<p>so far we have about 25 on the list updated as follows:</p>
<p>berkeley, uc
brown
caltech
cambridge
chicago,u
columbia
cornell
edinburgh
harvard
imperial
georgetown
kcl (kings college london)
lse
michigan, u
mit
northwestern
oxford
penn, u
princeton
soas
stanford
ucl (university college london)
tufts
warwick
yale</p>
<p>thank you all. pls feel welcome to add more to the list.</p>
<p>remove edinburgh, warwick, KCL, and soas <— *big joke
*
add in amherst, swarthmore, williams, rice, Duke, CMU, NYU, Dartmouth</p>
<p>I think Johns hopkins, UCLA and maybe Wellesley should be on the list too..</p>
<p>i agree:
remove edinburg, KCL, wariwick, nottingham and soas!
add williams, rice, duke, dartmouth!</p>
<p>This is the most pointless of the pointless bs ranking threads that I have yet seen.</p>
<p>I think when you guys get into the working place you would understand why SOAS, Edinburgh, KCl and Warwick deseve mention and not Williams or Amherst. 95% of the people think Amherst is a community college- these are people who are educated while a lot of them have heard of the easy-to-get into but landmark british schools</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>not good enough for a Princetonian eh? snob..</p>
<p>here’s an update:</p>
<p>amherst
berkeley, uc
brown
caltech
cambridge
chicago, u
cmu
columbia
cornell
dartmouth
duke
edinburgh
georgetown
harvard
imperial
johns hopkins
kcl (kings college london)
lse
michigan, u
mit
northwestern
nottingham
nyu
oxford
penn, u
rice
soas
stanford
swarthmore
tufts
ucl (university college london)
ucla
warwick
williams
yale</p>
<p>USC.</p>
<p>Before anyone starts screaming “WHY?!?”, let me reason my choice out.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>USC = UCLA at the very least, therefore if UCLA is on the list, USC deserves to be (in terms of financial endowment, faculty-student ratio, tradition, and the private>public prestige factor, just to name a few, SC arguably comes out tops)</p></li>
<li><p>I know UCLA has a wider global recognition, but I’m not too sure that the majority of Americans will feel that LA trumps SC.</p></li>
<li><p>USC has an incredibly diverse international student population, and if I remember it right, I once read that after NYU, SC has the largest int’l pop of any American university. (sadly though I can’t back this up with a source)</p></li>
<li><p>With that in mind, since this is a list to help internationals decide on a university of their choice, it would make sense that a school with such a wide global reach in terms of student body should be considered as a candidate.</p></li>
<li><p>Finally, on a lighter note, I must admit that I am planning to enroll at SC (yay!) and that Trojan football is awesome.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Yea..because most unis located at big cities are usually considered pretty prestigious- like NYU, UCLA and USC.. Education channels like discovery will always get these unis’ profs to talk on their shows..</p>
<p>
</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Correction: USC has THE LARGEST international student population of any US university, for the sixth year running.</p>
<p>[International</a> Students in the USA](<a href=“http://www.toeflaccess.com/articles/ETS/us/study/why_study/international_students.html]International”>http://www.toeflaccess.com/articles/ETS/us/study/why_study/international_students.html)</p>
<p>[International</a> students choosing to study in the US | Worldwide | EducationGuardian.co.uk](<a href=“http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,,2201394,00.html]International”>World class | Higher education | The Guardian)</p>
<p>this thread is becoming pointless…first soas, then nottingham, what next? community colleges? zZz</p>
<p>iongbowmen: your quote “this thread is becoming pointless…first soas, then nottingham, what next? community colleges? zzz”</p>
<p>u nottingham is one of the leading research unis in uk and considered one of the good schools for students seeking higher education in uk. ranked #14 by times good uni guide 2007. and according to thes, nottingham came #85 in top 200 world rankings and ranked #81 in social sciences.</p>
<p>now if this is not enough, iongbowmen, let’s take a look at another supposedly more neutral source for world rankings, shanghai jiao tong. here nottingham is world ranked (2007) at #81 overall, #24 in europe and #9 in uk. and now according to the latest 2008 (just released in feb 08) world rankings by academic fields, nottingham this year ranked at #29 in clinical medicine & phamarcy, #50 in life/agricultural sciences and top 100 in social sciences. now as far as world rankings are concerned, thes and sjtu are considered the benchmark, although still debateable and will continue to be so for years to come. but they’re really the only two key sources ppl refer to when talking world rankings.</p>
<p>another one you mentioned, the school of oriental and african studies (soas), has long been known for its excellent departments/programs in int’l studies, non-european languages, offering majors in history, economics and law. part of the uni of london, it’s the uk’s national center for the study of asia, africa and the middle east. ranked #18 by times good university guide 2007 for top uk schools. as for world rankings by thes, top at #70 overall and #30 in arts n humanities.</p>
<p>now in all fairness, i don’t think soas and nottingham educational values are pointless at all. they deserve at least some consideration to be candidates for good schools in uk together with those in us. okay, if we’re talking about top 10-20, then they shouldn’t be included, but here we’re talking a possible list of 30-50 schools that would sufficiently provide as a broader, comprehensive list. i’m not sure you’ve done enough research, other than cutting here and pasting there, as far as the schools you mentioned are concerned.</p>
<p>most of the cc boards have maybe about 5%-10% replies compared to total number of views. this is bc a great majority of cc participants simply want to click in and just to see anything worth reading, or to learn something new, or have their questions answered by reading the postings. although they might choose not to be active participants, they’re nevertheless the silent majority. </p>
<p>and for that, they deserve respect too, by not having to read something biased, impartial, bashful, and pointless!!!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, but that doesn’t change the overall academic quality of those institutions.</p>
<p>I fear that this thread is going to have a lot of bias towards US universities simply because people don’t know much more than Cambridge, Oxford, ICL and LSE in the UK.</p>
<p>The majority of people I know only know Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford, despite there being many other universities with equally brilliant academics.</p>
<p>sci-fry: i agree. generally speaking uk cambridge/oxford/icl/lse are considered the most prestigious “top tier” and in a sense comparable to people consider hypsm+caltech as “top tier” in the us. even though top students would apply to these schools, either us or uk, as their “dreams”, they would still consider other schools like ucl, edinburgh, bristol (the most popular uni oxbridge applicants would go to), warwick (as tony blair once proudly presented to bill clinton during his visit to uk as the british school of the future, excellent programs in business and economics almost on par with lse, but not quite), kcl, soas and so on. </p>
<p>mild bias, at least a polite one, is perfectly okay. we’re all are to a certain degree. but not those who are strongly/unfairly bashful and trying to be intimidating on purpose, i repeat on purpose, while they don’t know enough or haven’t done their homework. we should give some respect for those silent majority.</p>
<p>dconcerned, allow me to elucidate my point</p>
<p>1)you’re look for a list of top 50 UK/US unis…if you look at it from a rankings point of view, nottingham/soas/etc. wont make it in, which you yourself duly pointed out</p>
<p>2)unless you want an equal number of US and UK unis (which imo means including some relatively less qualified UK unis in the list), nottingham/soas/etc. wont qualify either…the UK has 120+ unis, while the US has more than 3000, 14/120 (nottingham) is top 11% in the UK, while any top 50 US colleges would be the top 0.01% in the US…while this is by no means indicative of prestige and quality (becoz by this method oxbridge would be excluded, which is ludicrous), it does follow logically that there will be fewer UK unis in the list, because UK has less unis and by extension less top unis</p>
<p>3)while i agree with you that SOAS/Nottingham/etc. should and will be considered by some students and we should respect that, herein lies the contradiction…you are looking for a list of Top unis strictly, then we shouldnt include SOAS/Nottingham/etc., but if you are looking for a list of ** top unis that students should consider**, different students consider different unis (i.e. a top student would only consider top-tier schools, while a good student would consider both top-tier and middle-tier, and a poor student considers only the middle-tier and lower-tier), essentially voiding the purpose of your generic list</p>
<p>iongbowmen: okay, if you want to clear the air.</p>
<p>1) as i said, if you look at the top 4-5 uk schools i.e. cambridge, oxford, imperial, lse, and may be ucl, they can be comparable to the top 10 or 15 in the us. now i don’t want to compare heads-on, i’m talking that they both can be considered, by most qualified educators and such, the top tier or tier#1 in their own country.</p>
<p>2) second tier in uk or the next five in top 10 (edinburgh, bristol, warwick, manchester, nottingham or whatever in that leaque) should be in the same second tier in us for the next 11th-20th or 15th-25th rankings on uswr. again i don’t want to go into specifics, it’s gonna be too lengthy and taking too much time. </p>
<p>so overall speaking, the top 10 uk schools are generally regarded as reasonably comparable, give or take, to the top 20-25, maybe 30 at most with the elites on uswr rankings.</p>
<p>now the rest of the top 120 uk schools may be categolized as in the same group with all 300-400 good schools in us, depending on the types of schools, depts/programs etc. etc. some will say too many, some can say too little, very debateable. i don’t know enough and i guess you don’t either, judging from you have commented so far. but give or take, as a whole they can be grouped together. you can always break them down further into third tier, fourth tier, fifth tier to do a heads-on comparison. but that’s not the motive of this thread. no matter what and how you classify, they’re gonna result in more heated debates and conflicting opinions.</p>
<p>this thread does not seek for direct comparisons, or detailed rankings per se. it serves as a convinient tool as the first step for int’l students in particular to go on with their college application process, probing into details of each and every individual schools they’re interested in along the way, and ultimately come up with two lists of their own college choices for final decision.</p>
<p>now, when you were implying that the top 120 uk schools should be compared to 3,000 something unis in the us, you really went over the board. do you know that outside the 400-500 or so schools in the us and even this number is still debateable, the rest are pretty much regional i.e. state or even local. nothing wrong about that. each and every single college serves their own target group and community. but to say top 120 uk schools, all considered research schools internationally renowned, at least in europe or in asia or elsewhere, is really an insult on those who highly value higher education and particularly those who were educated or are attending or thinking about going to uk. </p>
<p>i only hope that you’d be more careful and constructive when making criticism as you’re also of high caliber in your own way.</p>
<p>^ a laundry list, thats all you need to say…a laundry list is what you’re looking for</p>
<p>and whats with the top (<—you conveniently added this term yourself) 120 uk unis comparing to the 3000 unis in the us? uk has 120+ unis in total…and besides my point was, i disagree with the inclusion of so many uk unis (5-6 shud suffice) in a list of 30, firstly because outside of the top 5, non of these unis have any international prestige or clout to speak of, and secondly these unis do not represent the crem de la crem of the system (% wise)</p>
<p>you don’t get it. for one, compare the number of us population in uk vs in us. when you have a family of 3-4 you may need a 3-4 br home, you don’t need 15-20 br house. and on top of that, us schools in great number have student pop of 1,000 plus minus. that’s one major reason why number of us schools is way out of proportion when compared to uk number.</p>
<p>laundry list? maybe there’s one for those who need a clean-up.</p>
<p>^ you still don’t get it, yes many of these 3000 US colleges are small LACs/specialised colleges compared to the mostly huge comprehensives of the UK…but lets compare pop size, US has 5x the population of UK, so in terms of the quality of the student body, selectivity, quality of the academic staff etc., i would say the top 6-7 UK unis are comparable to the top 20-30 US unis, generally speaking (and we’re not even talking about funding, which significantly tilts the playing field in the favour of US unis)</p>
<p>at the rate you’re going, its a laundry list no doubt…and since you’re the OP, if you’re ok with it, then i’m fine too =)</p>