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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How familiar are you with the UK schools? Hard to compare as the American university system is its own beast and differs in some very significant ways from the British system. In general, American universities are much wealthier and at the elite level, much smaller. But in terms of prestige and academic quality (with an eye on research, since that tips the scale in global reputation tables) I'd very roughly put it somewhat like this.

HYPSM

Oxbridge = Columbia, Caltech

UCL/LSE/Imperial/St Andrews = Penn/Duke/Cornell/Northwestern/Chicago/Berkeley

KCL/Edinburgh/Durham = Hopkins/Brown/Dartmouth/Rice/UCLA/UMich

...or some iteration. There are way more elite U.S. schools, and they're typically much more selective.[/quote]

Brit here. I agree that it’s hard to compare, and you also need ot factor in what your American student wants to do afterwards with their UK degree. 
I think Oxbridge is as prestigious as HYS (not sure I’d include others but maybe).
The next rung down is Imperial, LSE, and possibly UCL depending on department. St Andrews isn’t up there at all - it’s popular with Americans but not particularly prestigious in the UK. Then after that come all of the Russell group, but exactly where they rank completely depends on the subject in question. [/quote]

"Oxbridge" is always ranked as one of the top 3 universities in the world. I may be biased as a grad, but I would say both are better than Harvard. [/quote]

I'd agree there's a bit of a British bias there. IIRC the British publications tend to rank British institutions favorably vis-a-vis their American counterparts. I think Harvard is pretty unanimously considered the most prestigious university in the world, and it has the endowment to back that up. For the record, I'm not a Harvard grad and think it's a flawed institution in many ways, but I'd be foolish to pretend its reputation doesn't stand for itself.

I think even the equivalencies in 19:46 are a bit generous. I'd generally put Oxbridge = Ivy League (+ Stanford, MIT et al), and maybe the rung immediately below that (LSE, Imperial, UCL) as = to schools like Duke, Northwestern, Hopkins, UCB. But I would even put schools like UCLA, UM, Rice head to head with that second rung in terms of student quality and academic caliber.[/quote]

I agree, Oxbridge admits a much larger contingent of students than most Ivy League schools (maybe except Cornell) since each of them has about 30+ colleges that do their own admissions. [b]And the acceptance rate is a lot higher too (around 20%). [/b]Don't get me wrong, they're all pretty elite, but if you really want to split hairs, the perceived difference between someone who went to Balliol versus St Edmunds Hall (where DC did an exchange year) is probably equivalent to the perceived difference between an average Harvard student versus a Cornell student. [/quote]

This is misleading.  Because you must meet the admissions criteria to even apply, [b]the pool of applicants is much stronger than the pool of applicants that applies to HYPSM+.[/b]  The 20% figure is not really apples to apples.  You would need to figure out how many candidates to The American school that are similarly in the top 1-2% academically are accepted/rejected.[/quote]

How do you know this?[/quote]

I am not that poster but I am English and I know this because the school will not permit you to apply to Oxford or Cambridge unless you meet the criteria, they can refused to endorse your application and write your references - it is not a privately controlled process. You can apply to up to 5 universities on UCAS maximum. You cannot apply to both Cambs and OX - when you do apply to them, you have to put either at the top of the list of 5. When you do that there are multiple universities who will no longer consider you if you put them 2nd or lower.

Cultural knowledge comes when you grow up in a place.[/quote]

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