Neutral mention · rule
I'm a researcher at Oxford, and I've both taught and studied here and in the US. The undergraduate teaching here is phenomenal. It's incredibly labor intensive for the staff, but the depth and breadth students are exposed to in their subject is astonishing. It's difficult to imagine how it can be improved. My favorite study of university rankings comes from faculty hiring markets, which compute implicit rankings by measuring which institutions tend to hire (PhD->faculty) from others. [1] It's not perfect, but at the very least it's a parameter free way to get a sense of how different universities view each other. The parameters in most university rankings are rather…
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arbitrary and game-able. Some have pointed to things like contextual admissions [2], and more broadly some identity politics capture of the administration for declining standards. While this might be true, in my view Oxford is still far more meritocratic than US institutions on the whole. There are no legacy admissions, and many subjects have difficult tests which better distinguish between applicants who have all done extremely well on national standardised tests (British A Levels are far more difficult than the SAT/ACT/AP exams.) Lastly, admissions at Oxford are devolved to the individual colleges, of which there are ~40. The faculty at each college directly interview and select the applicants which they will take as students. This devolved system and the friction it creates is surprisingly robust and makes complete ideological capture more difficult. The most pressing issue for Oxford's long-term viability as a leading institution, in my view, is the funding situation. For one the British economy is in a long, slow decline. Secondly, even though Oxford has money, there are lots of regulations/soft power influence from the British govt to standardise pay across the country, which makes top institutions like Oxford less competitive on the international market for PhD students, postdocs, and faculty in terms of pay. [1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400005 [2]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...