Are Top UK Colleges Regarded As Highly as the Ivy League Worldwide?

College Search & Selection
21

Just realised I missed out the THE World reputation ranking in my list above of reputations/prestige rankings.

Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, when I just checked the 2019 rankings, I find that it is 100% in alignment with the tiers I just created of:

Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Stanford, Oxford > Princeton, Yale, Caltech > Columbia, Imperial, Cornell, UPenn, UCL >> Edinburgh, LSE, KCL >> Brown >>>> Dartmouth

So, I do strongly believe that is how, on aggregate, the world view these Top UK and Ivy League [Equivalent] universities.

22

It’s all down to context. I lived in the US and did undergrad in the US before moving to the UK and attending post-Grad at one of the Universities being debated.

How universities are regarded will depend on where in the world you live. Commonwealth countries (Canada tends to have a US slant) will regard UK universities highly and in fact high school students in some of the commonwealth will sit Cambridge University exams thus adding to the Universities familiarity with these 14-18 year olds.

US Universities are much better at marketing thus creating brand awareness, mostly down to sports. Success in sports creates an incorrect impression (bias) of academic excellence. However, US college sports are only popular in North America - the rest of the world doesn’t care or even know which programs are good at football. Sadly, European universities do not do sports to the same extent as their North American counterparts, this probably leads to an impression (the layman on the street) that a University like ETH Zurich is not on the same level as Duke.

I’ll stick with the sports analogy. The NFL and NBA draft from colleges based on stats that help to predict whether someone will be successful at the next level. A top first round pick in the NBA (or NFL) is very very unlikely to come from Harvard or Yale. In fact, a top High School prospect is not going to consider Harvard or Yale if the goal is to make it into the NBA, and would instead pick Duke, UNC, Kentucky etc. These universities have been known to provide a path to the NBA, the final destination (employment!) A program may be strong in both football and basketball and in some cases just one of the sports. So, we can easily rank a University sports program to determine how strong it is compared to other programs. The coach (and coaching staff), teammates, previous year performance and funding for the program all add to the decision. This is a relatively simpler exercise (compared to academic ranking) since the pool of universities is only in North America and a winner is always crowned at the end of the year thanks to playoffs.

When we consider academic performance we can take a similar approach to the sports example. If you’re interested in Chemical Engineering then you should be aware that organisations that hire will rate the program and not the University. This decision can be influenced by knowledge of rock star teaching staff (coaching staff), funding for the program, research success in a specific field, prominence / performance of alumni especially recently graduated ones. Top university programs will generally have students with the most potential since these students were already excellent high school prospects (just like in sports). It doesn’t mean the student will pan out when they are employed - even if they are the number 1 pick!

So which universities would be good at Chemical Engineering and are they all in the USA? The answer is actually they are everywhere because rock star teaching staff, funding, high school prospects are all over the world. American, Australian, Asian and European universities will have the most funding and specific universities would be viewed as having the best programs in this field. Employers will recruit from these institutions because they become a target university and also based on previous experience with graduates. These universities will have high quality research and will collaborate with industry and with each other. Keep in mind that many European universities, and more specifically the top UK universities, are public institutions and apart from Oxford and Cambridge they do not have billion dollar endowments. What they do have are billion dollar budgets provided by the government so by extension adequate funding for programs and research.

Whilst Cornell is a fantastic school, you’d struggle to convince a lay person from Europe that it’s better than UCL, Imperial College or ETH Zurich for Chemical Engineering. The exact opposite would be true in the USA.

Keep in mind though, that experience always trumps the university you attend.

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23

It seems to me there’s a significant problem with using the global university rankings as a barometer of overall university “prestige,” especially when one is talking about undergraduate education, and especially for undergraduate institutions that are smaller or focused on undergraduate education.

Take for example, the QS global rankings and its ranking for Dartmouth, an Ivy League school. It ranks Dartmouth #203 globally, behind 43 other US colleges, while US News ranks it #13 nationally. Similarly, QS ranks Georgetown at #230 globally, behind 49 other US colleges, while US News ranks it #23 nationally. Notably, QS ranks Georgetown lower than Arizona State (#220), which US News ranks nationally at #103.

In addition, global rankings like QS and Times Higher Education don’t even include schools like Williams, Swarthmore, and Amherst, which lead the national liberal arts category in the US News rankings. Students from such schools matriculate to the very top graduate programs in the country, and anyone in the US knowledgeable about higher education would know that they are excellent schools filled with students having ivy-level stats. Generally, speaking my impression is that the global rankings favor universities with strong graduate programs, and speak less to the academic caliber of students or rigor of teaching at the undergraduate level.

I think most people in the US would agree with me that they would consider the national rankings to be more meaningful than the global rankings, as they are generally more in line with the academic caliber of the student bodies attending the universities. Indeed, US News also has global university rankings, and I’ve never seen anyone use that ranking as a barometer of how US universities in the US are viewed in the US.

While I can speak less to UK universities, I note that if one searches for the Wikipedia page titled “Rankings of universities in the United Kingdom,” it identifies three national rankings that rank the schools as follows:

THE COMPLETE UNIVERSITY GUIDE

Cambridge
Oxford
St Andrews
LSE
ICL
Loughborough
Durham
Lancaster
Bath
UCL

GUARDIAN

Oxford
St Andrews
Cambridge
Durham
LSE
Bath
Loughborough
Warwick
ICL
Lancaster

TIMES/SUNDAY TIMES

Cambridge
Oxford
St Andrews
LSE
Durham
ICL
Loughborough
Bath
Lancaster
Warwick
UCL

Notably, the Entry Standards (in terms of UCAS points), are (per the Times / Sunday times tables) as follows:

Cambridge - 212
St Andrews - 211
Glasgow - 204
Oxford - 203
Strathclyde - 200
ICL - 189
Durham - 188
Edinburg - 187
Aberdeen - 183
Dundee - 176

Personally, I will say that before looking into this issue more closely, I was really only familiar with Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE. Also, I will add that I would be surprised if anyone, anywhere thinks of Cambridge and Oxford as anything other than #1 and #2 (or visa versa) in the UK. Numbers only tell so much, and I think the historical excellence and interview process those universities employ will keep them at the top forever. From what I’ve read from others, there’s a good number of schools that are viewed highly in the UK beyond Oxbridge, but people generally are not splitting hairs about them, other than perhaps for personal pride reasons.

The Wiki article also provides the current global rankings as well for QS, THE, ARWU, and CWTS, and it provides some explanation for why those differences exist.

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24

In the UK, national rankings are not more meaningful for prestige/high regard than global rankings.

Trust me that hardly anyone over 20 years regards Loughborough, Lancaster, Bath, Dundee etc. as Top 10 universities.

These national rankings have mislead a lot of non-UK residents for years.

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25

Loughborough and Bath have engineering courses with about the highest emploment stats going outside of medicine. Both are places any well connected parent would recommend to their children. The same applies to most STEM courses at Bath.