<p>I am fascinated with Europe and would love to study there in a respected university, but know aiming for Oxford or Cambridge is setting my hopes a little high. What basic factors, such as GPA or whether the college you attend is an ivy leauge or not, improve one's chances to transfer into say St. Andrews University or Kings college?</p>
<p>I would say it is a combination of both. An IVY or another top 30 institution such as stanford, UCLA, Emory, John Hopkins would be well known universities in Europe and would impress the admissions office. It would be hard to transfer from a USA university to a British one because of the two very different systems. You are better of just starting an undergraduate at a British one or doing a JYA in your third year. I know Oxbridge is hard to get into but as an American you might have an advantage because there is not a huge amount of undergraduate students at those unis from the USA.</p>
<p>The new Guardian ranking's of UK univesities are out. I know they are not perfect and that it is impossible to have a perfect ranking but it gives us an idea. </p>
<p>Most of the results are quite predictable </p>
<p>Oxford and Cambridge at the top followed by the University of London colleges : LSE, UCL, Imperial, SOAS and King's.</p>
<p>Many of the "Glass Plate " universities did quite well like Warwick, Bath and York.</p>
<p>I was suprised that a few universities that are very famous and reputable were not as well ranked as I expected such as Edinburgh, Durham and St. Andrews.</p>
<p>pmsoccerpink:
just to reinforce what psmyth000 said. The concept of transfer basically doesn't exist in UK universities so don't look to do that from the US to the UK. </p>
<p>The alternatives are really studying for a year or semester abroad whilst still strictly enrolled with your US university, or becoming an undergraduate in the UK which would mean applying from scratch via UCAS. The second option would mean doing a full undergraduate course unless it is as a second degree, in which case they could well excuse you from the first year (Oxford would do that).</p>
<p>\\\\\\\</p>
<p>I used to work in recruiting. The international universities that tended to be known and recognised by US managers were:</p>
<p>Oxford (England)
Cambridge (England)
London School of Economics
INSEAD (for the MBA)
McGill (Canada)
Trinity College Dublin</p>
<p>And then, somewhat less known but not unheard of were:</p>
<p>Charles University (Czech Republic)
Indian Institute of Technology (in engineering circles only)
Jagellonian University (Poland)
U Toronto
U Waterloo (in engineering circles only)
London Business School (MBA only)
University College, London
Technion (Israel. Usually only known by managers in the NYC metro area)</p>
<p>pmssoccerpink, as others have said, you really can't transfer into a British university. But you can definately do a year abroad there, or do a complete course from scratch.</p>
<p>I would think HEI in Geneva would be pretty renowed. It might only be a graduate school, but it's a TOP school for International Relations.</p>
<p>I think Warwick is relatively well known too.</p>
<p>Very few people in the UK had heard of St Andrews before Prince William went there. It's nothing special but for some reason Americans think it gives them a lot of prestige to study at the same place as the future king (who didn't even do very well in his A-leves, despite going to one of the most expensive schools in the world. He got ABC). St A's is the only UK university (as far as I know) which has a special application process just for Americans because they get so many applicants (and want to raise as much miney as they can from expensive overseas fees. Remember there is no financial aid for foreign undergraduates in the UK).</p>
<p>All right, I am an EU folk and am keen to express my opinion about European universities.
The first and most important feature of them is that they admit students according to their major and it will be really hard to change it once you're there. The implication of this policy is that your major really matters in admission process. As an exmple: all of the brightest students in my class, except me, applied to Cambridge last fall. One guy was a CS major, one girl was med, and the rest of them were economics majors. Guess who got admitted? Only the guy majoring in CS, though I cannot say that he is any brighter than the economists. As a further example, my girlfriend, who is also majoring in economics, with a perfect GPA and brilliant predicted IB scores was rejected from Edinburgh, while another folk in my class, CS major, with terrible GPA and IB scores got a conditional (~30 IB) offer of admission from there.</p>
<p>If you get addmitted to an English university, you will get a conditional, which is a sum of IB/A-level etc final grades. So when my classmates were cramming for their IB finals and praying to make up their conditional, I was as cool as a cucamber, because I already knew that I am admitted.
However, there are also advantages, because education in the UK is free of charge for all EU students and financial matters by no means influence admission decission. Unfortunately, this is not the case in the US and as a result I had to withdraw my offer of admission at Cornell and go to Lafayette. Therefore, in the US many bright students simply cannot go to their dream schools even if they get admitted there.</p>
<p>So in conclusion, I think that recognition of EU universities in the US is kinda relative thing because as I have pointed out EU and US educational systems vary greatly and there is no way according to which one can decently compare American and European universities. Thus, recognition is usually based on such factors as international fame and relations with graduates of a particular school.</p>
<p>ETH Zürich and Imperial College London are IMHO the best engineering schools in Europe (and pretty much MIT-like in U.S. terms). LSE on the other hand is definitely the place to go if you are interested in applied social sciences (including economics and political science). Cambrige has a very proud and strong tradition in mathematics and natural sciences (Newton, Babbage, Darwin Maxwell, Stokes, Kelvin, Rutherford, Dirac, Crick, Hawkings, etc.), but has also been a driving force in the history of economic theory (from Alfred Marshall to J. M. Keynes and Meade, to James Mirrlees and Armartya Sen). Its closest US equivalent would probably be Harvard. Oxford on the other hand is perhaps more like Yale: it doesn't have the same scientific tradition as Cambridge (or Harvard for that matter), but it is the ideal to place to go if your future plans include a political career. Like Yale though, Oxford is very good in humanities and has an excellent medicine course.</p>
<p>"I know the Sorbonne does not exist any more as it did before but I just guessed that it was famous in the USA under that name and not under the new names."</p>
<p>Excuse me, I go to the Sorbonne. The riots of '68 did change the original status of the University but what really changed is the number of students and high school graduates who apply there. It's a public school, a baccalaureate graduate can NOT be rejected from any college he's interested in, which is why the first two years there are really challenging, so that the weakest drop out before junior year, where everyone finally gets to study in the prestigious buildings...</p>
<p>I heard about ETH Zurich some six months ago and I've been liking it a lot.. Does anyone have any ideas regarding places elsewhere like germany, singapore or scandinavian countries...</p>