https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/admiss...
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.
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.
But you don't get anywhere near as much online outrage with that theory so "leftists are ruining western civilisation" wins out again.
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/
but on the other end our political class fail to understand/sell that stopping international students means that we have to fund university education.
The assumption was that international student numbers would be allowed to grow as fast or faster than in the past, ignoring the fact that the UK is not able to provide infrastructure for the people who live here let alone temporary inhabitants. There is no way to keep the bubble going (as with every bubble, for government and university administrators it just seemed unlimited because there are no limits to resources, dangerous).
The quality of teaching is non-existent. It's about giving foreign parents ability to tell their peers look my brilliant child is studying in England! But really they are not studying. Attendance is not checked and lectures are a sham.
Domestic students end up with debt for degrees that deliver little value, often taught by underqualified lecturers. Those who complain get brushed off or quietly bought out with NDA-style settlements. Foreign students mostly keep quiet because openly questioning standards would devalue their own diploma.
So yes, funding cuts mattered - but the bigger scandal is how universities responded. They saw the “golden years” were over and decided to milk the brand, not safeguard education.
They are basically a scam.
The amount of cheating on exams and complete lack of effort on studying by the vast majority (+80%) was astounding. We were essentially hand feeding them to get them to learn the material.
The professor was very frustrated but (I presume) was told you can’t come down hard on them. They were obviously a huge income source for the university.
Reason #53 why modern university has basically become a scam.
Formal tracking of attendance at lectures is a fairly new thing in British universities (introduced around 2015 when I was teaching at one).
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2015/oct/ucl-international-studen...
Combined with universities' increasing reliance on international student income (over the last years) and issues accessing research funding, this can get universities into trouble.
[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
They do show drops in the last year or two, but I find it hard to attribute that to Brexit when they're still much higher.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/293277/study-related-vis...
What happened was a massive expansion to non-EU students paying the larger uncapped fees because of an expansion of student visas to allow (a) dependents to come (b) a route to staying in the UK. It led to over a million immigrants in one year, was massively criticised politically, and so got scrapped. There's no a lot of arguing that we should as a country remove/change the Indefinite Leave to Remain route because those graduates (and dependents) are from January starting to be eligible to apply and stay permanently.
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.
I find the rates high for what some (most?) students are getting.
I can’t see a single example of anyone reacting to it that way.
Much of this data is extremely 'gameable', and a lot of the 'alpha' between successful and less successful institutions is being 'good at surveys.' e.g. for NSS, between comparable institutions it's really a question of how good they are at getting students to complete the survey (students mostly ignore it, and you lose marks for poor completion rates).
Of course — it should also go without saying that there is no 'correct' weighting for any of this data, and depending on how you weight the different indicators, the rankings change.
"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?
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.
> 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.
What has seemingly happened here is that oxbridge have ramped up their intake of overseas students, who pay a vast sum compared to a U.K. student, thus pushing more U.K. talent to Durham, as you’ll always preferentially give the place to the kid paying six figures rather than the one on a state bursary.
Edit: Sorry, I only looked at the Engineering ans Technology ranking. Anyway, QS ranking is vastly different from the Times' ranking.
Nobody reads the article. Apparently not even pg.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgkUVIj3KWY (Salami tactics)
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.
That's the price of fighting for a stupid prize.
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.
That's a level of elitism I don't often encounter.
It's the daydream sequence from series 10 episode 7, 'Lisa Gets an "A"'.
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.
At one point, I identified at least 4 categories of how Harvard alumni may mention or not mention where they went to school.
The funniest category is the one you mention: saying something like "back East", as a way of avoiding saying that you went to Harvard, as if you don't want to brag, while still making sure they know you went to Harvard, because you actually do want to brag.
That category might still be a thing, but I bet only for a very small minority. Most Harvard people are decent people. And even most of the minority who graduate and eventually do things you don't like, from positions of power, will have some poise. Living in the neighborhood for a long time, I have a suspicion that there's a respectable decorum that new students pick up on almost immediately from the student body culture, if they don't arrive with it. Each academic year, I almost never see any kind of public douchiness after the first week of September, until guests arrive for graduation/commencement. Then, I will probably notice at least one bit of overt jerkiness by a visitor, who, my theory goes, didn't attend Harvard themselves.
https://quahog.org/FactsFolklore/Trivia/Limelight/TV/The_Sim...
> Brown ('81) alumnus and Simpson's writer Ian Maxtone-Graham takes credit for chosing his alma mater as Lisa's less-than-top choice: "I chose Brown because I went there, and I felt like the school could take a joke,"
Still too high.
Back when I chose a UK university to attend, I valued the QS ranking much higher.
wait so you're saying an entire country is rubbish because oxford has a worse classics degree than an unspecified country in Europe?
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
Terribly sorry a British woman broke your heart, or whatever it was that someone did to you. All the best.
Also those people don’t say full fat coke referring to a regular coke because they did biology instead of just math and physics from 15 years old and don’t have £80k of student loan to repay.
UK is suffering from the education it offers its people.
This is apparent in the law system having to be super simple to be understood to a point that it is not fair. For example, the £100k treshold for child benefits that is per person instead of per family income because people would struggle to follow it.
There are many examples to this. I wish all British people would speak another language properly and spend some time in continental Europe instead of comparing themselves to USA on matters of education and welfare.
Anyway I don't know what happened to you in the UK but I'm sorry that it did.
I feel shame for how easy was for me to get a great life in this country when most locals struggle with social mobility.
I get that full fat coke is an idiomatic phrase but it stems from honest ignorance towards macronutrients. I am a diabetic type 1, I had to explain that carbohydrates and alcohol can affect your blood like sugar to endless British people lol
Please, if you are monolingual and monoculture, just have some healthy skepticism about well eradicated habits in this society. That’s what I want to inspire in my friends
I lived here for over 20 years. Speak other two languages natively because my parents were from two different European countries. This is an informed opinion not hearsay!
You don't understand. It's literally just a reference to full-fat and semi-skimmed milk, like a small joke. It's OK to not understand, you're not from the UK, but it's a bit outlandish to turn your own failure to understand a very basic joke into grand claims about British education lol.
I think you've just been living in the UK too long and should probably go home. You sound completely depressed. 20 years in a country you hate populated by people you despise sounds like Hell. It's not too late to make a change. Where's home for you then?
It’s okay if you wanna keep the head in the sand. I get it. It’s better if you don’t know any better. People who are themselves ignorant cannot see other people gaps.
Btw look up the reasons Coca Cola rebranded the Coke Zero to Coke Zero Sugar, and why it all stemmed from UK.
But yes, you hate the UK clearly, though I guess you predictably now refuse to admit it to the person you're trying to troll, because that would be far too vulnerable. To admit to me now that you've indeed wasted 20 years of your life in a country you hate is absolutely tragic, that's a life wasted right there, and there's no way of getting that time back. No wonder you're so angry.
> People who are themselves ignorant cannot see other people gaps
Literally seeing other people's gaps is the easiest thing of all lol, another gem from you, the enlightened continental European who nevertheless refuses to say where they're from (quite cowardly I might add, after all, why do you care what I think?). That's how we can critique, for example, top level footballers despite not necessarily being any good at football ourselves. It's introspection that is hard.
Why are they in the UK then?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
A large part of uni is about learning to learn on your own and learning in groups - if everything is spoonfed, it might not be the best training.
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.
and having 4 people is very different from 2
and I agree with much of the parent post, and would add that "oxbridge" and/or "high ranking schools in subject areas" provide many of the professors to "lesser" schools or programs, so you can get a fine education from anywhere.
however, the special extra sauce for me was not small classes/personal attention, but rather rooms full of the smartest possible peers to do problem sets with, and these are found at the highest ranked schools, see first paragraph above, they attract the best incoming freshman.
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.
I don't like using "Anglo" because it also implies the Anglophone world, so I'm hesitant to use "Anglophilia" because it is also often used to lump Australia, Canada, and even the US to a certain extent as well.
A portion of Russell Group programs are amazing, but I felt I could get similar exit opps at at a good domestic state flagship in the US with less headaches around AP-to-A level equivalencies, admissions exams, and logistics.
Oxford, in particular, has made their bed. They have made a willful choice to be worse. I am not sure why anyone wouldn't take them at their word.
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?
However... some of the best business contacts I have came from teaching at a trade school in Texas. But I'm just selling solutions into SMEs, I'm not baby-sitting kids with VC funds.
For this they measured the gap between what graduates made, and what they would be expected to make based on high school record, test scores, and choice of major. In other words, "How much do you earn because of the university you went to, rather than your own virtues?"
That university won because it has a network rich people who could help people's careers get a good launch.
If you can't get the grades, you don't have merit.
Debase the currency, surprised when it has less value? Lol.
Of course! So easy! What percentage of foreign students applying get aid or scholarships?
> Again, this is really the best of the best, those with the highest merit.
You're assuming that "the best of the best" are applying. This is not true. "The best of the best who are encouraged to apply and/or have the means", apply. This is not the same population.
> All they had to do was convince a bureaucrat their life was hard
I don't know who this "bureaucrat" is. When I interviewed at Cambridge I was seen by 3 fellows, all members of the relevant departments.
> If you can't get the grades, you don't have merit.
Nobody's this naive, surely?
Collage loans seem like a great solution when you’re entering a highly lucrative career, but that’s not true for every top student.
> Debase the currency, surprised when it has less value?
This bizarre comment is not related to the issue at all.
Higher education is a strange purchase that is engineered to extract the maximum amount of money (up to full-cost tuition, fees, etc.), based on financial records which you are forced to provide.
Any asset except for a residence is typically considered something that could be tendered to the university, and is accordingly deducted from financial need.
This means that external scholarships are limited as to how much they can reduce the expected parental or student contribution. Anything beyond this limit is deducted from need and pocketed by the university.
Not to say I'm (nor was) 'the very top' either - I just liked the idea of MIT for the same reason Imperial appealed I suppose.
Do you have a source to back this claim?
ARWU is biased towards research, but nevertheless Durham is currently #201-300 and St Andrews is #301-400. So the post is a bit sensationalistic as well. However, as someone in Oxford, I reckon the university has serious structural issues that need to be addressed if they want to stay at the top of their game.
Unlike Cambridge, Oxford doesn't have a post equivalent to Assistant Professor. In many divisions, appointment as an Associate Professor often occurs by internal promotion and this has created really toxic dynamics that scare off top talent. Furthermore, in many fields, Junior Research Fellowships are no longer attractive compared to e.g. a Lecturer position at Imperial or an Assistant Professor position overseas. Failing to attract and retain junior faculty has devastating consequences in terms of teaching and research quality.
Undergraduate admissions have experienced lots of recent changes. It is great that anti-state school bias is no longer present, but some faculty I know have expressed concerns about admissions becoming too subjective and often taking in students that are gaming the system by creating a false narrative of overcoming learning difficulties and minor disabilities (vs considering true disabled students, for instance). I find this very unsettling.
With that said, some courses (e.g. Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science) are outstanding and more isolated from these issues. IMHO, they still offer terrific value at the Home Fee rate (£9k), even if you need a mortgage. A rigorous and timeless no-nonsense education that is greatly valued by top employers.
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"!!
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.
Obviously there are some industries where degrees are necessary (law, medicine, presumably academia, although I'm not certain), but outside of those, the limiting factors of how far you can go are independent of where you graduated from. There are some places where the initial hiring process will be mostly filtered by where someone graduated, but in the long term, most people will either hit a point of diminishing returns regardless, or they'll be able to make up the difference.
Postgrad degrees still have a lot of value, and open a lot of doors. There are things I learned in my Master's that I probably wouldn'tve been able to get at a deep level working in industry, and for that same reason I want to go for a PhD (even if it might be ill-advised in these times).
I think sales in general may also be one of those fields where education is not that important.
If you don't it may take you a decade of career time to "prove yourself" and network to the point where you could apply for something similar.
Or you might _never_ get the chance to do that because you are stuck in jobs at "normal" companies where you spend all your time on low impact stuff.
Why would you want to work for those places?
Infrastructure projects are where it's at. Pays well and you're using your technical skills to do some good for the country for a change.
A rather crude way to express it. But I don't think that pointing out that Oxbridge isn't always a first choice implies, um, "shitdog" status, whatever that is.
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.
Frankly speaking, the only advantage of US universities is how much fund they have for postgraduates.
So... yes... despite consistently ranking high on surveys, Durham and LSE are not "sexy" in the way Cambridge and Oxford are.
Yale is part of the Ivy League and was founded ~65 years after Harvard. Also ranking #1-#2 for producing US presidents, Harvard-Yale is probably a somewhat better US university analog to Oxford-Cambridge.
Stanford is well-regarded and may be a solid competitor to Harvard in a number of ways (#1 in Turing awards, #2 in VC-backed startups behind Berkeley, etc.) but it was founded 250 years later (considered a long time in the US) and has a smaller endowment (4th place, behind Harvard, UT, and Yale.) It has also only produced one US President: Herbert Hoover.
MIT is a top tier school though more focused on technology (it's in the name). MIT has a business school (Sloan), but a Harvard/Yale/Stanford will include a business school, law school, med school (etc.) and a range of well-regarded programs in humanities and social sciences in addition to science and engineering.
Anyway, I don't think the specifics really matter, point is it's not unusual to have a bunch of extremely good universities and then a handful or fewer that are for whatever reason the first-to-mind 'best' ones.
This is likely; international vs. US also probably makes a difference, as three of the last six US presidents (by person, not year) were Yale alumni (no MIT alumni have yet become president, but I think it's a good idea!)
And five are Ivy League grads: Obama from Harvard Law School, and Trump with an undergrad degree from Wharton/U. Penn. (Biden being somewhat of an outlier, having attended U. Delaware and Syracuse University.)
The same is true in the US as well: The University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania are probably world beating for economics and finance research respectively -- but I would still recommend people to go to Harvard/Stanford for an economics-focused undergrad or finance MSc or MBA if they have the choice, due to the name recognition and the network...
Oxford has long had a reputation for being a dual university - a raw academic track for smart people, and a political/establishment track for people with money, connections, ambition, and the kind of entitled self-assurance that comes from easy privilege.
"Political" doesn't just mean politics, although the notorious PPE degree often means exactly that. It also means media/journalism, and law.
There's some overlap between the talent intake and the connections intake, especially in the humanities. (Science is a little more rigorous.)
Generally if you're on the political track Oxford opens doors no other university will. Cambridge is a good second choice, and St Andrews has a minor presence in Scotland. But realistically the rest - Durham, York, Bristol - don't really count.
The difference is that tutors don't just teach, they talent scout. A good word and an introduction from a tutor - quite likely to be face to face at a social event - opens doors and plugs you straight into the network.
Another problem is that students are very often totally uninformed about their own institutions, despite their institutions informing them. During my time here I have seen multiple instances of students demanding a thing that already existed for years, was mentioned in the beginners brochure, could be found on the official website with a simple google search and so on.
So as much as I dislike saying it as a former student, but the mayority of students opinion is not necessarily a reflection of the institution itself, more of the mood within the student body. And this may or may not correlate with the value of the education received there.
When my son and I visited St. Andrews a few years back we were informally told that they really only select people who make that university their first pick - and given that St. Andrews doesn't seem to have any problems attracting students then I would question whether everyone puts Oxbridge first. I certainly knew people when I was applying to university (40+ years ago) who were very bright but who didn't even think about applying to Oxbridge because of the perceived snobbery.
I've also met quite a lot of rather unimpressive Oxbridge graduates in my career - so I wouldn't automatically assume that they get the brightest and the best.
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 …
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/
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).
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
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...
Though I strongly disagree with their choice of conferences, probably the best regarded ranking of computer science schools is CSRankings.org (https://csrankings.org/)
Even within the same field should a paper that speeds up LLM's by 10x be equal to one that improves object detection accuracy in a specific dataset by 2%, or a dataset paper? All could be published at NeurIPS and all are good papers, but that does not make them equal in impact.
A better example might be that a hypothetical paper curing some cancer through some magic technology, or a differnt one detecting cancer better using AI could both target a similar venue (as evidenced by various nature puplications), but are vastly different in impact.
Yeah this is worthless. "Elite" colleges in the US value student evaluations of teaching VERY VERY highly in things like tenure review. Well, guess what kind of grades professors give almost every single student at those colleges... It's a race to the bottom. Students aren't experts in teaching; they're rarely even experts in learning coming out of modern secondary education.
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.
Also I am confused why you are pointing out the obvious. Its as if you have been personaly offended by the suggestion Oxford has Monty Python moments and are trying to reassure everyone its only because all institutions do.
This was not an attack, it was just a couple of anecdotes. Like I said I still think Oxford is a great institution.
You are clearly confused why someone who likes something might criticise it. The reason is to improve it by increasing awareness. Its called positive feedback.
In essense what I am saying is, if all you have is praise for something, then in part you hate it , because you are not being honest, or trying to help it grow.
EDIT > To be honest I just reread your comment, I wanted to keep the good faith of mine so I didnt edit what I said, but I didnt realise you said they were minor. Literally banning clapping is not minor its an almost comical affront to free speech.
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.
(Also Edinburgh isn’t a redbrick, it was founded in 1583)
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”?
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmm/migrated/d...
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
[2]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...
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.
Also... do you mean Computer Science or Software Engineering or "Computer Engineering" (a term that makes me shudder.)
Essentially, Oxford researchers—institutionalists—are on the worst perch to evaluate institutions because they don't have a deep understanding of cross-societal differences and inevitably end up using their position to ad hominem and rationalize their own insider-ish biases. That's a tough ideological shell to crack through if the goal is to maintain an objective discussion.
As to the matter, the real issue is that Oxford/Cambridge is a different system than the US big universities. The people who apply to Oxbridge are from UK-related nations where they can study for an IB or an A levels. So for example the miscomparison that "A levels are harder than SAT/AP" is because it fundamentally misunderstands the historical aims of American education philosophy and very different social formations of the 20th century. This is a better approach to explain why UK/European universities are the way they are versus the (previously) leading ring of STEM universities in the US.
Take as another example the PhD system. The American system is different, they prefer non-Masters students direct from undergrad. The European PhD is only 3 years! By one metric that sounds insanely short and not enough time to develop a PhD-level mind. By another metric, yet another systemic difference, with differing rationales and intentions.
More deeply, if we really are to reject identity politics, then a class-based critique would demolish the notion of university education as a filtration system for all societies. 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? A response that decouples education from research is itself an assumption, one that the American academic philosophy in practice does not agree with. American academia prioritizes research, then teaching, then community service. In other words, decoupling “education” from “research” is itself a pedagogical-philosophy assumption, one the American/British/European academic systems nevertheless still has various problematizable, elitist mindsets about.
So there's a much broader social, political, and historical/class analysis to be made rather than this kind of wonkism of foolish comparisons, and I'm rather miffed that supposedly world-class researchers are still not cognizant of this. Sometimes we are too close to critically think about our own habitus fairly.
Or, before making graphs and charts, read some Paulo Freire.
The UK is a particularly poor example of how things are done in Europe. In many aspects (such as whether the primary university degree is Bachelor's or Master's) it's closer to the US than the average continental European country.
You edited your comment after I started writing mine. Your idea that the US is still responsible for an exceptionally large fraction of academic research sounds like a leftover from the 20th century. European universities needed a couple of generations to recover from WW2, but since ~20 years ago, there have not been any significant qualitative or quantitative differences between the research output in the US and Europe. (China may also have crossed the threshold recently, but it's too early to say.)
At least not in the fields I'm qualified to judge (computer science, bioinformatics, genomics). There are obviously major differences in both directions in individual topics, but that's because both blocks are pretty small. Neither has enough researchers to cover every subfield and every topic.
American universities fill most of the top positions in university rankings, but that's mostly because the concept of "top institutions" is more relevant in American culture. (That's another aspect where the British tradition is closer to the US than continental Europe.) In many European countries, all proper universities are seen as more or less equivalent as far as education is concerned. Some universities employ more top researchers than others, but that doesn't impact their reputation as educational institutions as much as in the US or the UK.
Pointedly, I don't define results or leadership as "research output". I mean who was responsible for Crispr? For LLMs? All roads lead to Rome; but today, empires also change shape and form.
Who was responsible for CRISPR is good question (I'm less familiar with the advances leading to LLMs). There was a series of incremental advances building on each other from at least Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, the US, France, Sweden, and Lithuania. And the Nobel prize was shared between an American researcher working in the US and a French researcher working in Sweden (and later in Germany).
I'm Asian American and LGBT+, and I was privileged by an advanced formal education. So, yes, I literally have a different set of values and goals than you. So you should just try to read it in good faith, I have made no such assumption rather my comment laid out those issues for you to think about. Unless you are doing the old "rules of rational discussion are for me, not for thee"? Surely you're not that sort of antiintellectual reactionary.
And to the other possibility, you're just writing an insult, so the problem there is you and your emotional regulation, and you are responsible for that.
Going back, it's quite the opposite, when the other commenter framed "identity politics" and "meritocracy", they were committing the very error you have ignorantly accused me of. Thus you are just engaging in projection. Not to mention the ("kritik" conservative's dogwshistle).
Thus, the fact that you are lacking in critical thinking skills today does not excuse you from such intellectually prejudiced remarks.
And finally, your reference to "electoral results" tells me you didn't read through my comment, and are pigeonholing me as one type of left-American Democrat or another, of which I have provided enough commentary in the original comment that I could not be one.
So as much as you were trying to suggest the problem is on my end, the problem is with you and your narrowminded (and frankly, one with a racist tenor because surely you would not have said that comment to my face) reply, eli_gottlieb. It's too bad you're actually a postdoc, if I were an evil SJW or Democrat (or whatever politics it was you were insinuating) I'd be cancelling you through your own institution or something.
If you are a conservative, further discussion is going to be pointless. If you are Bernie/AOC/other leftist then I'll chalk it up to you basically misreading what I wrote.
> So as much as you were trying to suggest the problem is on my end, the problem is with you and your narrowminded (and frankly, one with a racist tenor because surely you would not have said that comment to my face) reply, eli_gottlieb. It's too bad you're actually a postdoc, if I were an evil SJW or Democrat (or whatever politics it was you were insinuating) I'd be cancelling you through your own institution or something.
Oh yeah, you're asking ChatGPT for kritiks. Fuck off.
Do you have a source for this?
I think we just teach people to pass exams, really. Not to say it's necessarily wrong - you do need a grasp of the subject matter still - just that 'how the exam works' is an additional thing you learn.
I'm British, always lived here, took A levels naturally, and took SATs & ACTs too because I applied to MIT - I think I did extremely poorly. (vs. decently on A levels, meeting both my Cambridge & Imperial offers) I just had no familiarity with the test, the sort of questions, etc., maybe some of the subject matter is different too - from memory I think there was no calculus and an extraordinary emphasis on trigonometry? But I can readily understand then that vice versa you'd look at an A level exam and think Oh that's hard, because it's just not what you've been taught towards in the US.
The starting package For new professors at Oxbridge is several orders of magnitude less than top institutions outside UK
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.
"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.
It's frankly heartening to see it drop down the rankings, although IMO generally too much emphasis is placed on these sorts of lists.
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.
Oxbridge will always be tier 1. Undergraduate teaching quality + a rigorous selection process cannot be beat.
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.
abxyz•4mo ago
afavour•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
geremiiah•4mo ago
walthamstow•4mo ago
rrrrrrrrrrrryan•4mo ago
toast0•4mo ago
yndoendo•4mo ago
dan-robertson•4mo ago
lotsofpulp•4mo ago
achenet•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
Very unlikely, most financial aid is not available to international students.
Ar-Curunir•4mo ago
yardie•4mo ago
KaiserPro•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
AlexandrB•4mo ago
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.
rayiner•4mo ago
croes•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
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"
john-h-k•4mo ago
ceejayoz•4mo ago
Do you think Trump got into Wharton on his academic prowess? Legacy admits and donor kids take spots from both middle and lower classes.
> And no one is saying immigrants are taking the spots.
Sure they are. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/08/27/trump-administration-pro...
john-h-k•4mo ago
patanegra•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
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.
happytoexplain•4mo ago
AlexandrB•4mo ago
afavour•4mo ago
I think the point the OP is making is that getting 4 A*s when you benefit from exemplary schooling and personal tutoring doesn't necessarily make you the best nor the brightest.
hilios•4mo ago
Maybe they are supposed to do this, but let's not act like the filter doesn't quite apply the same way if your parents are rich and or well connected. They're however very effective in filtering out bright kids whose parents can't afford the tuition and aren't lucky enough to get a scholarship.
gcau•4mo ago
It sounds like you think admissions should be based on how hard people think they worked relative to others.
growse•4mo ago
ceejayoz•4mo ago
I’ve met smart people who do poorly on exams. I’ve met dumb people who do well on them.
dukeyukey•4mo ago
nicoburns•4mo ago
dukeyukey•4mo ago
trial3•4mo ago
eastbound•4mo ago
We could fill the world with Maybes, but the one thing I’ve noticed about people who succeed, is that it’s generally their work that performs, while anticlass-based triage has only made hateful people reach high positions.
patanegra•4mo ago
In the future, it's going to be a nil argument anyway, as world-class AI tutors are going to be available for every child 24/7 for a penny.
yodsanklai•4mo ago
In France, our elite scientific schools recruit students based on anonymous nationwide tests. It turns out most of the recruits come from privileged backgrounds, and I've heard this is more the case today than it was several decades ago.
I'd love to see more diversity in these schools, but I prefer to maintain our educational excellence rather than dilute it artificially with worse students. I'm all for paying tutors to poorer but promising student, but they should be admitted against the same criteria as anyone else.
patanegra•4mo ago
It's nothing bad that their kids end up good students again.
I think that French system is superior. It gives fair chances to everyone.
Ekaros•4mo ago
frotaur•4mo ago
An equally, if not more valid cause is that having money makes it much easier to get good condition/tutors etc for preparing for the exams.
patanegra•4mo ago
It is quite common people say, that something is only a correlation and not causation. But if you can point to a common denominator, that has been shown multiple times, to have a massive effect, it's not likely to be just a coincidence. Genes are this common denominator. Society and habits (for example, protestants vs catholics) are another.
Things that consistently impact the whole population are not just a random process that picks: "You will be clever, ugly.", "You will be pretty, sporty, but will be dumb." It's always genes, society and habits.
foven•4mo ago
patanegra•4mo ago
Or now, for $20/month OpenAI? Or for pennies through OpenRouter?
nickd2001•4mo ago
physicsguy•4mo ago
growse•4mo ago
UK-AL•4mo ago
yodsanklai•4mo ago
Pretty much all French physics Nobel Prize and Field Medal laureate when to the same top school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supérieu...
cauch•4mo ago
This is the point of training: the more training you have access to, the better you do. If it was not the case, then the notion of school itself as a way of training people to be able to think by themselves will not have any sense.
And that is just training. Even with the same amount of class hour, kids who don't have to worry about take care of their siblings, of the house chores, or of even having access to decent relaxing conditions will get higher score even if they are in fact less smart.
yodsanklai•4mo ago
If you want to build an elite sport team, I don't think you want to artificially put less athletic kids for the reason they had to work harder.
I think the question is why do we need elite higher education at all. Maybe we don't. In my view, we want to funnel the brightest people there and make sure they get access to the best resources.
cauch•4mo ago
You are saying that you don't want less athletic kids being accepted artificially. That's exactly the point: the score does not correspond to the talent, you have to correct for it: to compare 2 persons on their merit if they have had different training, you need to calibrate to get a variable that correspond to the merit.
patanegra•4mo ago
If you are world-class talent (someone who gets to Oxford), you should be capable of similar results as kids from independent schools. Like Joe Seddon did (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Seddon - growing up with a single parent mom, working as a therapist in NHS).
It isn't fair to ask ones to have 4A* and others to have just 3As.
Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A.
And 1 in 83 gets 3 As.
Making it 31
easier for people from state school is discrimination so bad, it should be illegal.asib•4mo ago
misnome•4mo ago
petesergeant•4mo ago
concernedParty•4mo ago
This is an entirely expected outcome. Water will find a way to ground.
patanegra•4mo ago
asib•4mo ago
I understand an argument saying people will game this setup, but arguing that state school kids are not disadvantaged is indefensible, in my opinion
oh_fiddlesticks•4mo ago
I don't think thats an objectionable statement.
Also, while not wanting to paint with a broad brush, people I know who work in state run schools are aware of how many other challenges students must face when they're on school grounds. They're fighting more than the test criteria, they're fighting their peers, outside criminal influences, prostitution, drug dealing etc etc.
Meanwhile this stuff is rarer and more swiftly dealt with at private schools because the parents won't have it, and they pay the bills and have some leverage, the financial incentives are different in the model and it shows.
I personally don't have a problem with loosening the grade criteria, even if it's gamed, the candidates are all interviewed anyway, it's not like a free pass, more an opportunity.
abxyz•4mo ago
At A level my secondary school couldn't accommodate most A level subjects: students were sent off to many different schools for different subjects, and forced to choose which A levels they did based on complicated scheduling arrangements. The only reason some of them could afford to do A levels was because of the £30 benefits payments they received which covered their transport costs (I believe it was called EMA (something like "Education Maintenance Allowance") at the time, but it was a long time ago).
As far as I recall, the maximum possible qualifications from my secondary school was 6 A* GCSEs and 3 A levels.
ceejayoz•4mo ago
> And 1 in 83 gets 3 As.
And what if that’s not always an indication of which person is smarter?
rayiner•4mo ago
Latty•4mo ago
Quite the contrary: there is a long history of "objective" tests being shown to be deeply flawed and biased towards certain factors (often cultural and class based), we explicitly know it isn't the case that test scores are purely about some innate intelligence characteristic: there is a reason the rich spend a lot of money to raise their children's scores.
My secondary school claimed to have the best results for Business Studies A-levels in the country. They achieved this by taking the pre-released case study, writing every possible question they could think of about the study, writing model answers, and telling the students to memorise them. The idea that these scores represent some innate intelligence of the student is obviously nonsense if you interact with the system at all.
rayiner•4mo ago
In the U.S., research shows the SAT is highly predictive of college performance: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-week-educatio... (summarizing research).
cauch•4mo ago
How will you explain that Asians outperform white British otherwise, knowing that the idea that Asians and white British are genetically different enough to explain this has been scientifically debunked, or that adopted Asians don't show the same pattern as not adopted Asians?
(and, yes, of course SAT is highly predictive of college performance, isn't that the point: people who get better training get better college performance while not being "smarter", just "better trained")
rayiner•4mo ago
cauch•4mo ago
(sure, we expect that a small difference in "normal situation" should be relatively small, but the samples are defined as biased, so you cannot really rely on them unless making unproven assumptions)
xyzzyz•4mo ago
> The cause of [test achievement] differential is not known; it is apparently not due to any simple form of bias in the content or administration of the tests themselves.
https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/APA%201985%20Intelligence%2...
cauch•4mo ago
Also, on just pure logic, I don't think the document shows what you think it shows. The document you provide (which is 30 years old, so with just this one, we should not assume it reflects today's consensus) explains that the difference is not understood, and that there is no _obvious_ answer, neither from biology, from group culture or from bias in the tests. In other words: the difference is due to something _not obvious_, for example (but not limited to, of course, it's just an example), _not obvious_ form of bias.
paganel•4mo ago
nobodyandproud•4mo ago
Don’t forget that China chose Confucianism to put a halt to the perpetual, European style wars.
Stagnation was by design, and caught up with them after 2000 years.
growse•4mo ago
Am i objectively smarter than every single other peer who only got 4 As?
(I, for one, am confident I know the answer to this question).
rayiner•4mo ago
growse•4mo ago
All babies are stupid, I therefore assume?
What about the people who never get the chance to do any A levels? Are they all less smart than those who do?
notahacker•4mo ago
Still, your grades (and mine) pale in comparison to all these youngsters with an opportunity to get A* grades...
ceejayoz•4mo ago
It’s one metric of many. We know that paying for a tutor can change test scores. We know that a shitty home life can, too. They’re just harder to measure.
rayiner•4mo ago
ceejayoz•4mo ago
rayiner•4mo ago
noelwelsh•4mo ago
https://www.schoolmanagementplus.com/exams-qualifications/a-...
Much more on the disparity if one cares to search.
skippyboxedhero•4mo ago
Before you continue, there are governments in the UK that have created formulas to mathematically measure your level of "struggle"...these happen to, in a massive coincidence, benefit areas that vote for them.
The same logic is also being applied within universities to boost grades as managers at universities have quotas to hit from government. This leads to odd situations where a subject like Scottish Law at Edinburgh has no quota for students without appropriate social credit because it is a subject which, unlike other courses at that university, gets largely Scottish students applying so it has to be used to fill quotas. And these students have to be carried to the end of their course because they are there to fulfill a quota.
Sounds like a great idea but, as with everything like this, the assumption is that a university administrator or bureaucrat can accurately measure your struggle...they can't, I am sure the wisdom of this approach will dim when you are being operated on by someone who filled a quota at medical school.
TMWNN•4mo ago
Or ABB for the incoming president of the Oxford Union, the one who cheered Charlie Kirk's murder a few months after debating him in person. <https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2025/09/oxfo...>
afavour•4mo ago
TMWNN•4mo ago
afavour•4mo ago
An extremely tenuous connection. Abaraonye (and even less his words on Kirk) had absolutely no relevance to the criteria by which the Times assesses universities, thus had no impact on Oxfords placement, thus has no relevance to the conversation.
TMWNN•4mo ago
> To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.
In reply, I provided a recently prominent example of someone recently admitted to Oxford with lower than 3 A grades on the A-Levels. I only mentioned Kirk's murder as context because, as I keep repeating, the person a) only became prominent because b) he publicly cheered said murder c) after debating Kirk in person. I don't know what else you can ask for here.
afavour•4mo ago
Perhaps a demonstration of any kind of connection between his grades and his views on Kirk? The implication in what you're saying is that an ABB student is saying bad things than a 4 A* student would never say. I'd love to see anything backing that up. There are plenty of ABB students who said nothing of that nature and I'd wager you could find 4 A* students (albeit with a lower profile) who did.
Absent that connection it just looks very much like you're using the person's grades as a tenuous excuse to bring them up.
programjames•4mo ago
afavour•4mo ago
If I argued that his comments were an obvious sign that Oxford needs to stop admitting people whose last name starts with A you’d rightly say I was being absurd. But basing the argument around his grades is no more valid.
“allegedly due to ideological fit” says it all. We’re just making stuff up to fit preconceived notions.
programjames•4mo ago
afavour•4mo ago
Because there’s no evidence for them! They themselves used the word “allegedly”. Asking for evidence to back up an assertion is not rude, it’s table stakes for any kind of debate.
programjames•4mo ago
afavour•4mo ago
programjames•4mo ago
This is what was actually said:
>> I provided a citation for the ABB grades, which is relevant to the comment I replied to.
> An extremely tenuous connection. Abaraonye (and even less his words on Kirk) had absolutely no relevance to the criteria by which the Times assesses universities, thus had no impact on Oxfords placement, thus has no relevance to the conversation.
>> I provided a recently prominent example of someone recently admitted to Oxford with lower than 3 A grades on the A-Levels. I only mentioned Kirk's murder as context because, as I keep repeating, the person a) only became prominent because b) he publicly cheered said murder c) after debating Kirk in person. I don't know what else you can ask for here.
> Perhaps a demonstration of any kind of connection between his grades and his views on Kirk? The implication in what you're saying is that an ABB student is saying bad things than a 4 A* student would never say. I'd love to see anything backing that up. There are plenty of ABB students who said nothing of that nature and I'd wager you could find 4 A* students (albeit with a lower profile) who did. Absent that connection it just looks very much like you're using the person's grades as a tenuous excuse to bring them up.
Do you see how this comes across to a third party as @TMWNN vaguely hinting about ideological picks doing ideological things, you knowing this is what they're doing, but then stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that and just repeatedly saying, "show me the connection!" when you know very well what it is?
This is what worries me about the left. Why must you refuse to even acknowledge someone can hold views antithetical to your own? My best guess is the left has stricter ideological purity tests, and just saying something that can be misinterpreted as accepting anti-left views is dangerous. So, you cannot have an honest conversation with a racist because just saying, "maybe you think some races are superior, but..." could be weaponized in inter-party fighting as a tacit endorsement of racism. And so, you pretend to stick your head in the sand as if racists aren't out there, and the person vaguely hinting at racist things is literally babbling nonsense instead of sensible-through-a-racist-lens ideas.
The issue with this kind of discourse is it's entirely ineffective. I like to say, 'racism is stupid, because people usually only use race as the explanation when they're not smart enough to figure out the actual problem.' The solution to racism isn't to pretend the problem doesn't exist (to deviate from racism for a bit: OBVIOUSLY Abaronye's comments are a symptom of Oxford losing prestige; don't pretend you couldn't make that connection), it's to offer a better explanation. This is why I said,
>>> It's very strange to say, "there's just no connection at all," instead of, "I don't think his lower offer letter was due to affirmative action, but probably due to skills in other areas (heck, he's the president-elect of the Oxford Union!)."
Obviously the right has issues with obfuscation and dishonesty too. They're just worse at it. @TMWNN's vague hints were... anything but subtle. I don't like to play these obfuscation games, because pretty much tautologically they make it harder to agree on reality. But I find it very worrying when calling out obfuscation and explicitly writing down what everyone is already thinking is met by digging one's heels in and moving over to another patch of sand. Why not just actually try to reach common knowledge? Why do I have to drag you around, kicking and screaming, before you'll even acknowledge your actual point?
> My point still stands: there’s no actual evidence for OP’s assertion.
You're making this out to be some kind of final stand, when this is the first time you have even gotten close to putting your point in writing. But which assertion are you referring to? There are lots of implied ones, and no explicit ones (again, why obfuscation is frustrating). I think your point is:
> Abaraonye was admitted on his merits, and there is no actual evidence for OP's implicit assertion that he is an affirmative action admit.
If so, why wasn't this your entire reply to @TMWNN?? It's rude to start a debate without doing your due diligence of actually saying what you mean, and giving your best effort to parse what they mean!
afavour•4mo ago
> You're making this out to be some kind of final stand, when this is the first time you have even gotten close to putting your point in writing.
“show me the connection” is a request for evidence. You’re saying I’ve said that repeatedly then you’re claiming I’ve only done it once at the end. What else would “a demonstration of the connection” mean?
> So, you cannot have an honest conversation with a racist because just saying, "maybe you think some races are superior, but..." could be weaponized in inter-party fighting as a tacit endorsement of racism.
I’m not a member of the left wing debate club you have in your mind (if it exists at all) but my starting point when having an honest conversation with a racist would be to ask “what evidence justifies your racism?”, because absent that we’re not having a conversation based in reality.
Same here. The reason I’m asking for evidence is basically what you’ve already said: OP’s assertions are vague at best. Yours haven’t been a lot better. It’s all attributable to “ideology”. Then you say he’s “one of the most prominent voices for that ideology”. What ideology? And by what metric is he one of the most prominent voices?
This is my problem with much of the right: it’s gotchaism. The only reason he’s prominent is because statements he made in a private WhatsApp chat were leaked and circulated in right wing circles. The president of the Oxford students union is not normally a person you ever hear anything about on the national stage. The vast majority of Oxford students don’t even care about who they are.
So the right makes a relative unknown prominent by excessively hyping their statements then turns around and says “look at this prominent spokesperson!”. The union have disowned his comments. He has disowned his comments. And yet, despite his views being endorsed by absolutely no one, he’s still held up as emblematic of a larger, completely unattributable larger movement (the “ideology”) that is responsible for all kinds of problems, apparently including Oxford university’s ranking. And anyone associated with that “ideology” (vague enough that it encompasses whoever it needs to) must atone for the sins of this newly prominent spokesperson they never even heard of a week ago.
That’s why I have asked repeatedly what these supposed connections are. Because when we actually get into the details none of this adds up to anything. And none of it has anything to do with Oxford’s university ranking, the actual topic at hand.
programjames•4mo ago
Evidence... yes, that narrowed it down a lot. You're looking for evidence! In a debate! I never could have guessed! Luckily for you, @TMWNN did, and tried to help twice, but clearly they didn't know you were looking for evidence, not whatever they provided.
In case it wasn't clear, I'm being sarcastic. You asked for evidence of a connection, they gave you it twice, and yet it clearly wasn't the evidence you actually wanted because you wouldn't just tell them what you actually wanted!
Also, btw, I never said this guy was prominent. I meant what I said, not something slightly different to further a not-so-hidden agenda.
afavour•4mo ago
ralusek•4mo ago
> debated Kirk [at Oxford]
> cheered assassination of Kirk, which happened within months of debate
Is this really dragging American culture war into things? This is clearly relevant to Oxford
mensetmanusman•4mo ago
znpy•4mo ago
So yes, in that sense it's an useful piece of information.
croes•4mo ago
afavour•4mo ago
There was no person being talked about, though. This is a discussion about Oxford's university ranking. The GP brought up a person entirely irrelevant to that discussion and informed us of his views on a topic that's also irrelevant to the discussion.
cvwright•4mo ago
afavour•4mo ago
mensetmanusman•4mo ago
afavour•4mo ago
Entirely depends on what circles you move in. The vast majority of people, especially those outside the US, are not talking about Charlie Kirk at all. Hence my objection to him being brought up. At bare minimum it has no relevance to the ranking being discussed in this topic.
> Celebrating violence against free speech doesn’t make sense for Oxford’s name to stand behind.
And they do not stand behind it. Oxford does not control the students union. I don’t buy any argument that they should somehow be policing free speech in the name of free speech. Makes no sense at all.
mensetmanusman•4mo ago
mensetmanusman•4mo ago
The society leaders decided it’s okay for him to do that because of racism based on their most recent response.
croes•4mo ago
Shall we ask the parents of the victims of the school shootings?
BTW why is a god given right not mentioned in the bible?
programjames•4mo ago
> To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations—that one 'will rule them with an iron scepter and will dash them to pieces like pottery'—just as I have received authority from my Father. (Revelation 2:26–27)
Any good Sanctuarian[^1] would know this refers to the AR-15, and Americans' right to bear arms.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_of_Iron_Ministries
dan-robertson•4mo ago
Clearly this PPE student has some talent for politics to be elected president of one of the more prestigious societies, so it seems right for him to have been given a place.
cvwright•4mo ago
growse•4mo ago
It's a very bold assertion that A level grades are the ultimate arbiter of "dumbness".
patanegra•4mo ago
In the UK, there's 1.5 million kids playing footbal. 1:83 ~18000 kids play in any professional club. 1:2600 ~580 kids get to play in Premier League, EFL Championship in a season
What is Oxford doing is letting kids who play in absolutely any club, if they go to state school, or only those who got to Premier League, if they go to independent school.
Again, it's discrimination so bad it should be illegal.
growse•4mo ago
rcxdude•4mo ago
patanegra•4mo ago
In my sons' prep school, I have seen kids playing musical instruments so good, they could do concerts for a general public. I have seen boys taking GCSEs in Year 6.
And 100% of parents are university educated, often high achievers. Don't let me start speaking about Chinese, where kids come from school 6pm, and they often get two more lessons at home (Chinese + music instrument most often).
Parents in state schools don't put in even half of the effort on average.
growse•4mo ago
I wondered how long it'd be before we'd see "parents who can't afford private education just aren't putting the effort in".
patanegra•4mo ago
And I say it as someone who went to a state school, just like my parents, grandparents...
growse•4mo ago
Or do they need to just be luckier?
patanegra•4mo ago
In China, they speak about 996 (working 9am to 9pm 6 days a week; and since we speak about education, Chinese kids often learn from 7am up to 9pm, and when they are getting ready for University, they pull 12–14 hours a day consistently), in Europe, we speak about working only 4 days a week, and whether it is bad for kids to have homeworks.
We all, in Europe, should speak about working a bit harder. Especially those, who are not happy with where they are.
asib•4mo ago
There are plenty of people who are not happy with where they are despite working hard. This "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality is cancer to the problem, it solves nothing.
Talking about a 6 day work week aspirationally is truly odd. There are parents of independent school kids who do not work 6 day weeks, I'd dare to wager many of them. It's foolish and naive to assume that grinding harder is the way to make up the difference.
wulfstan•4mo ago
This isn’t a surprise, because independent schools hothouse children to ensure they peak at a levels, whereas what universities want is students who will continue to improve at university.
I have two children (3xA*, 1A for one and 3As for the other) who were not interested in Oxford or Cambridge. My experience of Cambridge students (I live in Cambridge) is that I have seen many burn out. You also end up with a very narrow program of study which for children with broader interests forces them into a box very early. It’s also a 3 year undergrad program with 24 contact weeks a year, which is insanely short.
My children have gone to Scotland (Edinburgh and St Andrews) which allows significantly more flexibility than English universities offer in choosing subjects outside your chosen degree pattern. St Andrews even lets you change degree completely if you find something else you like.
If you really really want to be a mathematician at 18 then I can see why Cambridge or Oxford might appeal; for kids with more breadth, I think it’s a poor choice.
rcxdude•4mo ago
To some extent, but one of the things about it that I liked was the course I was on was more general than most other English universities. But still, it's not as broad as e.g. a US university, so it's pretty relative. (Basically, for engineering the curriculum is basically 'all engineering' until the second year, where you then can pick specific modules to go into specific areas. Natural Science and Mathematics are similar. But, relevant to your point about burnout, they didn't really cut anything from each area compared to other, more focused courses, so the workload was definitely intense). For me it was a perfect fit because I knew I wanted to go into engineering but I didn't really have a strong preference for which type (still haven't really given up being a generalist).
growse•4mo ago
> My experience of Cambridge students (I live in Cambridge) is that I have seen many burn out.
100%. I "burnt out" (actually, I think I discovered there was more to life than the academic slog I'd spent my entire schooling immersed in) and despite 6 A levels came 94/97 in my third year.
It happens a lot, and my suspicion is that the burnout is caused by the whiplash of going from a high intensity/pressure school environment (where you're likely told you're the smartest person in the room), to a more adult, self-driven one (where it's clear you're not).
> You also end up with a very narrow program of study which for children with broader interests forces them into a box very early.
This depends on the course I think. I did natural sciences which is extremely broad, and allows much later specialisation. Other courses are far narrower d think.
physicsguy•4mo ago
This just isn't true in my area (Physics), the courses at Oxbridge are just as broad but go much deeper than you'd study in another University.
I don't think it's true of written subjects either, from friends that studied there it sounds like the cranking out of essays is weekly or more at Oxbridge whereas my housemates at University were doing termly stuff.
wulfstan•4mo ago
rcxdude•4mo ago
No, it's nowhere near that intense on average. And also, this sounds like it very much is about the quality of the schooling, no? But, if you're also going with 'all kids aren't equally smart', then that would suggest that the results from that stage of schooling are not necessarily indicative of how well they would do at a given university, where there's a lot less support in general.
patanegra•4mo ago
All kids aren't equally smart. Not all kids can also handle such a regime. It isn't for everyone. Those, who succeed in such schools, deserve not to be discriminated against, because their dad has a Range Rover and tweed suit.
If a good independent school prepares a child better than a state school, the child should have a preference. Otherwise, all those years of preparation and all that talent is wasted.
growse•4mo ago
In other words, the parents should get a return on their investment?
Your child is not entitled to an Oxbridge place over a state-educated child because they might have more potential and ability, they're entitled because you paid extra for it?
patanegra•4mo ago
Anyway. If Oxford is going to pass on those kids, who are often multiple years ahead of the average, some other university will accept them. And then, this university will likely beat Oxford in ratings.
growse•4mo ago
If, however, you want to convince yourself that the amount of money you've spent on your child's education means they're smarter than the rest, go right ahead and believe that.
Universities don't select for whether a candidate has "reached their full potential". They select for what that potential is.
patanegra•4mo ago
For smarter. My narrative is more prepared, used to working harder. And also, it's self-selection. If you are not made for that type of education, you are going to leave.
No matter if universities select for potential, or operating near it. Both would be nice. Now, it is increasingly also how they will shape the society if they accept student A instead of student B. And they want to shape society in a way that discriminates against certain kids for who their parents are.
foven•4mo ago
nicce•4mo ago
asib•4mo ago
It cannot be understated how much of an advantage someone who went to a private school has over someone from a state school, with respect to the entire process (exams/admissions tests/interview prep).
NewJazz•4mo ago
rcxdude•4mo ago
(I would, in general, be in favor of fixing GCSEs and A-levels. They have persistently moved in a direction that rewards memorisation of particular keywords, something which especially rewards teaching the test, as well as getting easier and especially less good at discriminating the top end of ability accurately. But it's still not going to be enough to remove this difference)
madaxe_again•4mo ago
nickd2001•4mo ago
joosters•4mo ago
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!
notreallyauser•4mo ago
Dumbed down it was not, in my experience. Dumbing down would be a way to up the score on these rankings, though.
corimaith•4mo ago
jgraham•4mo ago
My understanding (based on a discussion with one Natural Sciences admissions tutor at one Cambridge college nearly 20 years ago, so strictly speaking this may not be true in general, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't common) is that during the admissions process, including interviews, applicants are scored so they can be stack-ranked, and the top N given offers. Then, for the students that are accepted, and get the required exam results, the college also records their marks at each stage of their degree. To verify the admissions process is fair, these marks are compared with the original interview ranking, expecting that interview performance is (on average) correlated with later degree performance.
I don't know if they go further and build models to suggest the correct offer to give different students based on interview performance, educational background, and other factors, but it seems at least plausible that one could try that kind of thing, and have the data to prove that it was working.
Anyway my guess is that of the population of people who would do well if they got in, but don't, the majority are those whose background makes them believe it's "not for the likes of me", and so never apply, rather than people who went to private schools, applied, and didn't get a place.
(also a Cambridge alumni from a state school, FWIW),
OJFord•4mo ago
(alumnus not of Cambridge, but from a state school, fwiw)
('people called Johns, they go the Cambridge?!')
lwhi•4mo ago
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.
patanegra•4mo ago
Which isn't true, and never was. I get why we do that with kids in Reception and Year 1. With young adults, like University students, the fact of inequality of potentials of individuals, is just a fact anyone has to live with.
I am clever, but I am a fat, average looking guy. So that's what I have to live with. David Beckham is not so smart, but he is sporty and looks great. He uses his innate talents, and I use mines. Nobody is discriminated by being different.
The system has been built by those with means. And those with means more often than not are clever, hard-working people. That's how you get successful in the first place. And when you are born with great talents, you will go up too. That was the point of aristocrats being replaced by bourgeois, and now people in tech growing no matter where they are from.
lwhi•4mo ago
Imagine the same person, cloned. Clone A is born into an economically challenged household; while clone B is born into an upper-middle class household.
Now consider whether both clones would achieve the same results at A level.
One could expect the child born into the poorer household to experience more challenges, and perhaps achieve worse results as a consequence.
In this instance, how would it be appropriate to call clone A thick or less intelligent than clone B?
patanegra•4mo ago
If you are a talented child born to a millionaire, your success is to go from £10M to £1bn.
If you are a dumb child born to a millionaire, you go from £10M to £1.
You probably assume that people with the same skills should have the same absolute outcomes. I don't. There shouldn't be glass ceilings for talented ones, so a son of a carpenter has a right to become a billionaire, or earn a Nobel Prize in science, or apply his talents in any field. But I don't think there exists any socioeconomic system that would deliver more equitable results and had more pros than cons, especially compared to the current system.
lwhi•4mo ago
Describing a family that doesn't have money as 'bad' is outrageous.
patanegra•4mo ago
I don't say people are evil for not having much money.
I grew up in a family with very low income (my dad was earning about £12000 per year, when he retired a few years ago, my mum about £6000, I am from Central Europe, so things are a bit cheaper there, but not much). He worked shifts, and my mum worked 1.5 jobs.
Yet, I was able to achieve everything I wanted.
Maybe you should re-read what I write to understand it better.
lwhi•4mo ago
However, that's exactly what the class system in the UK does. The potential of oeople born into lower classes of society is actively limited.
physicsguy•4mo ago
I went to a relatively poor state school. I did very well regardless but on average the results were not that good. I remember sitting in my history GCSE class and a teacher chasing a student around various classrooms on multiple occasions. I remember not having a permanent teacher for Year 10 English. I remember my GCSE Spanish teacher bribing everyone with chocolate when OFSTED came around because this was the third time doing the same lesson and he wanted us to look stronger than we were.
pimterry•4mo ago
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).
lokar•4mo ago
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.
abxyz•4mo ago
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.
energy123•4mo ago
fidotron•4mo ago
While I agree with this as a conclusion, I believe you cannot really go there without acknowledging that this has been a deteriorating situation ever since most of the UK abolished the grammar schools.
"Comprehensive" education has done nothing except result in the oppression of the very people it claims to be liberating.
Latty•4mo ago
Students are not equally capable across all subjects, and their ability changes over time. Grammar schools mean there is no room to give you what you need in subjects you fall behind on, and students who start to struggle or start achieving post-11-plus have to transfer schools to fix it, creating huge friction and basically ensuring they'll miss out on the education they should have.
Comprehensives that have a full range of sets to teach at the skill level of the student for each subject are infinitely better for actual education.
I was one of the fortunate ones who was pretty generalist and so I didn't suffer too much by it, but I consistently saw people just give up on subjects because they were too far behind and the school had no other options because there were no lower sets.
mytailorisrich•4mo ago
notreallyauser•4mo ago
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.
patanegra•4mo ago
Assumed, they really are 4 A* material.
If not, what might happen is, that Oxford might get worse in ratings. Is Oxford getting worse in ratings?
> It isn't dumbing down or taking worse students, it's easing out the rich types
But those rich types already have 4 A*, or they are close to it. Their kids have spent 10 years boarding, learning 10 hours a day, including Saturdays. And then, they are discriminated, because of hate towards the rich.
I guess, what will happen, is that some other universities will pick them up. Kids, who are used to work extremely hard. Kids, who know how to learn. Kids, whose parents and grandparents knew how to apply themselves and who instilled all this in them too.
And Oxford will be dethroned. Cream always rises to the top.
matthewmacleod•4mo ago
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.
KaiserPro•4mo ago
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.
energy123•4mo ago
programjames•4mo ago
JetSetWilly•4mo ago
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!
rcxdude•4mo ago
physicsguy•4mo ago
Is it? That assumes that the grade is a fair differentiator between two students. But we know that that's not true because the gulf between private education and state education is enormous.
eynsham•4mo ago
This is not, generally, true. Cambridge tends to have higher offers, and I had a friend offered 5A*+S1 (STEP), but that’s mostly because he buggered up his interview (and he was taking 5 A-levels). The standard offer at Oxford for mathematics is A*A*A, which is exactly what those applying from any public school will be asked to achieve.
> or just 3 As from state schools
Not for maths. For easy courses like PPE, someone who misses a standard offer of A*AA might be let off by a few grades. People at public schools who miss their offers are much likelier to be a bit thick.
seper8•4mo ago
StopDisinfo910•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
He did say exactly that.
hnhg•4mo ago
blitzar•4mo ago
WrongAssumption•4mo ago
growse•4mo ago
pg's lack of awareness that this has basically always been true smacks of naiveté.
adw•4mo ago
rcxdude•4mo ago
growse•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
alephnerd•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
- 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•4mo ago
I felt the original thread wasn't recognising the social disparity authentically.
KaiserPro•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
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