[_hark]

I'm a researcher at Oxford, and I've both taught and studied here and in the US.

The undergraduate teaching here is phenomenal. It's incredibly labor intensive for the staff, but the depth and breadth students are exposed to in their subject is astonishing. It's difficult to imagine how it can be improved.

My favorite study of university rankings comes from faculty hiring markets, which compute implicit rankings by measuring which institutions tend to hire (PhD->faculty) from others. [1] It's not perfect, but at the very least it's a parameter free way to get a sense of how different universities view each other. The parameters in most university rankings are rather arbitrary and game-able.

Some have pointed to things like contextual admissions [2], and more broadly some identity politics capture of the administration for declining standards. While this might be true, in my view Oxford is still far more meritocratic than US institutions on the whole. There are no legacy admissions, and many subjects have difficult tests which better distinguish between applicants who have all done extremely well on national standardised tests (British A Levels are far more difficult than the SAT/ACT/AP exams.)

Lastly, admissions at Oxford are devolved to the individual colleges, of which there are ~40. The faculty at each college directly interview and select the applicants which they will take as students. This devolved system and the friction it creates is surprisingly robust and makes complete ideological capture more difficult.

The most pressing issue for Oxford's long-term viability as a leading institution, in my view, is the funding situation. For one the British economy is in a long, slow decline. Secondly, even though Oxford has money, there are lots of regulations/soft power influence from the British govt to standardise pay across the country, which makes top institutions like Oxford less competitive on the international market for PhD students, postdocs, and faculty in terms of pay.

[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400005

[2]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...

[OJFord]

> British A Levels are far more difficult than the SAT/ACT/AP exams.

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.

[physicsguy]

Depends on the subject right? A Level Further Maths modules were (at least when I did it) typically at a very high level, and you couldn't wing them, you really needed to understand the material.

[j7ake]

Implicit in the funding issue is the inability to attract and retain top researchers in resource heavy fields (AI, experimental field).

The starting package For new professors at Oxbridge is several orders of magnitude less than top institutions outside UK

[programjames]

From [1], these are the rankings for CS:

1. Stanford 2. UC Berkeley 3. MIT 4. Caltech 5. Harvard

I'm a little surprised MIT and Caltech are lower than Stanford and UC Berkeley. I know that MIT has a culture of sending its undergraduates to different graduate schools (so, if the top CS students go to MIT for their undergrad and professorships, they often would not have a PhD from MIT, lowering their prestige rating), but that does not explain why Caltech would be lower than Stanford/Berkeley. I know Stanford has a decent CS program, but I'm wondering if there's a gaming network effects thing going on, since both Stanford and Berkeley attract more hustlers.

[OhMeadhbh]

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

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

[calf]

I studied at Berkeley and Princeton (big classes vs small classes), I find your view to be fundamentally flawed. You presuppose that meritocracy is an inherently fair value system implementation, while many critics and philosophers reject this assumption; in the next breath you delegitimize social justice issues subtly framed as "identity politics", needless to say many other critics and philosophers do not share this talking point either.

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.

[jltsiren]

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

[eli_gottlieb]

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

[rmccue]

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

Do you have a source for this?