Reply to How do Americans view universities abroad such as McGill, St Andrews, or similar?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t know what y’all are smoking but I just asked a few of my UK-based colleagues what they think of St. Andrews and they said it is meh. Decent school but not too hard to get into. They also said that LSE is not considered as prestigious any more because they have been loading up with full freight international students and their admissions standards have gone down.[/quote]

I mean your middle aged (presumably) colleagues hold a view likely representative of decades ago when they were applying to and going to university, St Andrews has long been a solid, decent university, but its ascent has been more recent.

The now world leading IR school was established in the 1990s, they started recruiting Americans in the 1980s, efforts that bore fruit more recently, alongside Will and Kate, which drew more students and made St Andrews even more selective. the rankings rise has been more in the past two decades, also alongside the addition of thousands of students and expansion and addition of programs and research.

Kinda like Northeastern in Boston, which was a commuter school two decades ago but has substantially beefed up its programs in recent years and is now a high caliber research university. Though St Andrews was never a commuter school and the St Andrews rankings rise was more organic than Northeastern's.
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The fact that William and Kate went there was not exactly a boost to its status as an academic institution. I don’t know about Kate’s school achievements but William was not an academic high achiever by any means. Their going there attracted a lot of Americans who wanted to be like them/mix in their circles and also other Brits of a similar social class and level of academic intelligence. That might have pushed the application numbers up but it didn’t help with the quality of the teaching or research or any of the things that universities are typically judged on. So no, St Andrews is still not a top UK university, though it is perfectly ok and would be fine on anyone’s resume. But not a place you’d turn down Yale (or Oxbridge) for. [/quote]

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