<p>^^^</p>
<p>Sorry:</p>
<p>So just to be clear: these statements were based primarily on the bizarre position of some US universities on the list.</p>
<p>This is why I maintain that colleges and research universities should receive largely different rankings. In cases like Cambridge, it's all first-rate all the time (apparently). Oxford quite probably is first-rate in terms of undergraduate student quality and slipping in terms of research output and graduate student quality, I don't know so clearly.</p>
<p>It is very, very possible that a huge smattering of universities worldwide have much more selectivity in terms of undergrad than the top US universities do. I can think of the IITs in India as being among the absolutely most difficult universities to get into in the world, based on the application/admission numbers I've heard. And given the fact that broadly speaking many countries educate their children better than the US does, difficult to get into in many countries may be on an entirely different level of different to get into.</p>
<p>And for the time being, given the amount of money Americans invest in their universities (Harvard's endowment is $35 billion, for example, Stanford's is something like $15 billion, Berkeley's is something like $4 billion, etc.) and the fact that these universities draw their best and brightest (students, esp. graduate students, and professors) from across the world, in terms of the broad quality of research powerhouses, I would say the US will probably be on top for awhile. Hey, that and movies are probably the only "export" industries that we have left that we're good at. Oh yeah, that and military.... But you must give us something, hee hee.</p>
<p>If, for instance, McGill or University of Toronto are the tip-top elite universities in Canada and highly coveted by many students in Canada, these universities deserve great respect. I frankly think it's very hard to come up with an apples-to-apples ranking across countries; it's frankly hard to rank different kinds of colleges within one nation. This ranking clearly failed. The university in Hong Kong deserves great respect, etc. But again, this ranking clearly failed.</p>