Another delightful Oxbridge/American Universities debate

hey people how much people from your last school was accepted into oxbridge i am going to a sixform next year and from that sixform 3 people was excepted into oxbridge 2 cambridge 1 oxford what about u guys?

As wooster said, in the US money = class - though I dont claim much experience of the US and so can only relate this isolated experience: when in DC I was appalled by the clear juxtaposition of wealth and poverty - and as for the Government making class impossible - tax cuts across the board help the rich more than the poor when the economy is in the worst state since the 80s, or even the 30s - its almost as if Keynes never even wrote his General Theory! Impossible, Bush is nigh on encouraging it!

Just to clear up about WHAT the THES world ranking is measuring

50% Peer Review (a eurovision song contect style voting system voted on by academics from 88 countries)
20% Faculty per student (Staff Student ratio)
20% Citations per faculty (however only based on citations included in journals freely available to the compilers - so academics who publish in more specialised and/or subscriber only journals tend to have their contributions ignored)
5% International faculty (%age of staff from other countries)
5% Internatioanl students (%age of students from other countries)

NOTHING to do with selectivity or entry standards or even quality of undergraduate teaching

That's quite a strang system.

In the real world, a job interview for example, everyone is judged primarily by their ability, itself measured by grades - why should the fact that one can play tennis, or an instrument, have any influence on that, as it seems to in the US College system.

And as for you talking about our tax cuts. This is one of the key issues dividing the Democrats and the Republicans. Bush is a Republican--his interests are in the wealthier people

yes, but you said "As for you thinking America is more "class -sensitive" than Britain, I honestly beg to differ. The government itself makes it more impossible". Last time I checked it was a republican in the white house so this doesn't quite work.

I don't remember much about the chinese one (it was published in 2000 IIRC) - again it had a pretty heavy weighting on citation index of research - which as I say has a built in bias towards certain countries and subjects...as well as fairly random figures like number of nobel laureates on faculty (regardless of where the research to actually get the nobel prize took place).

Comparatively, the UK is still more class stratified. I mean America began without the notion of aristocracy. Yours is still very much instilled.

umm, no. Definitely wouldn't agree with that. In the states you have large numbers of people who are very wealthy, but you also have huge numbers in poverty. 12% in council houses is better than 12% living in poverty which is the figure in the US. Although the US figure is actually less than britains poverty figure, this is because it's measured differently - to live in poverty in the UK you need to earn less than 60% of the median income whereas in the US, in 1999, you needed to earn less than 28.5% which is an enormous difference.

Even as an economics major, I won't pretend to know what that means.

Hmm, would that be because your undergraduate teaching hasnt been great? Or perhaps because you've been too busy playing tiddly winks or learning the harmonica.

Nah. I've only taken one economics course. (I am also a history major.) But I was taking my mathematics and statistics requirements as well as worthless breadth requirements. But ask me again once I've completed my next economics course. I have a long way to go before I graduate.

And I play the piano (for 12 years) and sing opera (for 6 years) da*n it..not the harmonica.