Elite Universities and Their Cultural and Political Dominance ?

[Monoriu]

Mono you're narrowing it down to job applications, the thread is about the political and cultural clout, or otherwise, of these institutions.

The problem of picking a suitable person out from a crowd applies to both job applications and many other situations.  Not to mention that getting a good job is a crucial step in obtaining political clout further down the road. 

[CountDeMoney]

So what do you think of your country's academic elite ?

Incredibly overrated, and the sense of elitism is perpetuated by the continual cultivation of their own self-serving mystique.  They are the original self-licking ice cream cones.

[CountDeMoney]

I don't have a problem with it.

Of course you don't.  You're gay.  It's a well-known scientific fact that fags are complete snobs when it comes to branding.

[garbon]

I don't have a problem with it.

Of course you don't.  You're gay.  It's a well-known scientific fact that fags are complete snobs when it comes to branding.

If you have a good marketing team - you can't be all that bad.

[Richard Hakluyt]

A proportion of my friends went to Oxbridge and many didn't. The ones who did were all quite serious-minded folk who had developed an interest in a particular subject (usually a science) at a relatively early age. The ones who didn't were under-performing layabouts who drank too much and had very eclectic intellectual interests. It is a small dataset, but IMO they let the right ones in.

Mind you, nearly all of these people were from families that had only become middle-class due to the success of their working-class fathers in the 50s and 60s, a golden age of social mobility in the UK. Some of them actually got a bit chippy when they realised that some of the other undergraduates were actually a bit dim but came from more elite social backgrounds.

[Sheilbh]

I agree. 

I don't really regret not going to Oxbridge.  I'm not sure I'd have enjoyed it, but I do regret not working harder at school.  But that's for different reasons.  Personally I also regret not working harder at university as well as at school.  For example I remember lots of research seminars that sounded quite interesting that I didn't go to, though I thought about it.  I wish I'd taken advantage of the space and diversity of uni to study a bit more.

I have far more problems with public schools than Oxbridge.

[Zanza]

We don't really have elite universities as far as I can tell. Sure, some universities have a better reputation in a certain field, but there is no cultural or political clout for certain universities and the elites aren't drawn from just a small set of universities either.

[Barrister]

I gave this some thought.  Canada as far as I can tell really does not have a particular subset of schools that are markedly superior to all others.  Some schools are somewhat more thought of than others - U of T, McGill, Dalhousie, UBC, U of A, but our political and business elite are hardly dominated by grads from only those schools.  It's nothing like the situation of Oxbridge, or the US Ivy League.

Given how the US and UK are so similar to us in so many things though I wonder why that is.  Perhaps just a factor of being such a geographically huge country, but without such an enormous population?  I know in legal recruiting there are only 12-15 schools producing graduates, so large firms can easily assess candidates from all of them - there's no need to start weeding people out merely by which school they attended.

[Admiral Yi]

Seems to me the Canadian situation might be explained by lack of longevity.

[Jacob]

Seems to me the Canadian situation might be explained by lack of longevity.

Compared to the US? When were the prestigious universities founded?

In Canada (according to some quick wikipedia searches), U of T is from 1827, Dalhousie is from 1818, McGill is from 1821 and Queen's is from 1841.

Or did you mean something else?

[Admiral Yi]

I think Harvard and Yale go back to the 17th.

[Valmy]

Compared to the US? When were the prestigious universities founded?

1600s

[Zanza]

Age alone does not make a university prestigious in these parts.

[Valmy]

Age alone does not make a university prestigious in these parts.

Naturally not but it does give a university a chance to build up prestige over the generations.  Especially since for awhile these literally trained EVERYBODY who was in the elite.

But other very old universities in the US, like William and Mary, are not elite.  So it is not age alone.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Most universities in England are not very old. But Oxford and Cambridge were founded back in the 13th century. No more universities were founded till the 19th century, instead new colleges were added to the two old ones.

I would imagine the situation in Germany reflects former political fragmentation, with each of the more prestigious political units having it's own university for some time.