, cost, and this very American notion of “fit” play a large role in where a student chooses to attend college. Given this, prestige is probably better understood as a quality that elicits respect and admiration. Caltech fits into that category. A scientist trained at Caltech, one can assume, elicits just as much respect and admiration (on the basis of their school) as one trained at MIT, or Harvard.
Honestly I’m actually a little uncomfortable and even a little outraged that schools come to proxy for one’s worth as a scientist (or whatever else), but I do see it play out in academia and in banking. It doesn’t matter that some of the brightest or hardest working people come out of less prestigious undergrads, people still believe undergrad prestige matters. But we are not comparing Caltech to Kansas State. We’re comparing it to Harvard and MIT.
This is a point that I’ve been hammering but which those who seem to be stubborn and quite “linear” in their thinking don’t seem to get.
The upper and upper-middle class of unis in the US is extremely deep (and the US is a much bigger country), so my comps are fairly accurate. If you look at alumni accomplishments (rather than average salary, where schools that concentrate in engineering and business, like Imperial and LSE, naturally do better, or faculty prowess), there is a pretty big gap between Oxbridge and everyone else in the UK (besides LSE) while there barely is between HYPSM and the rest of the Ivies/equivalents.
In any case, I’m not sure why anyone would think that comparing UCL to UMich is a bad thing; UMich is merely one of the top unis in the world (and an absolute research powerhouse, dwarfing UCL in the amount of research money that it pulls in) and in all world rankings, UCL and UMich are always fairly close together.
BTW, @LutherVan, that THE reputational ranking that you esteem so highly rates Caltech very highly; top 10 in the world and above every UK uni besides Oxbridge.
