Are there any other 'prestigous' universities in the UK apart from from Oxbridge?

[mids2019]

Are there any other 'prestigous' universities in the UK apart from Oxbridge?

My daughter was watching some American teen thing yesterday on Netflix and there was girl who's entire future lay on getting into Yale and Ivy League entrance was the be all and end all for this particular group of teenagers.

I know the US has a different HE system and culture but do we still have similar views in the UK in 2022? If there are prestigious universities in the UK how would you define this prestige? If we only allow Oxbridge the prestige label does this mean anyone who wishes to go a prestigious university has one (or two) Oxbridge or busy type application experiences then that ship sails?

Or maybe prestige is an archaic class ridden concept that is fading this millennium?

I was drawn to one of the RG v other university discussions and it may appear that the RG is being used as an artificial label to convey prestige in an HE environment where competition for Oxbridge is more intense than ever.

I think RG is a bit of a scam tbh, I did a highly competitive grad scheme a few years ago and I’m now a mentor for students on the same grad scheme and I can’t say I have noticed a significant difference between the students from RG unis and non-RG unis in terms of academic or work based performance.

The only difference I have noticed is the students who have a superiority complex tend to come from RG unis, which I think may stem from believing and being continually told they’re superior because they went to a RG uni, but performance wise there isn’t really a difference.

mids - sorry, to answer the second part of your question - I think the trend for US applications is largely driven by the bar being set slightly higher for very selective independent / grammar school candidates at Oxbridge (fair enough in my view), combined with greater awareness of the US application process in general. As I said, in the schools mine were in, many parents studied in the US themselves and so they don't really consider anything else. But another factor is the US system appeals to those who have significant "extra curriculars" because there are so many scholarships at US unis and people are often amazed that they can get s scholarship for having been in a reasonably successful rowing or football team or something. For US unis, they have to "brand" themselves, basically. They have to have evidence if leadership, community / charity work, sports and other things and they have to tell their "story' and this kind of thing. Oxbridge don't really give a hoot about the "rounded person" - it's all about the academics. So different application styles appeal to different students.

St Andrews is consistently in the top 3 in all the UK University rankings and league tables, and is not a RG university. Bath is consistently in the top 10, and is not a RG university. Loughborough and Lancaster are always in or around top 10 and arent in the RG. Queen Mary is a RG university and is solidly mid-table in the rankings, well below other non RG like Surrey and Strathclyde. All of which tells me that RG is a marketing tool, not an automatic actual indicator of quality or superiority. Clearly they are not going to be languishing near the bottom of any tables, but there are also clearly equally impresive universities that serve their students just as well outside of the RG. Prestige is in the eye of the beholder and what parents in their fifties and sixties remeber as prestigious can be very different from what students and employers think ime. Because they are looking at the data, not an incomplete 'club', and they live in an increasingly data-driven world.

The kids at my dc top London independent etc etc are all clamouring to get into non RG Bath for example and draw no distinction between there and, say, Warick, Exeter, Durham, outside of Oxbridge. Entrance requirements (and prestige) are considered equal.

Yes I totally agree about Bath. It's consistently higher in the league tables now than Bristol, for instance. They offer loads of 4-year courses with inbuilt industry placement years. Campus itself is a bit 60s, but at least they have a campus and the city of Bath itself is obviously beautiful. They also make lower offers for an A or A star in EPQ. Appeals to lots of Londoners I think, for all the above reasons and it's out if London but not miles away or inconvenient to travel back and forth.,

Why is it though that unis that feature in the top 10 in the U.K. league tables (such as St Andrews, Durham, Bath, LSE and Loughborough), don't feature as highly at all in the QS World League tables? In those, it's only Oxbridge and UCL that get into the top 10. LSE is in the 50s and St Andrews is about 100th. Why would this be?

Oxbridge , imperial and UCL typically also appear in the top 10 of any decent U.K. table. The QS rankings are the whole world, including the US - it's actually remarkable that the U.K. still has as many as four in the top ten.

Because the QS methodology and other international rankings give a high priority to research, research grants/funding, publications and citations, whereas domestic rankings for undergraduate programmes ignore research and focus on teaching quality, student satisfaction, library spending etc.

Also, on the subject of Russell group. It's a lobby group representing large research-intensive universities. Membership is not, and was not really ever supposed to be, an indicator of quality of undergraduate teaching,

If you want to know where is a good place to do a Phd, look at the international rankings like QS and the russell group membership, as these tell you where will have the research funding, facilities and most of the PhD places/studentships.
If you want to know where to find good undergraduate programmes with high student satisfaction, look at the domestic rankings and the national student survey.
There can be no definitive ranking of universities because universities combine two very different functions - research/postgraduate and teaching/undergraduate - and some can be much better at one than the other.

ErrolTheDragon - thanks. Yes I agree it is remarkable that we still have this, given we're such as small island!

Quite a lot of research seems to come out if the LSE though and certainly they have a very international student body, so I'm surprised it's not higher in the QS international tables.

Yes i know what you mean it is strange - apparently it is said to be something problematic about 'the QS rankings' that are used but I can't remember the details - someone on here who works in a RG uni explained it once (true or not, I don't know). Personally I am fine with my DC going to well regarded universities in the country they live in, I don't need it to be top of the World. I get why the US universities appeal to high-flyers though.

cross post :)

There can be no definitive ranking of universities because universities combine two very different functions - research/postgraduate and teaching/undergraduate - and some can be much better at one than the other.

In a nutshell, I think.

Everything depends on methodology. LSE offers a very narrow range of subjects. However as I pointed out upthread, LSE comes third in the world for Social Sciences and Management, but it ain't a great place to study drama or physics.

www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2022/social-sciences-management

(My understanding is that it's international reputation for Economics has improved over recent years, something that is reflected in the QS table where it is now 6th ahead of both Oxford and Cambridge.)

If you want to know where to find good undergraduate programmes with high student satisfaction,

Unfortunately the 'student satisfaction' metrics tend to be based on small sample sizes and may merely reflect a cohort that has less demanding standards than elsewhere. For sure if somewhere is anomalously low be cautious but they're not necessarily very meaningful.

It's because the QS world rankings are shit @acatwhisperer (love the user name by the way!).

Or for a more detailed explanation see @piisnot3's post 😀

Very briefly, so as not to bore everyone on the thread, the QS rankings are not considered a very reliable guide because they overweight peer review (which is obviously open to personal and institutional bias); they set a lot of store in citations ie published papers (the strength of research at a university is largely irrelevant to a teenage undergraduate, though of course much more important in post-graduate study); and it also is slanted towards natural and medical sciences over social sciences (hence the relatively low position of LSE). There are also suggestions in some quarters that the size of a university might affect its QS ranking.

Like all such league tables, it contains some useful information but to hold it up as a definitive metric is probably unwise.

Worth remembering QS offer Consultancy services and some stories that Unis that have signed up have found that the ranking gets better..

the strength of research at a university is largely irrelevant to a teenage undergraduate, though of course much more important in post-graduate study

I don't agree it's 'largely irrelevant' in STEM disciplines for undergrads - just it's not the be-all-and-end-all.
Having said that, DH and my experience in our long scientific careers is that while the likes of Harvard, MIT and oxbridge certainly do outstanding research in some fields, they're inevitably not the best at everything, and also that a PhD taken in some large groups may be quite mundane 'cannon fodder' doing the prof's bidding rather than developing as a more independent researcher.

Maybe I haven't phrased that correctly (wouldn't be the first time!). Universities benefit from the presence of outstanding researchers, for certain, but I am unconvinced that such people do a lot of undergraduate lecturing/tutoring. In my experience they try to avoid too much interaction with undergraduates! So while there are massive benefits to having such academics at your university, in general, I don't know how much benefit an individual undergraduate gets from it.

The system may be different in the US, I don't have any experience of working over there.

DD2 did her STEM Masters at at a university many people won't be familiar with (though you and your DH would be @ErrolTheDragon). She most definitely did original research, in a bio-secure lab using cutting-edge tech that she wouldn't have been allowed anywhere near as an undergraduate. It was intellectually stimulating but very hard work, and a world away from undergraduate study.

Ivy League colleges take about 0.5% of all students going to college in the USA so any American kid without a backup (and there are plenty of other excellent public and private universities) is an idiot. It’s really a crapshoot. most employers only care here your grad degree is from anyway, undergrad (as long as you are from a decent college) is just not the big deal kid think it is.

In the UK, the most prestigious universities are UCL and Imperial.

After Oxbridge...

UCL? Really?

Yes, why do you query UCL?

Sorry I just looked at the global rankings and can see that UCL is indeed there, after Oxbridge and Imperial. Sorry, I hadn't realised that.