I am a Durham graduate, still somewhat involved with the university via some voluntary roles, and a bit of a 'booster' in the sense that I'll sing its praises to anyone. I also have a postgrad degree from Cambridge and did a little teaching while there. So, I'm quite familiar, and while I'm happy to see Durham get some love, this is bunk.
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.
I think high school students preparing to go to university are most interested in rankings not least because for graduate schools specific areas of research are more important.
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.
> high school students preparing to go to university are most interested in rankings
Wouldn't league tables like Norrington and Tompkins be more important for them?
I remember during my Britishphilia phase in HS and imagined doing a CS Tripos at one and then a BCL at he other before I removed the emotion and realized the services and network was inferior to a good UC like Cal or UCLA or a B10 like Mich, I was concentrating more on the College itself, not the Uni as a whole. Like being at Harris Manchester College, Oxford wouldn't open the same doors that Balliol College, Oxford would.
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.
The time of every bright child having Oxbridge as first university pick ended quite a few years ago. Not accurate that parents are saying this either, the change has largely come from parents who are often people doing hiring and have seen the change over the past few years. The very top aren't applying there any more at all, you don't need to: Stanford, Harvard, MIT, all better.
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 supervision system guarantees all Oxbridge students weekly, small-group tutorials,
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.
I'm not saying it's wrong but people are reacting to this as if the Times university guide is some objective truth.
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.
I don't know anyone at Oxford but do have friends who work in higher education. From what I hear from them Brexit has turned UK higher education upside down when it comes to funding and research. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is a consequence of some universities navigating that better than others.
But you don't get anywhere near as much online outrage with that theory so "leftists are ruining western civilisation" wins out again.
Yes I’d agree with that. International student income dropped, rounds of layoffs.
Some universities are better at optimising for rankings, see also REF research funding and how much effort and resources are spent on it, which varies by university: https://2029.ref.ac.uk/about/what-is-the-ref/
How did international student income drop with Brexit, when the UK now have 4-600k student visas granted in each of the last few years vs 2-300k pre-Brexit?
Government decided it doesn't want to pay for tertiary education. But, it does want UK students to get tertiary education, and they can't afford it. So, OK that circle can be kinda squared by "student loans" except of course the cost on these loans would sky-rocket. So, then government says ah, you can't charge more than this small fixed amount, and we'll never increase it because that's unpopular. For-profit lenders can charge as much as they can find an excuse for, but you educational charities too bad, you're not getting an extra penny.
So a good UK university cannot profitably offer education for UK students.
So for some of the best they'll focus on non UK students. These students aren't subject to a capped price we can't afford, so we can gouge them to make up for the lost revenue from home students.
But the usual "I'm not racist but..." people of course hate foreigners. How dare any of these people be different in any way. And so while some of them will pretend their hatred only extends to some foreigners it's always the same exact people who are aggrieved and want yet another excuse to hate foreigners.
This results in government efforts to make it harder to study here, and more expensive to teach students here. That way they slightly appease racists who weren't going to vote for them anyway and they feel justified.
I assume eventually this will collapse, and judging from Brexit nothing whatsoever will be learned by the supporter/victim class, the same gullible morons will keep falling for lies from the same people who feed off them. Certain that somehow it must be somebody else's fault their lives are shit while the leaders they're feeding are doing so well.
Be cautious with university rankings. Universities can be assessed by research, student satisfaction, teaching quality, cost, accessibility, or by specific fields. Some excel in computer science, others in medicine or the humanities.
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/
This is a cool site. For anyone who doesn't feel like clicking, the top overall is Carnegie Mellon. There are three from China in the top 10, the other seven are American. ETH Zurich is the first outside of China/USA at number 12.
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).
I wasn't even aware Oxford has ever loses top 2. May be I am way too stuck in the past. Also surprised Imperial and UCL are lower than what I expected.
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
Given that this is Hacker News, I think it is worth pointing out that Durham's strong suit traditionally is the humanities. In my opinion a CS degree from Oxford, Cambridge, or ICL is considerably more impressive than one from Durham.
I think the real story here might be the line below:
"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?
My recollection from thirty years ago was a lot of people that were aiming for Oxford would have Durham as their backup plan. It's been hovering around there for a while although not so much in the the world tech people care about, for which Warwick and Imperial circle Cambridge far more closely.
What's the provenance of this "30 places year-on-year" assertion anyways? (TFA won't load on my end.)
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 several years now 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.
Durham is the oxbridge reject university, and it’s a standard opener during freshers week to ask which college rejected them. Me, Corpus Christi Oxford reject, Durham alumnus.
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.
Yes, and then when oxbridge reject you, you take your second choice, Durham. At any rate that’s how it worked 25 years ago, I think it’s much the same now.
So my experience with moving from a Cambridge undergrad to an Edinburgh postgrad, albeit a couple of decades ago now, was the expectations between the two were nowhere comparable.
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.
Your anecdote doesn’t contradict the story - the University of Edinburgh doesn’t appear in the top 20 so apparently their “rankings” don’t think highly of the University of Edinburgh either.
(Also Edinburgh isn’t a redbrick, it was founded in 1583)
> Middle class students, knowing they'll be discriminated against, are now applying to US schools
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.
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.
But the difference between UK student debt (basically a regressive time limited tax) and the US version of student debt (actual loan that will fuck you up) is key here.
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)
In British English, "middle class" refers to the well off professional classes or merchant traders.
In American English, if I understand correctly, everyone who works is considered middle class.
I think usage in the UK can vary a lot. And different people may mean anything from the haute bourgeoisie to something much broader including a majority of the population. Another thing is that obviously class in the UK is a social distinction and includes a lot more than just income or wealth brackets.
> refers to the well off professional classes or merchant traders.
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.
I’m not sure Paul Graham’s use of “middle class” matches the colloquial one here in the UK. The students who are not getting in to Oxbridge because of their background are broadly privately educated.
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.
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.
Oxbridge have never had to 'let in dumber people'. They are always heavily over-subscribed, and give offers to a small fraction of the people who come for an interview, let alone apply.
The whole point of the interview process is to assess not just the applicant's past achievements, but what they might be able to achieve if they got their place at the uni. Part of that is looking at the applicant's background, and knowing that even if they aren't currently at some elite high-fee school, they might still have the ability and capability to do well.
I am all in favor of this style of selection. The dark old days of "this kid's dad went to our college, we should do them a favour and let them in" are long gone, thankfully.
Can you point to any kind of evidence that Oxbridge are dumbing down their teaching, or lowering their standards of teaching? I doubt it.
Full disclosure: cambridge alumni, from a state school!
On student evaluations, I wouldn't be surprised of Oxbridge do badly as so many pf the dons were at or near the top of their year at the university, weren't employed for their teaching abilities, and seemed unable to comprehend they were not teaching cohorts entirely full of clones of themselves.
Dumbed down it was not, in my experience. Dumbing down would be a way to up the score on these rankings, though.
And is this new generation doing paticularly well in solving our problems or advancing the nation over the previous one? I can't see much examples, I do remember going through some of the science projects shown in undergrad showcase but none of them were tackling key bottlenecks or doing something novel.
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.
> 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.
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.
As someone who went to a grammar school, they are a terrible idea and comprehensive schools are a better system.
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.
Paul is talking his book, he wants it to change to increase the probability that his kids get in. Of course what we get to hear are the "reasons", and this conflict of interest goes unmentioned.
The kids at private schools are specifically primed for every part of the application process, including the interview and interview questions in a way that state schools simply cannot. It does not matter how smart you are if your competition is able to practice in a way you cannot.
It is, via the interview. This is why A-level results are a coarse filter, and why they have different standards for state vs private schools; state school kids with 3 A's presumably excel in the interview to the same extent as private school kids with 3 A*'s.
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).
Went to private school and gotta say I went into the whole thing entirely blind - zero priming or coaching, just a begrudging allowing me to escape the prison camp for a night to go for my interview.
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.
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.
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.
At my secondary school it wasn't possible to do more than 6 GCSEs vs. many of the most academically gifted independent school attendees who obtained at least double that number of GCSEs.
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.
> In total, almost half (49.4 per cent) of A-level entries at independent schools this year were awarded A or A*, compared with less than a quarter (22.3 per cent) at comprehensives.
If it's so much easier to get into Oxbridge from a state school, why do you think people with the means send their kids to private school? They'd save so much money not doing so.
But we know that it’s true. That’s why we have been using objective metrics like test scores for millennia, across societies are different as China, India, and Britain.
Your best argument is "we've done it for a long time, so it can't be wrong"?
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.
You could fairly say that China’s pre-Opium Wars obsession with testing and meritocracy based on said testing is what brought them into all that mess, I’m pretty sure that the Portuguese that had gotten all the way from their small country all the way to Southern China using some stingy boats were not clerks nor great (potential) test-takers, and yet it was those Portuguese seafarers that were to change the fate of most of Asia forever, not the test-taking Chinese.
But does Oxford want the best student or some that had to work harder but ultimately aren't as good?
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.
Clearly, it's because talented people grow to the top (not just economically, they might be cultural elites, like people working in news, academia). Then, they marry people who are on the top. And they pass their genes and habits.
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.
There are studies that show how heritable intelligence is. Very.
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.
Honestly I feel like anonymous mass test in general is least worst way. Yes, parents can invest in tutoring and such. But there still needs to be effort and learning to do well on the test.
Maybe. Unfortunately it's very hard to measure that. Moreover, how hard you have to work doesn't necessarily correlate to how good you are. The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".
> The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".
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.
>The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".
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.
Maybe the statistically average kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder than, say, the statistically average Prince Charles with his private school and dedicated personal tutors.
Maybe statistically gifted child is more often than not born to parents who were gifted too. Then, they read more to the child, speak more with him. And maybe either have higher disposable income, or liberty to recommend books, and learn with the child.
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.
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.
Statistical averages would tell you that you wouldn't have some schools getting 150 pupils into Oxbridge while others only get 2. But has long been the reality.
The context is explicitly statistical, so yes, of course - but your point is valuable to keep in mind to avoid subconsciously painting individuals with the same brush as the big picture.
It means I think admissions officers sometimes know there’s more to a human than their raw test scores. They likely also know that a decent result at some schools requires more work than a great result at others.
I’ve met smart people who do poorly on exams. I’ve met dumb people who do well on them.
Maybe they should be based on a range of factors that influence how successful the university thinks the candidate will be as an undergraduate? Not just exam results?
Fundamentally Oxbridge entry has never been based on academic results directly as you're implying. You needed near-perfect grades to be considered, but the vast majority of people applying with those grades fail the interviews regardless.
The interview is absolutely the primary test here, with the grades just acting as a filter to provide a manageable number of applicants. Widening that filter to allow more disadvantaged students the chance to interview seems perfectly reasonable - given that the interview itself remains equally demanding (and I've seen no suggestion or evidence against this).
Contextual offers are just that -- contextual. Cite your sources if you're claiming all independent schools get one tariff and all state schools get another, because AFAIK that's not how these contextual offers work.
Oxford admissions have a heavy interview component: if they think you're really smart, have great potential, and then you'll be of the caliber to get 4 A* no question if you had rich parents and went to a top Public School (but don't, so may not), then -- yeah -- they can make you a lower offer. Their place, their rules.
It isn't dumbing down or taking worse students, it's easing out the rich types who will drink/play lacrosse or rugby/bore to at least Blues standard, are pretty bright but have been spoon-fed to get there so will turn out to be dumber and worse students that people whose potential hadn't been fully revealed by 17/18, even if the spoon-fed cohort get better A Level results.
And yet those kids from state schools then come out with more firsts than those from independent schools, showing they were not “dumber” at all - they were smarter.
Really, oxford and cambridge as well as other top universities can have a simple algorithm. They should bias against those from private schools in terms of admissions criteria until the point at which outcomes (as measured by graduating degree scores) are equal. This wouldn’t happen though because then private schools would drop to 5% of enrolments and there’d be no advantage gained from paying for a private school education. Unthinkable!
I think it’s a mistake to think admissions can ever be some neutral objective process.
You are designing a contest, and students compete. You have to try to represent your goals in terms of the contest, this is very lossy. It’s just never going to be very accurate, and in highly selective institutions much of the selection will be random no matter how you structure the contest.
It's interesting to see that conservatives have quietly moved on from the idea that affirmative action should be done on the basis of household wealth instead of ethnicity. At least now we are being honest.
Alternatively, the gap between the classes for access to educational resources has significantly declined in the past twenty years (due to stuff being posted online).
That's not "letting in poor people" as you framed it. It's letting in dumber people, worse students. Lots of that is mainly based on classism (against people from middle class), racism (against white people).
This obviously doesn’t follow, and you should feel a decent amount of embarrassment for ignoring the fact that exam grades don’t correlate with “dumbness” or lack thereof.
It should be trivially obvious that a student who is perhaps from a less well-off background, attending state school and achieving decent grades, can be equally as talented and deserving of a top-tier education as a better-off, privately-educated student.
Access programs go some way towards trying to tackle snowballing generational inequality - which essentially results in a bias away from merit, and towards those able to afford private education.
If you want to argue against that, then fine - but at least don’t start with such faulty assumptions.
There is also the issue of "contextual offers" at most Unis. Offers can be made at a significantly lower level just based on the postcode of the applicant. So someone might get an offer at AAB or ABB purely based on their address while the standard offer is AAA or higher.
It would be wonderful if we could, just once, have a conversation about something happening outside the US without bringing in US culture war talking points.
As somebody that's not from the UK and not from the US, knowing this guy cheered the murder of Charlie Kirk gives me a strong hint about the kind of person it's being talked about.
So yes, in that sense it's an useful piece of information.
> gives me a strong hint about the kind of person it's being talked about.
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.
My objection was not the student in question being mentioned. It was why he was mentioned: his views on Charlie Kirk, a US culture war topic that has nothing to do with the discussion and nothing to do with the student’s admission grades.
Given the violence Kirk paved the way and how he shrugged off gun related deaths as necessary evil for the 2nd amendment, I see no great difference in unsympathetic behavior of both.
Publicly cheering Kirk's murder is what made Abaraonye notable. I provided a citation for the ABB grades, which is relevant to the comment I replied to.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Sometimes colleges make deliberately easy offers for students they like, or they later accept students who did not meet the criteria that were set (if you set offers such that fewer students pass than you have places for, it is much easier to control class sizes – look at the chaos with Covid grade inflation). So I think it’s wrong to assume that the offer made to someone being high is a particularly strong signal for how clever they are.
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.
Where is his reaction different to Kirk‘s statement that some gun deaths are a necessary evil for the „god given right“ of the 2nd amendment? Both seem to have lost basic human empathy.
Shall we ask the parents of the victims of the school shootings?
BTW why is a god given right not mentioned in the bible?
This is basically 100% backwards. In Canada it's large corporate lobbies pushing for more immigration. Why? Because it lets them keep wages low and makes unionization impossible.
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.
You also end up with a voter base that demands relatively little from their political leaders. The left-wing parties can win elections just using some feel-good measures targeted at recent immigrants and promising to make it easier for their co-ethnics to either immigrate legally or stay if they have immigrated illegally. That enables them to move right on economic issues to capture the politically powerful knowledge worker class.
No, I don’t think it is. There is no billionaire secretly hoarding all the top university spots. And no one is saying immigrants are taking the spots. This seems like completely unrelated political posting
If you replace 'middle class', with 'upper class' .. you get a much more realistic reading of this thread; which is undoubtedly an apologia for upper class paid education.
I felt the original thread wasn't recognising the social disparity authentically.
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.
Target Schools was a thing in the 90s. This isn’t even slightly new. (And last I checked the Target Schools students had, if anything, slightly better outcomes than the main pool.)
While your link is helpful, he did not say that. He specifically mentions changing the admissions standards. Specifically having different standards for different social classes.
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.
> Now they have lower standards for applicants from poor families or bad schools. As a result Oxford and Cambridge have sunk to fourth place in the latest Times Good Universities Guide.
> [LSE's] stellar academic performance was boosted this year by improvements in teaching quality and student experience.
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.
My prior would have been brexit-related changes reducing the number of smart but non-rich students coming from the EU, but I don’t actually know how the numbers there changed. Also, what are the rankings based on? When I was applying, I think it was lots of stuff like:
- 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.
Is pg generally aligned with this line of thought or is this out of character? Not what I expected but also not unexpected given most powerful tech bros slides into that side of politics
> Is pg generally aligned with this line of thought
Yep, but this is a fairly common take I've noticed in England (not as severe in Scotland).
The air is thick with a semblance of classism, and I've found the business culture to be horrid due to this "old boys club" mindset.
Imagine an America where the only way to open doors to the upper echelons is to attend only an Ivy.
And I say this as an Ivy grad.
To a large extent I feel this is because the British economy is so heavily tied to legal, financial, and media services, and as such the "Magic Circle", "The City", and the media consolidation in Greater London has such an outsized impact.
Ironic too because there are fairly decent clusters of engineering research like DefenseTech in Southwest England (which tbf is fairly posh) and Robotics and HPC in Edinburgh.
Not familiar of Oxfords admissions, but if they apply affirmative action as done in other universities in the US, this take of Thomas Sowell is very relevant:
https://youtu.be/7AyhaYkikCs?t=57
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.
Helping someone practice Oxford Maths Assessment Tests at present, and whatever else may be happening in the admissions process, those test papers are not getting easier over time.
Rankings are just meaningless. And this isn't the evidence for it! Actually in the past they've more or less admitted that they play around with the weighting and discard if the outcome is unexpected, meaning that even by its own standards it's circular. But the fact is that rankings are one dimensional and universities are very obviously multidimensional. You can't get anything meaningful out of such compression. The researchers and students at oxbridge are higher quality, that's more or less undisputed. Other than that though, it's so subjective and personal.
I don’t think many people place much stock in these rankings, and if they don’t have “shocking” moves then how are they gonna sell papers and get people to click!?!
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.
I’d be willing to bet the number of students that pick a UK university over Oxbridge in the next year will round to 0%. The times rankings mean nothing at this granularity (whereas being top 20 vs top 100 _is_ significant)
When I was a student you would buy a book which had overall rankings, per subject rankings, and descriptions of all the ranked universities. I assume the book is what they are trying to sell rather than the papers and you want the latest edition to have up-to-date information about the universities. I’m not sure shuffling the rankings to sell papers makes that much sense but maybe the economics are different today.
iirc the Times ranking has always been garbage as it weighs some "student experience" metric way too high. Do I really care about the result of some online survey equally or more than the academic achievement of the staff?
Back when I chose a UK university to attend, I valued the QS ranking much higher.
When I was a student, no one would seriously say they had a ‘doxbridge education’ for the same reason that saying you went to an ‘Ivy League school’ meant you went to a shit one like Brown (idk about the US rankings tbh; basing that on a Lisa Simpson nightmare). That’s still obviously true today.
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.
“Mmm, heck of a school. Weren’t you at Brown Otto?”
I think you’re confusing a statement about ranking in a small set (Ivy League schools) for a statement about a bigger set. This isn’t uncommon – iirc there was some big furore a few months ago about admissions to US schools where much of the disagreement seemed to be downstream of different people thinking about different numbers of top or acceptable universities (and then sometimes having a big difference between the intuitive percentages of possible university options and the actual percentages they made up)
I think it’s still the case that people who describe themselves as having gone to an Ivy League school mean a school like Brown. If you went to Harvard then either say it directly or mumble something about a school in Boston – why say something that sounds similarly fancy to the truth but that could also be interpreted as something less elite? Saying you went to school in Boston is much lower in fanciness than Harvard or Ivy League except that most people know what it is code for.
I cant help myself, I have to chip in. Having lived in Oxford for about a decade my most memorable local ( and in one case international headlines) which maybe me tut and wonder what on earth they are doing were these ( feel free to look them up).
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.
If you'd bothered to research then you can see the academic performance is the main criteria for entrance. They spend the rest of the time sifting the top 10% academically to boil it down even more.
There are tens of these ratings with different weights to different things. Obviously the universities prefer to brag about ratings where they are higher. Also realistically reputations of different of unis across various subjects are vastly different.
So the actual title of this article is just clickbait.
What is the ranking supposed to reflect, exactly? Quality of education? If the programs have the same instructors, same facilities, same curricula, etc., why would we expect a small change to admission criteria to affect rankings of the program?
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.
> The list is based on analysis of student satisfaction with teaching quality and experience, entry standards, research quality, sustainability and graduate prospects
> 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.
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 …
I compared this to the QS ranking, where Oxford is still second in the world, and Durham, the new third place in the ranking mentioned in the article is 341. QS ranking does not even rank the first two, London School of Economics and University of St. Andrews. Does anybody know why?
Edit: Sorry, I only looked at the Engineering ans Technology ranking. Anyway, QS ranking is vastly different from the Times' ranking.
> Oxford and Cambridge are tied for fourth in the 2026 rankings, after falling due to their relatively poor performance in the latest National Student Survey.
It doesn’t matter. UK education is flawed already by the time a student reach tertiary. A levels 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.
The UK system ranks a fair bit above the antiquated German system, you should be aware that there are 3 types of schools, with only one that teaches Latin etc., and the other two of them are considered shit, one German even told me that if you go to the lowest level of secondary school, your best bet is to just kill yourself. But it's certainly neat meeting lots of young Germans who studied Latin in school but nevertheless know absolutely no Latin once you ask them about it. Fabulous system.
I am a Durham graduate, still somewhat involved with the university via some voluntary roles, and a bit of a 'booster' in the sense that I'll sing its praises to anyone. I also have a postgrad degree from Cambridge and did a little teaching while there. So, I'm quite familiar, and while I'm happy to see Durham get some love, this is bunk.
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.
I think high school students preparing to go to university are most interested in rankings not least because for graduate schools specific areas of research are more important.
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.
> high school students preparing to go to university are most interested in rankings
Wouldn't league tables like Norrington and Tompkins be more important for them?
I remember during my Britishphilia phase in HS and imagined doing a CS Tripos at one and then a BCL at he other before I removed the emotion and realized the services and network was inferior to a good UC like Cal or UCLA or a B10 like Mich, I was concentrating more on the College itself, not the Uni as a whole. Like being at Harris Manchester College, Oxford wouldn't open the same doors that Balliol College, Oxford would.
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.
The time of every bright child having Oxbridge as first university pick ended quite a few years ago. Not accurate that parents are saying this either, the change has largely come from parents who are often people doing hiring and have seen the change over the past few years. The very top aren't applying there any more at all, you don't need to: Stanford, Harvard, MIT, all better.
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 very top aren't applying there any more at all, you don't need to: Stanford, Harvard, MIT, all better.
The only people applying to those from the UK are the wealthy.
If by "very top" you mean "richest", then maybe. But I'm not sure we care about that?
> The supervision system guarantees all Oxbridge students weekly, small-group tutorials,
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.
Unique Selling Point?
yes
Same, at Imperial in 80’s
I don’t know what college you were in or what you read, but in castle, we had weekly tutorials in physics. Grand total of four of us in the group.
I'm not saying it's wrong but people are reacting to this as if the Times university guide is some objective truth.
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.
> I'm not saying it's wrong but people are reacting to this as if the Times university guide is some objective truth.
I can’t see a single example of anyone reacting to it that way.
I don't know anyone at Oxford but do have friends who work in higher education. From what I hear from them Brexit has turned UK higher education upside down when it comes to funding and research. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is a consequence of some universities navigating that better than others.
But you don't get anywhere near as much online outrage with that theory so "leftists are ruining western civilisation" wins out again.
Yes I’d agree with that. International student income dropped, rounds of layoffs.
Some universities are better at optimising for rankings, see also REF research funding and how much effort and resources are spent on it, which varies by university: https://2029.ref.ac.uk/about/what-is-the-ref/
How did international student income drop with Brexit, when the UK now have 4-600k student visas granted in each of the last few years vs 2-300k pre-Brexit?
Its a double whammy of EU students suddenly have to pay a lot more cash for a lot less certainty
but on the other end our political class fail to understand/sell that stopping international students means that we have to fund university education.
Government decided it doesn't want to pay for tertiary education. But, it does want UK students to get tertiary education, and they can't afford it. So, OK that circle can be kinda squared by "student loans" except of course the cost on these loans would sky-rocket. So, then government says ah, you can't charge more than this small fixed amount, and we'll never increase it because that's unpopular. For-profit lenders can charge as much as they can find an excuse for, but you educational charities too bad, you're not getting an extra penny.
So a good UK university cannot profitably offer education for UK students.
So for some of the best they'll focus on non UK students. These students aren't subject to a capped price we can't afford, so we can gouge them to make up for the lost revenue from home students.
But the usual "I'm not racist but..." people of course hate foreigners. How dare any of these people be different in any way. And so while some of them will pretend their hatred only extends to some foreigners it's always the same exact people who are aggrieved and want yet another excuse to hate foreigners.
This results in government efforts to make it harder to study here, and more expensive to teach students here. That way they slightly appease racists who weren't going to vote for them anyway and they feel justified.
I assume eventually this will collapse, and judging from Brexit nothing whatsoever will be learned by the supporter/victim class, the same gullible morons will keep falling for lies from the same people who feed off them. Certain that somehow it must be somebody else's fault their lives are shit while the leaders they're feeding are doing so well.
Be cautious with university rankings. Universities can be assessed by research, student satisfaction, teaching quality, cost, accessibility, or by specific fields. Some excel in computer science, others in medicine or the humanities.
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/
This is a cool site. For anyone who doesn't feel like clicking, the top overall is Carnegie Mellon. There are three from China in the top 10, the other seven are American. ETH Zurich is the first outside of China/USA at number 12.
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).
compare contrast
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...
I wasn't even aware Oxford has ever loses top 2. May be I am way too stuck in the past. Also surprised Imperial and UCL are lower than what I expected.
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
Given that this is Hacker News, I think it is worth pointing out that Durham's strong suit traditionally is the humanities. In my opinion a CS degree from Oxford, Cambridge, or ICL is considerably more impressive than one from Durham.
Given this is Hacker News, I think we should definitely encourage all Yes, Minister references.
It's scary how relevant a 1970's/80s comedy show is...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgkUVIj3KWY (Salami tactics)
I've found graduate students at Edinburgh to be fairly good as well thanks to the EPSRC's preference for the uni.
You can see one international ranking (maybe the most important) from June this year here:
https://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings
I think the real story here might be the line below:
"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?
My recollection from thirty years ago was a lot of people that were aiming for Oxford would have Durham as their backup plan. It's been hovering around there for a while although not so much in the the world tech people care about, for which Warwick and Imperial circle Cambridge far more closely.
What's the provenance of this "30 places year-on-year" assertion anyways? (TFA won't load on my end.)
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 several years now being characterized as "not as well-regarded"...strikes me as indefensibly elitist.
[1] https://archive.is/QN4Js
[2] https://archive.is/KyP48
I think they are referring to:
> Durham University improved by 30 places year-on-year in its students’ evaluation of teaching quality, which was the main driver in securing its third place in the overall university league table
Which isn't quite the same as 30 places in ranking as OP suggests, however I agree with their point that moving 30 places on that metric could be fairly suspicious.
For example - when I was at university in the UK we got a speech telling us basically that we were going to get sent a survey from the times, and the higher we ranked the university, the higher the universities ranking would be, and that would make our degree more valuable. If the main reason they jumped from 7th to 3rd could be a metric that is potentially 'influence-able' by the university, it could be more of a change in comms-strategy than actual university quality.
Appreciate the clarification and perspective.
Durham is the oxbridge reject university, and it’s a standard opener during freshers week to ask which college rejected them. Me, Corpus Christi Oxford reject, Durham alumnus.
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.
I assumed one generally applied to both, no?
Yes, and then when oxbridge reject you, you take your second choice, Durham. At any rate that’s how it worked 25 years ago, I think it’s much the same now.
So my experience with moving from a Cambridge undergrad to an Edinburgh postgrad, albeit a couple of decades ago now, was the expectations between the two were nowhere comparable.
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.
Your anecdote doesn’t contradict the story - the University of Edinburgh doesn’t appear in the top 20 so apparently their “rankings” don’t think highly of the University of Edinburgh either.
(Also Edinburgh isn’t a redbrick, it was founded in 1583)
pg thinks this is because of letting in poor people: https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1969334665375813679
> Middle class students, knowing they'll be discriminated against, are now applying to US schools
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.
Average student debt is £53k (~$71k USD): https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...
Given the disparity in middle-class household incomes between the UK and the US, I suspect a majority of UK middle-class students would be eligible for some form of financial aid from US universities (assuming Oxbridge vs US equivalents with need-blind + full-need international admissions), meaning their net cost to attend could be lower than studying in the UK.
> I would suspect that the majority of UK middle class students would be eligible for some form of financial aid at US schools
Very unlikely, most financial aid is not available to international students.
But the difference between UK student debt (basically a regressive time limited tax) and the US version of student debt (actual loan that will fuck you up) is key here.
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)
Merit-based, in a lot of cases certainly. But need-based, you’re there to subsidize the university and not the other way around.
Very few schools give international students any aid.
In British English, "middle class" refers to the well off professional classes or merchant traders. In American English, if I understand correctly, everyone who works is considered middle class.
I think usage in the UK can vary a lot. And different people may mean anything from the haute bourgeoisie to something much broader including a majority of the population. Another thing is that obviously class in the UK is a social distinction and includes a lot more than just income or wealth brackets.
> refers to the well off professional classes or merchant traders.
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.
I think I read that US middle class are people who only have to work one job
Yeah having a single full time job but not being part of the executive class is a decent definition. It's much more wide than the UK's usage for sure.
The beauty of the term middle class is that it can be whatever the writer wants it to be, including leaving it up the reader’s imagination.
In America, we have a classless society and everyone claims to be middle class.
USA class system is based on income ranges. USA is also segregated by income and wealth.
I’m not sure Paul Graham’s use of “middle class” matches the colloquial one here in the UK. The students who are not getting in to Oxbridge because of their background are broadly privately educated.
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.
Not to mention the US administration’s a) war on said schools and b) immigration mayhem.
This is extremely unfair framing.
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.
Oxbridge have never had to 'let in dumber people'. They are always heavily over-subscribed, and give offers to a small fraction of the people who come for an interview, let alone apply.
The whole point of the interview process is to assess not just the applicant's past achievements, but what they might be able to achieve if they got their place at the uni. Part of that is looking at the applicant's background, and knowing that even if they aren't currently at some elite high-fee school, they might still have the ability and capability to do well.
I am all in favor of this style of selection. The dark old days of "this kid's dad went to our college, we should do them a favour and let them in" are long gone, thankfully.
Can you point to any kind of evidence that Oxbridge are dumbing down their teaching, or lowering their standards of teaching? I doubt it.
Full disclosure: cambridge alumni, from a state school!
On student evaluations, I wouldn't be surprised of Oxbridge do badly as so many pf the dons were at or near the top of their year at the university, weren't employed for their teaching abilities, and seemed unable to comprehend they were not teaching cohorts entirely full of clones of themselves.
Dumbed down it was not, in my experience. Dumbing down would be a way to up the score on these rankings, though.
And is this new generation doing paticularly well in solving our problems or advancing the nation over the previous one? I can't see much examples, I do remember going through some of the science projects shown in undergrad showcase but none of them were tackling key bottlenecks or doing something novel.
It is a very fair read of Paul's take.
I attended one of the worst secondary schools in the country. Less than 10% of my year earned the qualifications necessary to go on to university. I know that many of these people, who have gone on to be successful in life, would have excelled at an independent school and would have excelled at university. They were in poverty, not stupid.
You cannot compare the achievements of a student at an independent school to those of a student at a state school based on grades. State school and independent school are a fundamentally different educational experience.
If you think Cambridge and Oxford exist to accept the highest graded students in the country, rather than to accept the students that have the most academic potential, then sure, let's only admit students who have 3 A*s.
> 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.
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.
As someone who went to a grammar school, they are a terrible idea and comprehensive schools are a better system.
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.
Paul is talking his book, he wants it to change to increase the probability that his kids get in. Of course what we get to hear are the "reasons", and this conflict of interest goes unmentioned.
The kids at private schools are specifically primed for every part of the application process, including the interview and interview questions in a way that state schools simply cannot. It does not matter how smart you are if your competition is able to practice in a way you cannot.
Why the process is not fixed from that part? Redesign in a way that private schools will not get any benefit from the process itself.
It is, via the interview. This is why A-level results are a coarse filter, and why they have different standards for state vs private schools; state school kids with 3 A's presumably excel in the interview to the same extent as private school kids with 3 A*'s.
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).
What is your specific proposal? Anything you do, the private schools will do their best to adapt.
Went to private school and gotta say I went into the whole thing entirely blind - zero priming or coaching, just a begrudging allowing me to escape the prison camp for a night to go for my interview.
> It's letting in dumber people, worse students.
Is it?
Maybe a kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder than, say, Prince Charles with his private school and dedicated personal tutors.
How would you measure this?
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.
It's always the same argument.
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.
At my secondary school it wasn't possible to do more than 6 GCSEs vs. many of the most academically gifted independent school attendees who obtained at least double that number of GCSEs.
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.
> In total, almost half (49.4 per cent) of A-level entries at independent schools this year were awarded A or A*, compared with less than a quarter (22.3 per cent) at comprehensives.
https://www.schoolmanagementplus.com/exams-qualifications/a-...
Much more on the disparity if one cares to search.
If it's so much easier to get into Oxbridge from a state school, why do you think people with the means send their kids to private school? They'd save so much money not doing so.
Maybe they aren’t doing it purely as a numerical exercise to get into a specific university 13 years in the future?
Most people sending their kids to the very best British schools are not expecting their kids to get into Oxbridge.
> Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A.
> And 1 in 83 gets 3 As.
And what if that’s not always an indication of which person is smarter?
But we know that it’s true. That’s why we have been using objective metrics like test scores for millennia, across societies are different as China, India, and Britain.
I got six A's at A level, over 20 years 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).
Your best argument is "we've done it for a long time, so it can't be wrong"?
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.
You could fairly say that China’s pre-Opium Wars obsession with testing and meritocracy based on said testing is what brought them into all that mess, I’m pretty sure that the Portuguese that had gotten all the way from their small country all the way to Southern China using some stingy boats were not clerks nor great (potential) test-takers, and yet it was those Portuguese seafarers that were to change the fate of most of Asia forever, not the test-taking Chinese.
But does Oxford want the best student or some that had to work harder but ultimately aren't as good?
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.
If you can pay to be better at the test, then the test just becomes a test of how wealthy you are.
When you have well off parents, you can literally be sent to prep schools which drill for these tests.
These tests are pretty advanced maths and physics, not just multiple choice question you can just drill. Also almost all the prep schools are public.
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...
Clearly, it's because talented people grow to the top (not just economically, they might be cultural elites, like people working in news, academia). Then, they marry people who are on the top. And they pass their genes and habits.
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.
This is not 'clear' at all. What is clear is the correlation. You imply that the cause is 'good genes and habit'.
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.
There are studies that show how heritable intelligence is. Very.
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.
Honestly I feel like anonymous mass test in general is least worst way. Yes, parents can invest in tutoring and such. But there still needs to be effort and learning to do well on the test.
Maybe. Unfortunately it's very hard to measure that. Moreover, how hard you have to work doesn't necessarily correlate to how good you are. The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".
> The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".
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.
>The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".
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.
We're not talking about individual cases, we're talking about statistical averages.
Maybe the statistically average kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder than, say, the statistically average Prince Charles with his private school and dedicated personal tutors.
Maybe statistically gifted child is more often than not born to parents who were gifted too. Then, they read more to the child, speak more with him. And maybe either have higher disposable income, or liberty to recommend books, and learn with the child.
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.
This is quite the insult.
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.
Statistical averages would tell you that you wouldn't have some schools getting 150 pupils into Oxbridge while others only get 2. But has long been the reality.
The context is explicitly statistical, so yes, of course - but your point is valuable to keep in mind to avoid subconsciously painting individuals with the same brush as the big picture.
>Maybe a kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder
It sounds like you think admissions should be based on how hard people think they worked relative to others.
It means I think admissions officers sometimes know there’s more to a human than their raw test scores. They likely also know that a decent result at some schools requires more work than a great result at others.
I’ve met smart people who do poorly on exams. I’ve met dumb people who do well on them.
Maybe they should be based on a range of factors that influence how successful the university thinks the candidate will be as an undergraduate? Not just exam results?
Fundamentally Oxbridge entry has never been based on academic results directly as you're implying. You needed near-perfect grades to be considered, but the vast majority of people applying with those grades fail the interviews regardless.
The interview is absolutely the primary test here, with the grades just acting as a filter to provide a manageable number of applicants. Widening that filter to allow more disadvantaged students the chance to interview seems perfectly reasonable - given that the interview itself remains equally demanding (and I've seen no suggestion or evidence against this).
Contextual offers are just that -- contextual. Cite your sources if you're claiming all independent schools get one tariff and all state schools get another, because AFAIK that's not how these contextual offers work.
Oxford admissions have a heavy interview component: if they think you're really smart, have great potential, and then you'll be of the caliber to get 4 A* no question if you had rich parents and went to a top Public School (but don't, so may not), then -- yeah -- they can make you a lower offer. Their place, their rules.
It isn't dumbing down or taking worse students, it's easing out the rich types who will drink/play lacrosse or rugby/bore to at least Blues standard, are pretty bright but have been spoon-fed to get there so will turn out to be dumber and worse students that people whose potential hadn't been fully revealed by 17/18, even if the spoon-fed cohort get better A Level results.
What an appalling point of view.
Growing up without privilege is (obviously) markedly more difficult than being provided with the best education money can buy throughout childhood.
The students aren't necessarily worse; but they will be unaccustomed to the codified approach that other students from independent schools understand.
The system has been built to serve the privileged.
While you might feel blame can fairly be placed on differing entry requirements; the truth is more complex.
A 'sticking plaster' solution has been lazily applied to address disparity, when in reality, the whole system needs to be reworked.
'Dumber' and 'worse', are not labels that should be used here.
> It's letting in dumber people, worse students
It's a very bold assertion that A level grades are the ultimate arbiter of "dumbness".
> To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.
where does it say that here?
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/admiss...
Although I do note that foundation PPE only requires BBB, which given the current crop of people in westminister, it makes sense.
And yet those kids from state schools then come out with more firsts than those from independent schools, showing they were not “dumber” at all - they were smarter.
Really, oxford and cambridge as well as other top universities can have a simple algorithm. They should bias against those from private schools in terms of admissions criteria until the point at which outcomes (as measured by graduating degree scores) are equal. This wouldn’t happen though because then private schools would drop to 5% of enrolments and there’d be no advantage gained from paying for a private school education. Unthinkable!
And it’s being reported that the new president of the Oxford Union only had A B B.
I think it’s a mistake to think admissions can ever be some neutral objective process.
You are designing a contest, and students compete. You have to try to represent your goals in terms of the contest, this is very lossy. It’s just never going to be very accurate, and in highly selective institutions much of the selection will be random no matter how you structure the contest.
It's interesting to see that conservatives have quietly moved on from the idea that affirmative action should be done on the basis of household wealth instead of ethnicity. At least now we are being honest.
Alternatively, the gap between the classes for access to educational resources has significantly declined in the past twenty years (due to stuff being posted online).
That's not "letting in poor people" as you framed it. It's letting in dumber people, worse students. Lots of that is mainly based on classism (against people from middle class), racism (against white people).
This obviously doesn’t follow, and you should feel a decent amount of embarrassment for ignoring the fact that exam grades don’t correlate with “dumbness” or lack thereof.
It should be trivially obvious that a student who is perhaps from a less well-off background, attending state school and achieving decent grades, can be equally as talented and deserving of a top-tier education as a better-off, privately-educated student.
Access programs go some way towards trying to tackle snowballing generational inequality - which essentially results in a bias away from merit, and towards those able to afford private education.
If you want to argue against that, then fine - but at least don’t start with such faulty assumptions.
There is also the issue of "contextual offers" at most Unis. Offers can be made at a significantly lower level just based on the postcode of the applicant. So someone might get an offer at AAB or ABB purely based on their address while the standard offer is AAA or higher.
>To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.
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...>
It would be wonderful if we could, just once, have a conversation about something happening outside the US without bringing in US culture war talking points.
As somebody that's not from the UK and not from the US, knowing this guy cheered the murder of Charlie Kirk gives me a strong hint about the kind of person it's being talked about.
So yes, in that sense it's an useful piece of information.
> gives me a strong hint about the kind of person it's being talked about.
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.
How are the grades of a student in a prestigious position at Oxford not relevant to the academic reputation of Oxford?
My objection was not the student in question being mentioned. It was why he was mentioned: his views on Charlie Kirk, a US culture war topic that has nothing to do with the discussion and nothing to do with the student’s admission grades.
Given the violence Kirk paved the way and how he shrugged off gun related deaths as necessary evil for the 2nd amendment, I see no great difference in unsympathetic behavior of both.
Publicly cheering Kirk's murder is what made Abaraonye notable. I provided a citation for the ABB grades, which is relevant to the comment I replied to.
> 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.
Patanegra wrote:
> 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.
> 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.
> incoming president of Oxford Union
> 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
Sometimes colleges make deliberately easy offers for students they like, or they later accept students who did not meet the criteria that were set (if you set offers such that fewer students pass than you have places for, it is much easier to control class sizes – look at the chaos with Covid grade inflation). So I think it’s wrong to assume that the offer made to someone being high is a particularly strong signal for how clever they are.
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.
Where is his reaction different to Kirk‘s statement that some gun deaths are a necessary evil for the „god given right“ of the 2nd amendment? Both seem to have lost basic human empathy.
Shall we ask the parents of the victims of the school shootings?
BTW why is a god given right not mentioned in the bible?
The comic in https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w... is, as ever, very relevant.
This is basically 100% backwards. In Canada it's large corporate lobbies pushing for more immigration. Why? Because it lets them keep wages low and makes unionization impossible.
See also, Bernie 10 years ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0&pp=ygUVYmVybmllIG9...
I don't know at what point people were convinced that the push against immigration is some kind of billionaire plot, but is has been great cover for said billionaires.
You also end up with a voter base that demands relatively little from their political leaders. The left-wing parties can win elections just using some feel-good measures targeted at recent immigrants and promising to make it easier for their co-ethnics to either immigrate legally or stay if they have immigrated illegally. That enables them to move right on economic issues to capture the politically powerful knowledge worker class.
Do you think billionaires care whom they exploit?
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
No, I don’t think it is. There is no billionaire secretly hoarding all the top university spots. And no one is saying immigrants are taking the spots. This seems like completely unrelated political posting
> There is no billionaire secretly hoarding all the top university spots.
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...
If you replace 'middle class', with 'upper class' .. you get a much more realistic reading of this thread; which is undoubtedly an apologia for upper class paid education.
I felt the original thread wasn't recognising the social disparity authentically.
I love how logic escapes PG.
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.
> Kids worrying that Oxford and Cambridge will discriminate against them are among the smartest in the country.
pg's lack of awareness that this has basically always been true smacks of naiveté.
Target Schools was a thing in the 90s. This isn’t even slightly new. (And last I checked the Target Schools students had, if anything, slightly better outcomes than the main pool.)
While your link is helpful, he did not say that. He specifically mentions changing the admissions standards. Specifically having different standards for different social classes.
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.
> Now they have lower standards for applicants from poor families or bad schools. As a result Oxford and Cambridge have sunk to fourth place in the latest Times Good Universities Guide.
He did say exactly that.
He also provided no numbers or evidence - did his children fail to get in or something?
> [LSE's] stellar academic performance was boosted this year by improvements in teaching quality and student experience.
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.
My prior would have been brexit-related changes reducing the number of smart but non-rich students coming from the EU, but I don’t actually know how the numbers there changed. Also, what are the rankings based on? When I was applying, I think it was lots of stuff like:
- 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.
Is pg generally aligned with this line of thought or is this out of character? Not what I expected but also not unexpected given most powerful tech bros slides into that side of politics
> Is pg generally aligned with this line of thought
Yep, but this is a fairly common take I've noticed in England (not as severe in Scotland).
The air is thick with a semblance of classism, and I've found the business culture to be horrid due to this "old boys club" mindset.
Imagine an America where the only way to open doors to the upper echelons is to attend only an Ivy.
And I say this as an Ivy grad.
To a large extent I feel this is because the British economy is so heavily tied to legal, financial, and media services, and as such the "Magic Circle", "The City", and the media consolidation in Greater London has such an outsized impact.
Ironic too because there are fairly decent clusters of engineering research like DefenseTech in Southwest England (which tbf is fairly posh) and Robotics and HPC in Edinburgh.
Not familiar of Oxfords admissions, but if they apply affirmative action as done in other universities in the US, this take of Thomas Sowell is very relevant: https://youtu.be/7AyhaYkikCs?t=57
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...
Helping someone practice Oxford Maths Assessment Tests at present, and whatever else may be happening in the admissions process, those test papers are not getting easier over time.
Rankings are just meaningless. And this isn't the evidence for it! Actually in the past they've more or less admitted that they play around with the weighting and discard if the outcome is unexpected, meaning that even by its own standards it's circular. But the fact is that rankings are one dimensional and universities are very obviously multidimensional. You can't get anything meaningful out of such compression. The researchers and students at oxbridge are higher quality, that's more or less undisputed. Other than that though, it's so subjective and personal.
I don’t think many people place much stock in these rankings, and if they don’t have “shocking” moves then how are they gonna sell papers and get people to click!?!
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.
I’d be willing to bet the number of students that pick a UK university over Oxbridge in the next year will round to 0%. The times rankings mean nothing at this granularity (whereas being top 20 vs top 100 _is_ significant)
When I was a student you would buy a book which had overall rankings, per subject rankings, and descriptions of all the ranked universities. I assume the book is what they are trying to sell rather than the papers and you want the latest edition to have up-to-date information about the universities. I’m not sure shuffling the rankings to sell papers makes that much sense but maybe the economics are different today.
Now Durham has everything to lose... While Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial will live on regardless...
That's the price of fighting for a stupid prize.
iirc the Times ranking has always been garbage as it weighs some "student experience" metric way too high. Do I really care about the result of some online survey equally or more than the academic achievement of the staff?
Back when I chose a UK university to attend, I valued the QS ranking much higher.
When I was a student, no one would seriously say they had a ‘doxbridge education’ for the same reason that saying you went to an ‘Ivy League school’ meant you went to a shit one like Brown (idk about the US rankings tbh; basing that on a Lisa Simpson nightmare). That’s still obviously true today.
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.
Brown is a shit school?
That's a level of elitism I don't often encounter.
“Mmm, heck of a school. Weren’t you at Brown Otto?”
I think you’re confusing a statement about ranking in a small set (Ivy League schools) for a statement about a bigger set. This isn’t uncommon – iirc there was some big furore a few months ago about admissions to US schools where much of the disagreement seemed to be downstream of different people thinking about different numbers of top or acceptable universities (and then sometimes having a big difference between the intuitive percentages of possible university options and the actual percentages they made up)
I think it’s still the case that people who describe themselves as having gone to an Ivy League school mean a school like Brown. If you went to Harvard then either say it directly or mumble something about a school in Boston – why say something that sounds similarly fancy to the truth but that could also be interpreted as something less elite? Saying you went to school in Boston is much lower in fanciness than Harvard or Ivy League except that most people know what it is code for.
it’s like saying you earn six figures, everyone knows that means $110,000.
You don't watch enough The Simpsons. (-:
It's the daydream sequence from series 10 episode 7, 'Lisa Gets an "A"'.
There's a weird intersection in ultra-elitism where true blue-blooded snobbery is indistinguishable from middle-class envy.
yup, that's where the brown color comes from
I cant help myself, I have to chip in. Having lived in Oxford for about a decade my most memorable local ( and in one case international headlines) which maybe me tut and wonder what on earth they are doing were these ( feel free to look them up).
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.
If academic performance is no longer the main criteria for admission then it's no surprise that Oxford's ranking has gone down.
If you'd bothered to research then you can see the academic performance is the main criteria for entrance. They spend the rest of the time sifting the top 10% academically to boil it down even more.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/admiss...
It is still the main criterion.
Elaborate?
The ranking is based on what exactly?
There are tens of these ratings with different weights to different things. Obviously the universities prefer to brag about ratings where they are higher. Also realistically reputations of different of unis across various subjects are vastly different. So the actual title of this article is just clickbait.
What is the ranking supposed to reflect, exactly? Quality of education? If the programs have the same instructors, same facilities, same curricula, etc., why would we expect a small change to admission criteria to affect rankings of the program?
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.
> The list is based on analysis of student satisfaction with teaching quality and experience, entry standards, research quality, sustainability and graduate prospects
Times articles on the rankings: https://www.thetimes.com/uk-university-rankings
> 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.
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 …
I compared this to the QS ranking, where Oxford is still second in the world, and Durham, the new third place in the ranking mentioned in the article is 341. QS ranking does not even rank the first two, London School of Economics and University of St. Andrews. Does anybody know why?
Edit: Sorry, I only looked at the Engineering ans Technology ranking. Anyway, QS ranking is vastly different from the Times' ranking.
The Wikipedia article on UK university rankings has an entire section on the differences to world university rankings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankings_of_universities_in_th...
> Oxford and Cambridge are tied for fourth in the 2026 rankings, after falling due to their relatively poor performance in the latest National Student Survey.
Nobody reads the article. Apparently not even pg.
It doesn’t matter. UK education is flawed already by the time a student reach tertiary. A levels 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.
> People in the UK, even if they study at Oxford, are likely more ignorant than many Europeans having done classical studies in high school.
wait so you're saying an entire country is rubbish because oxford has a worse classics degree than an unspecified country in Europe?
The UK system ranks a fair bit above the antiquated German system, you should be aware that there are 3 types of schools, with only one that teaches Latin etc., and the other two of them are considered shit, one German even told me that if you go to the lowest level of secondary school, your best bet is to just kill yourself. But it's certainly neat meeting lots of young Germans who studied Latin in school but nevertheless know absolutely no Latin once you ask them about it. Fabulous system.
Surprised to see CMU (Carnegie-Mellon) so low in the rankings.
It doesn’t matter.
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.
So it's fourth place?
Still too high.
This is what happens when the didn't-earn-it crew roles in
And yet, the Times Higher Education (no longer associated with The Times) global rankings place it number 1 https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
Wait till they find out what happened to Columbia’s rankings.