Actually, if you’re from a low-income household or over 25, Oxford is by far the cheapest decent university in Britain. Until the national tuition fee rise, Oxford gave means-tested non-repayable bursaries that completely covered the cost of tuition to all students below a certain household income threshold, and now, after the increase, the fees are £3,500 a year for the first year (which is almost completely cancelled out by the £3,225 Opportunity Bursary) and £6,000 a year after that, compared to £9,000 at pretty much any other university.
An’ if you talk to him about Dylan, he thinks yer talkin’ about Dylan Thomas - whoever he was.
The man ain’t got no culture.
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I love bullshit like this. It feeds directly into the absurdity that the reason for higher education is to get a good, well paying job for life.
Except those don’t exist anymore outside a very few highly specialized fields. And in our lifetimes there will be literally zero guaranteed jobs, anywhere.
An education needs to be about teaching students how to be creative and innovative. In science, arts, business, whatever. That list seems more like a top 10 ‘bankable’ credential farms. Not best schools, just best resumes. Which won’t help.
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Bandwagon.
Anecdotal.
Appeal to authority.
Incomplete comparison.
Appeal to tradition
Begging the question.
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My debt was roughly £20,000 when I graduated from Imperial College. I pay it back at a rate of 9% over any earnings above £15,000/year. If I were to earn less than that in a year I wouldn’t have to pay anything back in that year.
With the recent rise in tuition fees students starting there next month can expect closer to £60,000 of debt. It’s a shame, I hope the next government reduces (preferably to zero) tuition fees.
In the opinion of the BBC, obviously. And isn’t that what really matters?
The QS ranking used to be the Times ranking. It was often criticized at the time for being heavily UK centric. The Times created a new ranking in 2009, and QS split off.
To university ranking watchers, the QS ranking is probably the most controversial. It is a reputation based ranking, meaning that they ask professors and employers to rank schools. As you can probably guess, reputation based rankings are heavily dependent on the pool of professors and employers you ask. For example, Maclean’s magazine in Canada has a fairly good reputation ranking of Canadian universities by Canadian employers.
The QS ranking on the other hand purports to be a world ranking, but they heavily skew towards English language universities, and UK universities in particular, suggesting that their pool of employers and professors is heavily skewed in this direction.
Ummm. Chicago? Chicago what?
A college in the UK is simply an institution of further or higher education which doesn’t award degrees. In the case of Oxford & Cambridge some of the teaching (tutorials) is provided by the college and some (lectures & practicals) by the University. The degrees are set & awarded by the University.
All research is carried out at a University level, though permanent staff are members of a college too. In reality Oxbridge colleges, despite their very different histories (some are ~800 years old, some less than 80) are fairly homogeneous once you look beyond the architecture.
There are other collegiate Universities in the UK, which divide roles up between the colleges and the University differently - though the University always awards the degree. Durham, St Andrew’s and York are collegiate Universities. As is The University of London, of which UCL is part. Imperial used to part of the University of London, but left ~5 years ago and is now a University in its own right, making its official name (Imperial College London) an anachronism.
By regular you mean USAian - the way Oxbridge use the word college is correct (and original) in British English.
Haven’t read the link yet, but I assume University of Chicago.
There are more English Graduates per year in India than there are graduates of all disciplines in America.
It is not because the exams are easier they are actually harder.
Although there are more people in India very few can afford education.
Just a farmers point of view but.
…in British English.
Which, by virtue of demographics, is no longer regular. But my point was the same as your lengthier reply to Amorette.
I assume you never went to school and are completely self-taught then? Since all teachers are such a bore?
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Government grants?!? What world do you live in? I spend a fair amount of time with profs here in academia (history, so…), and rarely do they get straight government grants, unless you call a salary paid by the state to be a “government grant” rather than a salary for work they perform. Of course, I’m not in a top-tier school, so there is that. Plus, I’d guess that most “government grants” go to places that emphasize STEM. Us losers in the humanities aren’t rolling in fat stacks of government grants, yo. More like begging for crumbs, as history is now a meaningless exercise for most people, a hoop to jump through on the way to a “practical” degree. Because the only thing that matters is getting a degree that’s going to make you rich. Who cares about the pursuit of knowledge, cause that gets you jack and shit in a neo-liberal capitalist economy.
Sure, some profs can’t teach their way out of a paper bag. Then again, tons of people can’t do they job they got an education for–it’s all relative. And to be fair, getting a PhD in whatever, your job is not necessarily about teaching–it is about research and expanding generally knowledge in your field. It’s about being a scholar (well, in theory). I’ve known some fine educators at the university level and I’ve known some duds. The point is not to have hand holding at the university level. I do far more teaching as a TA than some of the tenure track/ tenured profs. And we get vague guidelines on what to teach, which is both good and bad. For example, we have to teach all of the US survey. That means colonial to now. I don’t get to split it at reconstruction. In 15 weeks. All of US history in 15 weeks. Want to give that a try?
On top of that, few people use any part of the education they receive in their day to day or even work lives after graduation.
Most degrees exist solely to make HR easier, specifically hiring. If you get 1000 resumes for 10 jobs, it is easy to just filter out all the applications without a degree, then look through the rest for someone worthwhile. This bullshit applies to grad degrees also - I had a policy research job for 5 years after my MA, and nobody ever asked me so much as what subject my degrees might be in. I spent a lot of time, effort and no small amount of money for 2 letters on my resume just to open a door.
It would probably be better for the employer to think carefully about exactly what they want from an employee, then come up with a way to recruit those people - regardless of credentials. But that would be costly in the short-term (though probably not the long-term) and would require a willingness to assign sufficient resources to doing it. Few are willing.
As a result we get an explosion in meaningless credential farms, complete with burgeoning debt, job lock and all the rest. A few generations unable to take risks or innovate in any meaningful way because of crushing debt loads will help ensure the (relative) decline of the countries that have decided that credentials are more important that skills while simultaneously deciding that said credentials should be very expensive to acquire. Lunacy.
Of course, the progeny of the rich won’t have that problem, and can afford to take those unpaid internships at the end as well. So no problem I guess.
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Whatever else I was thinking of to post just went out the window.
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Its all lost in UK->US English translation. In UK English these are the top 10 universities, and universities can be made of colleges. In US English these are the top 10 colleges, then the language breaks 
Well, the BBC article is actually about why the UK did disproportionately well…
Sorry, if Yale is in the list then it is a list of places where rich people buy their children pieces of paper. I swear to you, literally the stupidest person I have ever met in my life had a PhD from Yale.
