Is Doxbridge a thing?

[mids2019]

Oxford and Cambridge both outside top 3 in uni rankings for first time https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15114137/Oxford-Cambridge-outside-three-prestigious-university-rankings-time-London-School-Economics-first.html?ito=native_share_article-top

I think the DM was trying to make a point about social inclusion but given the Times is a reputable university of guide is this a beginning of a shift where Oxbridge aren't undisputed in their dominance?

Durham is a really good university and in 2025 is it that Oxford and Cambridge have competitors?

In the end, it’s the quality of the specific course that matters most.

You are confusing correlation and causation.

You do realise that students that are accepted into Durham/warwick/imperial etc have exactly the same grades as those who get into Oxford and Cambridge don’t you?

There are far more qualified applicants than spaces. They aren’t on a different level.

the global rankings are far more related to research. That has close to zero effect on undergraduate students.

There are some interesting comments here but the thrust of it from the OP seems to be that Durham is better because it's posher and has more privately educated pupils there. Nice. I don't know enough about it but I find it hard to believe that privately educated students are largely of a higher calibre than state-educated. Oxbridge don't do contextual offers do they so they'll have the same grades as each other and many state-educated students will have achieved these grades in far less privileged circumstances than those who are privately educated.

As for prestigious careers still being dominated by those from private schools, I think this needs drilling down further. DS is considering going into law and perhaps becoming a barrister and has researched this. He found that while most of the 'top' chambers have a huge proportion of people from private schools and then Oxbridge, this is skewed by age. As you start looking at the younger groups their backgrounds are a bit more varied. I've also read that, while, blind recruitment has become more common, it is still that case that Oxbridge graduates are more likely to be successful in those circumstances, though I didn't see how many had also been to private schools.

The Times is clickbaiting. Oxbridge fall out of the top three is a headline worldwide and it’s very easy to manipulate the data to make any uni go up and down the rankings, Oxbridge stays in the top three isn’t. I doubt applicants to Oxbridge are going to dry up.

Imperial, Oxford and Cambridge are the three which make it into the top 10 internationally fairly consistently.

UCL and LSE sometimes, depending on year. Not Durham or St Andrews though.

There are loads of brilliant universities, and a handful of internationally excellent ones.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/latest/world-ranking

LSE only sometimes makes it as it's just social sciences and doesn't really do STEM. But for economics and the other social sciences LSE is world leading.

Each set of rankings focuses on different things and some of the student satisfaction scores come from very low numbers of students some unis give rewards for returning questionnaires others don’t so really not a true reflection. But there are lots of great unis, but the best one for you will always be the one where you like course content and would be happy to study for the duration of the course.

Stripycats

I guess the interesting question is what the result of Oxbridge taking more state applicants is actually doing in terms of the proportion of 'top' jobs going to the privately educated. According to the Sutton trust you still have dominance of top professions by the privately schooled yet Oxbridge have tried to address this by taking more state students with maybe questionable effect.

The question is are the privately educated with connections getting to the same positions bypassing Oxbridge? Does the Oxbridge label matter a great deal when it comes to the ultimate destination of these young people or is schooling the major factor? There also is the question about whether Oxbridge are missing out on talent as they diversify....i.e. letting some private school talent 'leak' out?

I think that’s fair. I was using Ivy League loosely. The point I am trying to get across is that, for certain jobs and milieux in the USA, especially on the east coast, St Andrews is a good uni to have gone to.

Example, I have a brother in law in Manhattan in finance, and a brother of a different brother in law in Big Law in Charleston. Americans love and boost endlessly their alma maters. People this connected talking up St Andrews professionally is very helpful. On the flip side , Imperial, UCL or Durham don’t have any brand awareness.

For the next tier after Oxbridge, the courses may be as good or even better than Oxbridge, but the brand recognition is more niche. I would imagine an engineering degree from Imperial College would get a lot of kudos in China for instance. Or an economics degree from the LSE in Washington DC.

So no, nothing else is on par with Oxbridge in terms of international reputation, but the next tier is very, very good. And, that next tier is hard to put into a hierarchy because they have niche reputations that punch hardest in particular subjects and contexts.

You need to look at what is being measured.
these league tables reveal what I said previously. Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial excel in research environment and research quality.
This is almost irrelevant to undergraduate students.

look at teach quality. They do really well but the American and Chinese universities hit higher. If you are focussed on the ‘top 3’ then you would find Oxbridge and Imperial pretty much never make those positions.

Cambridge actually scores surprisingly low for industry advancement.

@Fgvdssi agree that Oxbridge, LSE and Imperial have international brand status but certainly would not put Kings and UCL above Durham. I’d put next tier as Durham, UCL, St Andrews and Edinburgh next perhaps Warwick but don’t really know it. Then Kings, Bristol, Bath etc.
But anyway the subject league tables are more important though also should be taken with a healthy amount of salt - they don’t offer my DD’s course at Oxford or St A, and only a related one at Cambridge. Durham, Glasgow, Bath and Loughborough rank highest (the CUG does put Oxford and C as top but I don’t understand why as I mentioned neither offer it as an undergraduate degree).
One of the recognised best unis in the WORLD for a subject my DD was considering is at the University of Hertfordshire. Just saying.
@Truetoselfyes, not due to the royal connection (no one would accuse William of being a brain box) but it has become very competitive in recent years.
Anyway, as someone who went to the third best art and design uni in the world according to QS (could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw that) it’s largely meaningless. You get out what you put in.

Imperial is definitely ‘up there’ but doesn’t have the fancy buildings and is in London
so it’s a different (albeit also fantastic) experience. Due to the STEM focus, employability stats are also excellent which is very important at the moment when grad jobs are tricky to come by.

My theory is that as well as Oxbridge widening their participation in terms of social inclusion employers are now actively doing the same but by recruiting from non Oxbridge unis.

Hence those good private candidates who were rejected to allow social mobility at Oxbridge are now being recruited and the Oxbridge kids aren't because they are trying to recruit fewer from Oxbridge! Thus it's backfiring in a way they didn't expect.

Imperial does have fancy nice buildings. Many of which I've explored in my free time.

Research quality leads to higher rankings which leads to better applicants and better attendees which leads to a higher achieving peer group which has many positive effects for students who attend.

But employers doing Social Mobility properly look at occupation on main wage earner in the family at age 14. This isn’t affected by which Uni’s posh people go to. Also Durham at least is working very hard to improve its social inclusion.

That’s the rub, though - do you improve social inclusion by prioritising people with the grades who ALSO have x,y,z characteristics (Durham’s approach), or do you take the Oxbridge approach of just prioritising the characteristics and then dropping the grades for those students? The Times seems to be taking a dim view of the latter.

As I’ve pointed out earlier in the thread, Durham costs the same as all other unis, and their only barrier to entry is grades. So if they’re attracting a disproportionate number of private school applicants, I suspect there are a few factors at play:

1. Durham halls are split between catered with shared rooms & bathrooms (especially in the pretty UNESCO city center colleges) and more modern shared flats with en suite bathrooms. The pretty colleges are a big draw for applicants, but sharing rooms is no longer normal for today’s students. I suspect that kids who’ve been to boarding school are more relaxed about giving up on a self-contained single room with en suite for a college with massive character. (Disclosure - my DD is state educated and dithered for ages over firming Durham because of the “threat” of having a room mate. I told her that in my day 30 years ago, working class 1st gen uni plebs like me thought room sharing and crappy accomodation was standard for students - we didn’t expect snazzy flats and en suites at all!)
2. There are a lot of unis in that corner of the country. Newcastle Uni, Northumbria, Newcastle College, Gateshead College, Sunderland, etc etc. They are all bigger than Durham in terms of student population. (Some much more so - Northumbria is twice the size.) If you need to live at home to make uni affordable in the NE, there are lots of good and probably easier options than Durham - which makes Durham’s applications pretty open to people who don’t mind being 5+ hours drive from home, with the attendent costs of managing visits home over the year.
3. With the above, plus the modern student expectations of banging nightlife, private en suite rooms, etc, Durham is going to appeal mainly to kids who like the course the way it’s being taught at Durham, who like the college life and uni traditions, and are willing to give up flash modern student accommodation to get it.

So the Durham “package” isn’t for everyone. It’s a small place with a big uni, and they choose to keep the entry criteria is very high. I don’t think that is a sign that they are nefariously trying to bolster private school applicants over state school applicants, though.

Durham also had less international students? So a lot of the well off private school British kids are going to Durham? And a lot of them have top grades? One can maybe see why for some people that is attractive?

As a Durham grad - I'd discourage my kids from going there - the class prejudice was fucking appalling 20 years ago and is still terrible now. The accommodation, as people described above, is shit by comparison with the student "norm" now (Moatside Court anyone?!) and, in hindsight I think I didn't get a great education there. I went back to do a PGCE and that was appallingly run.

In contrast I went to do a second degree (vocational) at a MN-despair ex-poly and the quality and rigour of the teaching was off the scale compared to Durham.

That’s the rub, though - do you improve social inclusion by prioritising people with the grades who ALSO have x,y,z characteristics (Durham’s approach), or do you take the Oxbridge approach of just prioritising the characteristics and then dropping the grades for those students? The Times seems to be taking a dim view of the latter.

Neither Oxford nor Cambridge make contextual offers. I don't know what Durham does.

What makes prestige then? What makes let's say Cambridge or LSE "special" for their respective fields compared to Hull, Birmingham, Nottingham, Bristol etc.

Do Cambridge not make contextual offers? They did when I went there - a very long time ago, admittedly. If you went to a private school it was a much harder entry bar than from a comprehensive in Cumbria (and fair enough) and they were far more amenable to people from the latter missing their grades by quite some margin. But has that changed?

Either way both Oxford and Cambridge make it pretty clear they'll give the benefit of the doubt to a promising student from a "bad" school over a good one from a private school. They've been clobbered by successive governments to do so, while Durham etc are under comparatively little pressure to do the same and consequently take the people predicted and achieving top grades, who tend to go to very good private schools.

Durham does make contextual offers. The criteria are on their website. I remember it being talked about when we visited.

Ha, we were “warned” by people who really dislike Durham that it’s full of rich international students!