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

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.

> 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?

> 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.

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?

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

Do you have a source to back this claim?

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

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"!!

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

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

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

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

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

Sure they'll never have quite the same cachet, but it's the same anywhere - UCLA/Stanford/Yale are extremely respected but nevertheless not Harvard or MIT. No doubt someone more familiar would say not all IITs are equal, but Bombay, Bengaluru & friends lead the pack. &c.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

2 is the norm for supervisions/tutorials

and having 4 people is very different from 2

Same, at Imperial in 80’s

Unique Selling Point?

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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you have a source for this?

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

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

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

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.

I assumed one generally applied to both, no?

> 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”?

“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.

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

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

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

yup, that's where the brown color comes from

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oxbridge have never had to 'let in dumber people'. They are always heavily over-subscribed, and give offers to a small fraction of the people who come for an interview, let alone apply.

The whole point of the interview process is to assess not just the applicant's past achievements, but what they might be able to achieve if they got their place at the uni. Part of that is looking at the applicant's background, and knowing that even if they aren't currently at some elite high-fee school, they might still have the ability and capability to do well.

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

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

Full disclosure: cambridge alumni, from a state school!

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

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

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

> 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.

What an appalling point of view.

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

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

The system has been built to serve the privileged.

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

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

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

> It's letting in dumber people, worse students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

where does it say that here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.)

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

> 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.

> 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.