Are the best universities the poshest universities?

Well when they get to university former independent school pupils underperform former state pupils with the same grades...

the two leading hypotheses seem to boil down to either 'excessive spoonfeeding' or 'superficial polish' http://www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2013/06/two-new-reports-confirm-that-state-school-pupils-outperform-independent-ones-at-university/

Afraid that that article is outdated and they actually reported a mistake...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/university-funding-body-made-disturbing-blunder-with-claim-state-school-students-perform-better-a6718201.html

For all but those with the very highest A-level grades, state school graduates tend to have higher degree outcomes than independent school graduates with the same prior educational attainment

The HEFCE mistake was in 2015, the article I linked reported an earlier HEFCE report... 2013 is somewhat old - see below.

The corrected HEFCE report and the one quoted in the article show broadly the same thing, private school educated students get better degree classifications than state... When the HEFCE looks at school type and entry grades, the independent school underperformance found by the Sutton Trust, OBU and Cardiff reappears...

http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2015/201521/

Best in what perspective?

Robert Gordon University is ranked about 55 but is the best university for graduate employment. Another middle of the road ex poly - Reading probably has the best construction management programmes. Oxford and Cambridge in contrast are definitely best at teaching posh kids PPE and Anglo Saxon Studies.

Some universities (in particular in the US) are fantastic research institutions - MIT, Stanford, Yale, Harvard etc - but their teaching is actually pretty mediocre. Their professors are so busy writing arcane papers for publishing in obscure journals that nobody ever reads that the dirty work of teaching of undergraduates often falls to hapless PHd students. The quality of law teaching is a particular case in point - you won't get a better legal education from Yale than you will from the University of New Mexico - but you'll get a diploma that makes you more employable.

Exactly, there's absolutely nothing posh about a University in the centre of London with the 3rd lowest acceptance rates and the 6th highest percentage of private school students.

FYI Howard, Reading is not an ex-poly. It grew out of an extension college established by, of all places, Christ Church Oxford before receiving its charter in 1926. So it's much grander than other redbricks :-). I have no connection with the university.

Not just the centre of London, it's in South Kensington. Not many other posher postcodes than that