Will any university in the UK ever be comparable to Oxbridge?

It does now but that is a new foundation. Dundee got the law school, the medical school and the Elvis LP collection in the divorce.

The Bute had been around for some time....

Also they don't do clinicals at St Andrews, youusually go onto elsewhere in Scotland, Manchester and now Barts I believe.

St Andrews doesn't award the MB ChB only the BSc. As a result, it'll never have a high ranking in the medicine league tables because it has no hospital (and no St Andrews Community Hospital doesn't count lol its basicaly a minor injury clinic with 3 GPs) and can't do a huge portion of the medical research that requires patients. Not only that, its in the middle of nowhere so it will always be difficult to attract researchers.

St Andrews though excels in teaching the first 3 years and thats what it will always be good for in medicine. Most clinical schools that accept St Andrews students say that St Andrews students are prepared well.

What would you say about computer science?


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I wonder what people's reactions would be if one day, london metropolitan is comparable to oxbridge.
Im guessing it would the change the face of top unis in the uk.

In terms of reputation/prestige, etc., will any universities ever be on par with the famous Oxbridge? There seems to be such a gap between them with other top uni's such as UCL, LSE and Imperial - buy why?


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It does now but that is a new foundation. Dundee got the law school, the medical school and the Elvis LP collection in the divorce.

Not only that, its in the middle of nowhere so it will always be difficult to attract researchers.

No offence but St Andrews has many world class researchers on staff and performs very well in the RAE across all its subject areas. That statement simply isn't true. They manage to recruit one of UCL's leading profs recently so they can't be that crap in the area of medical research.

On a more general note, I'm surprised about the number of people on here who seem to speak with absolute authority about St Andrews, but clearly have never been near the place or actually know much about it.

Ouch, last line hurt. I'm currently a medic at St Andrews and while i do appreciate the teaching and especially the fairness and explanation of the grading I just don't see the world class research. I've seen the same exact research news about candles and soot on the University's research page for a year now and their news updates contain mostly marine biology research (which i know St Andrews is very strong in). We aren't given the breadth of options for our final dissertation as some other unis are given (if you aren't into psychology, molecular biology or public health you are mostly out of luck). Who is this UCL prof again?

Top tier: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, UPenn, Chicago, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Cornell, Johns Hopkins (for Medicine)...

Not just for medicine. In my experience, the students at Johns Hopkins are more intelligent, knowledgeable, analytic and intellectually well-rounded than those at Oxford. They're also much harder working. I say that as an Oxonian.

There's nothing to choose between the respective faculties. The facilities (labs, IT etc) are hands down better at JHU. The libraries are comparable.

Oxford has a better reputation but that's because JHU hides its light under a bushel.

Oh no I'm wary of the fact JHU is very strong across most if not all of its departments. It's just that the Medical School is perhaps what it is most famous for internationally or perhaps its jewel in the crown as it were.

In terms of reputation/prestige, etc., will any universities ever be on par with the famous Oxbridge? There seems to be such a gap between them with other top uni's such as UCL, LSE and Imperial - buy why?


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Isn't Warwick ranked higher than Oxford for Maths?

No.

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The first paragraph is absolute rubbish. LSE and Warwick are both ahead of Cambridge by a long way for research but that does not mean it has better teachers. At undergraduate level you don't need nobel prize winners to teach you. So yes, the achievements of academics is pretty irrelevant for undergraduates. In fact, arguably my best supervisor for first year at Cambridge is a Ph.D student and I ended up getting one of the best grades in the year for his subject. One of the poorer supervisors was the most distinguished academics and she has now moved to UCL, which has better research than Cambridge but now they've got another bad teacher! At a top institution all tutors have enough knowledge to teach you the stuff - it's how good they are at teaching that matters. LSE and Warwick (and other places too) have been better than Cambridge in economics research for a long long time, but the fact remains that the better students go to Cambridge. You can deny it all you want but the quality of LSE and Warwick students is lowered by the fact that most (not all) of their best offer holders go to Cambridge. You also mention that the best researchers teach undergraduates which is just a load of rubbish in many cases. Rarely if ever will you get a nobel laureate teaching undergraduates and it doesn't matter if they do because it doesn't mean they will be able to explain the required concepts better than less celebrated academics.

The reason I say Cambridge is harder is simple: they have a higher quality intake (often quite substantially) yet get more grades below 2.1 and similar or less firsts (less than LSE for example) despite having a workload that is significantly higher and more support via supervisions etc.

Also you are right that Warwick > Oxford for maths in terms of research. But I'd still rather go to Oxford as you'll get much better teaching and supervisions, thus learning more. The fact is that the calibre of students at Oxbridge is and remains to be higher than for other institutions in most subjects. The workload is higher, the papers are often harder and the entry standards are higher. You can argue until you're blue in the face about the calibre of students but the entry standards for undergraduates are pretty telling (and regardless of what you say A level results (particularly UMS) correlate well with degree classification).

If you want to argue that the calibre of economics students at LSE, for example, compares to those at Cambridge you're having a laugh. At my school there were 8 people who applied to both LSE and Cambridge for economics - all of them got LSE offers and made them whereas I was the only one to get an offer from Cambridge. If you've got 10A*s and 4A*s predicted and a good PS (which could be plagiarised) and reference, you'll get an LSE offer. The same is definitely not true for Cambridge.