<p>Hash, not all the Ivys have those grad rates</p>
<p>Princeton, Harvard and Yale are all around 97, its Cornell that brings it down for the most part.</p>
<p>Yes the 1-1, 1-2 teaching is nice, but thats not what education is all about. I found the most valuable things I got in college were the group discussions.</p>
<p>interesting to see the times of london report...I think their methodology makes the most sense (certainly more than US News'. Maybe that's just me being glad to see Berkeley ranked above Stanford (not that I would want to go to berkeley, but as a taxpayer in the state of california, its good to see my money is going farther than that of those slick snobs in Palo Alto. Also great to see UC San Francisco on there, seeing as not many people know that the university actually exists! (since it doesn't teach undergrads). Also, since that list is based on research productivity and notoriety, its almost entirely useless for us first time freshman.</p>
<p>Well, Amused, the way I read it, it sounds more like a euphemism for better-than-you. Pretty pathetic for adults to be marginalizing other colleges & other students like that. Can you spell a-r-r-o-g-a-n-t? I think maybe some of these parents couldn't get into either Chicago or an Ivy, and they're living through their children. Makes them feel better to put others down.</p>
<p>Qinghua University should be mentioned.</p>
<p>Nanjing Polytechnic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! F-k yeah!</p>
<p>What is the overall Best BUSINESS Schools in the World??</p>
<p>Undergrad or for MBA?</p>
<p>hhmm, both</p>
<p>Ugrad: probably Wharton at Penn and Sloan at MIT
MBA: probably some combination of Wharton, Sloan, Harvard, Kellogg at Northwestern, and INSEAD.
There are loads of really good business schools and I don't think any single one can claim to be the 'best'.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
Yes the UK school only admit on merit, but a University isnt about merit anymore. It is about graduating as a WELL ROUNDED INDIVIUAL. So maybe that means having an active participation in school athletic spirit, which means the ivies have to recruit athletes. Thats how you create diversity on a campus.
[/QUOTE]
</p>
<p>The aim of UK schools has nothing to do with being well rounded though (no minors for a start. No switching majors etc.). They don't care about diversity or anything like that. Neither do employers in the UK as far as I can tell. They are just looking for someone, anyone, who has excelled academically. It's all about the numbers. Really I think people at Oxford would laugh at me if I told them I had some here to be "well rounded". If that's what you want, you really shouldn't come to Oxford!</p>
<p>Yes, nearly everyone here graduates. It's pretty rare to drop out at any of the top UK schools.</p>
<p>"The aim of UK schools has nothing to do with being well rounded though (no minors for a start. No switching majors etc.). They don't care about diversity or anything like that."</p>
<p>Cupcake, under the British educational system we get a year extra at school, and therefore it takes a year less to graduate.</p>
<p>The year extra at school is the time when British students are doing diverse subjects. University is where they specialise.</p>
<p>"Yes the UK school only admit on merit, but a University isnt about merit anymore. It is about graduating as a WELL ROUNDED INDIVIUAL. So maybe that means having an active participation in school athletic spirit, which means the ivies have to recruit athletes. Thats how you create diversity on a campus."</p>
<p>There are 39 Oxford colleges. Each college fields at least 2 teams in every sport. As a result, a huge number of students are participating in sports/athletics. Far more than in Ivies I would say.</p>
<p>The very top athletes go on to represent the University. As a result, sport is played competitively at the college level as well as the higher University level.</p>
<p>There are of course a huge number of clubs as well. Most notably the Oxford Union, one of the most famous debating societies in the World.</p>
<p>How you can say Oxford students are not well rounded, I will never understand.</p>
<p>There seems to be a myth that applicants are admittedto Oxbridge based purely on grades. This is not true - admissions tutors DO look at your extra curriculars. However, if your grades are not of the highest standard, then even the extra curriculars can help. </p>
<p>There just isn't AS MUCH emphasis on ECs. A student would have to be very special academically to get into Oxford without decent ECs.</p>
<p>I think claiming that Oxford students are not as "well rounded" as those at the ivies is a lame (and incorrent) excuse developed to mask the fact that Ivies recruit such a major aprt of their class because of recruitment/legacies/donations etc.</p>
<p>Oxbridge students are more academic, and AT LEAST as well rounded as ivy league students.</p>
<p>I went to a British school (and did A-levels). I have been an undergrad here (at cambridge) and am now a graduate student. You don't get a year extra at school. UK year 13 is the same age as US grade 12. In both countries high school graduates/A-level leavers are the same age. 18. I think that US kindergarten is the year which British schools call year 1. hence the grade numbers are out of sync.</p>
<p>British schools really do not encourage diverse curriculums! Most students only take 3-4 A-level subjects aged 16-18. US high school students take many more. Go and have a look at all the stats posted by the readers of this board. But A-level students cover their subjects in much more depth. My maths skills having done A-level maths were much better than people who did AP calculus for example. But of course my English skills were worse because I didn't do A-level English, nor any A-level arts subjects (see I'm not very good at typing nor spelling!). There are benefits to both systems. It depends what you enjoy and how certain you are about your career aspirations.</p>
<p>University in the UK takes a year less (for undergrad) because there are no minor subjects. Plus students are already pretty specialised after having done A-levels so they are a bit more advanced in their "major" to start with.</p>
<p>As for ECs, on the UCAS form (the application form for UK colleges. There is only one common app for all) there is a tiny little box for a "personal statement" of about 20 lines. I wrote all about how much I wanted to study science in there, and I think I added about two sentances on ECs at the end. Compare this to all the time Ivy applicants spend hunting out leadership positions and counting up volunteer activities and you can see the difference.</p>
<p>Recruited athletes in the US are good enough to go professional. With the exception of the rowers, Oxford college sports teams are just a bit of fun. it's not that serious and no-one is training for the Olympics or anything!</p>
<p>An interesting article that appeared recently in The Economist (a weekly British publication). It's perhaps long, but seems relevant for the current thread.</p>
<p>When universities depend on taxpayers, their independence and standards suffer:</p>
<p>IT IS depressing to visit Oxford or Cambridge these days. The old buildings are so wonderfully grand that they highlight the cheap, ugly and badly kept new ones. The intellectual history is stunning, too: this is where Newton pondered gravity, and Occam honed his razor. But these days academics at Britain's two finest universities are a harried, ill-paid lot; salaries start at a mere £14,139 ($25,733). </p>
<p>Few disagree that both universities are living off the past, in everything from cash to reputation. The colleges' wine cellars are better than the kitchens, quips one don. The port and claret were laid down in happier times, when cash was flush and planning for the future mattered. But the food that goes with them is often dismal: that must be bought out of current income, which is usually earmarked already for everything from maintaining ancient buildings to supplementing salaries.</p>
<p>Yet Oxford and Cambridge are still in relatively good shape, thanks largely to their structure of self-governing, self-financing colleges. This limits the power of bureaucrats, provides independently managed money and ensures some protection for the original and the excellent. Other British universities have much worse problems. </p>
<p>To begin with, they have little or no endowment income to fall back on. The combined investments of Oxford and Cambridge are £4 billion; the rest of the British university system has £1.7 billion to play with. In America, Harvard alone has twice Britain's total. The funding gapthe hole in the universities' collective accounts created by the unfunded expansion of the past 20 yearsis around £10 billion. </p>
<p>It is not just that money is short. The price and quantity of courses are state-controlled, in a system more suited to Soviet central planning than to a modern democracy. And as with other planned economies, the result of government intervention is increasingly unsatisfactory. In Britain, over 30 years, universities have gone from being almost wholly autonomous, with state-financed block grants handed out at arm's length, to becoming branch offices of a government ministry. </p>
<p>Admissions, too, bring a whiff of the old Soviet system. The government is convinced that more working-class students, including many with few formal qualifications, should go to university. Its ultimate target is 50% of 18-30-year-olds by 2010, and it is getting there fast. Figures released this week show that the number of students in higher education has risen in just one year from 43% to nearly 45% of the relevant age cohort. In 1979, the percentage of school-leavers going on to higher education was just 12.4%.</p>
<p>...</p>
<p>The story of British higher education is less about expansion than inflation of qualifications. University degrees mean less and less and there are more and more of them. The rot set in in 1992, when the Conservative government allowed the polytechnicslocally based institutions that originally specialised in vocational teachingto relabel themselves universities. That created a panoply of new academic courses, many of dubious merit, and kicked away a vital pillar of the higher education system, between the purely vocational further education colleges and the fully academic universities. This trend towards uniformity has disastrously weakened higher education in Britain. </p>
<p>Hence the importance of the government's proposed reform of university finance, which will allow a modest liberalisation of tuition fees. Instead of the current flat rate of £1,125, universities will be allowed to charge up to £3,000. The scheme is festooned with carrots, chiefly easy terms for poor students, in order to forestall a revolt by the government's nominal supporters in Parliament.</p>
<p>Critics say the new fees will create an unmanageable debt burden. Yet a broadly similar system in Australia has not had this effect: graduates pay back the loans when they are earning enough.</p>
<p>Woes across the Channel
The present picture in Britain may be dismal, but misery is relative. Strolling happily through the Oxbridge quadrangles, and in the bustling corridors of less beautiful British universities, are 12,000 undergraduates from other European Union (EU) countries. Their home universities are in a still worse state: not only more overcrowded, but with barely a vestige of direct teaching. Oxford and Cambridge, more than other British universities, still offer undergraduate students close attention from a designated don. </p>
<p>The system is threadbare and arguably wasteful, especially as many students do little to prepare for their supervisions. But at least it happens. At France's best-known university, the Sorbonne, a translation seminar at the start of last term had 80 registered students. Too many, said the teacher superciliously. Half of you have to leave. When we are down to 40 I'll start teaching. Foreigners will go first.</p>
<p>In Germany, too, where professors enjoy the status of tenured civil servants, conditions are frequently dreadful. A current scandal is the Blockseminaran ingenious system whereby an academic turns up briefly at the university and delivers an entire term's teaching in the space of a weekend, before returning to the unhurried pursuit of private knowledge. </p>
<p>Similar stories come from Spain and Italy, where universities are plagued by rigidity and corruption. Last year, students at Rome's Sapienza University were found to have paid up to 3,000 ($3,400) to pass their exams; and a professor at the University of Bari was arrested for demanding sexual favours in exchange for getting candidates onto the psychology course. </p>
<p>In effect, universities in these countries have become government-owned degree mills. Their aim is to get the greatest number of young people in and out for the least money and trouble. Really determined students may fight their way through to gain a professor's attention, win a research scholarship and start doing some real work, probably in postgraduate study. The others will arrive in the labour market, qualification in hand, feeling that their mostly middle-class parents have something to show for their taxes. </p>
<p>It is not all gloom and doom. Most countries have islands of excellence: German postgraduate engineering faculties, for example, or the French grandes écoles, fiercely competitive and independent. Finland and Holland have largely managed to keep quality up and bureaucracy down. But for the most part, universities in the larger countries of continental Europe are a dreadful warning of the consequences of nationalisation.</p>
<p>No wonder, then, that British and European academics cast envious and wondering eyes at the American university system. It manages both quantity and quality: more than 60% of American high school graduates at least start some form of tertiary education. And it keeps standards high, too. The European Commission recently published a painstaking ranking of the world's best universities, compiled by researchers in Shanghai. Of the top 50, all but 15 were American. From Europe, only Oxford and Cambridge made it into the top 10; from other EU countries, no university ranks higher than 40. </p>
<p>The American system is not flawless. The diversity which makes the system so dynamic also leaves it vulnerable to abuse. In the humanities, intellectual fashion seems bizarrely distant from the real world. Many bad ideasnotably political correctnessstarted life as American campus fads. And budget pressures squeeze the system when times are tough. This year, the axe has fallen hard on California's public universities.
...
Degrees of difference
Why does America succeed where Europe fails? The most important factor is diversity. American higher education is not just more varied, but has less of the crippling snobbery and resentment that accompanies variety in, say, Britain. At the bottom of the pyramid are community colleges, offering inexpensive, flexible, job-focused courses for millions of Americans each year. They are pretty basic, and Britons sniff at them. But the difference in mentality, says Martin Trow, an observer of both the British and American education systems, is that in America something is seen as better than nothing. </p>
<p>(Article truncated due to length)
Jan 22nd 2004
From The Economist print edition</p>
<p>I seem to have an uncanny knack for killing conversation on a thread. I know the last post was long, but I found it insightful. It's perhaps more nuanced than generalizations like University X is crap while University Y is the best. Yes, Oxford and Cambridge are struggling financially, but I wouldn't say that they've gone down the tubes. Neither would I say that they're at the pinnacle of higher education.</p>
<p>
[quote]
No wonder, then, that British and European academics cast envious and wondering eyes at the American university system. It manages both quantity and quality: more than 60% of American high school graduates at least start some form of tertiary education. And it keeps standards high, too.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think most people here would agree with most of that article except for the section above. The aim of getting 50% of UK students into higher education is a big issue here. Most people think it drive standards down. People who would have been better off learning a trade enter college instead and come out with a worthless degree in a weird subject plus lots of debt. So I think people in the UK would say if 60% of peopel can get into college, at the lower end it must be too easy/waste of time.</p>
<p>I am loathe to resurrect an aging thread for a first post, but here goes.</p>
<p>It is undoubtedly the case that admissions to Oxford are essentially on the grounds of academic ability (after all it is done by subject tutors looking at candidates for their own subjects), but it would be wrong to take away the impression that Oxford students are a bunch of nerdy academic obsessives as a result. The range of ECs going on in the university and each college is impressive: sport, music, drama, debating, politics, voluntary work. The point is not that the sport is not primarily at a professional level. The point is that the students take the opportunities for themselves, that the student body in each Oxford college is a very diverse community of interests and activities, but that a college does not need to depart from the principle of selection on academic merit in order for that to happen.</p>
<p>A warning on The Economic article. In good academic fashion it is important to understand the source before proceeding to interpret it. The Economist is proud of its unrelenting commitment to free market economics. But as a result its world view is underpinned by certain dogmas which are treated as undoubted truths and not subject to the usual intellectual rigour. One of the main ones is "(competitive) private sector: good; (uncompetitive) public sector: bad". So it is not surprising to see an article that talks up the benefits of private sector colleges, and the disbenefits of universities which are essentially public sector. But it is important to understand it.</p>
<p>excellent post oldspc.</p>
<p>I'd put IIT up there, Indiai Inst. of Tech.</p>