Elite Universities and Their Cultural and Political Dominance ?

[dps]

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

1600s

Not all of them.  Even in the Ivy League, only Yale and Harvard are that old--most of the rest of the Ivy League schools were founded in the 1700s, and Cornell IIRC wasn't founded until after the Civil War.  And Stanford, which is arguably the most prestigious American university outside the Ivy League, wasn't founded until the 1890s IIRC, well after dozens of state universities that are just mid-level schools in terms of prestige.

I don't think that even Harvard and Yale, though, have the same cultural dominance in the States that Oxford and Cambridge have in the UK.

[Valmy]

Not all of them.  Even in the Ivy League, only Yale and Harvard are that old--most of the rest of the Ivy League schools were founded in the 1700s, and Cornell IIRC wasn't founded until after the Civil War.  And Stanford, which is arguably the most prestigious American university outside the Ivy League, wasn't founded until the 1890s IIRC, well after dozens of state universities that are just mid-level schools in terms of prestige.

Well ok pretty much anything founded prior to 1776 has a certain bit of cache.  Well except Rutgers.

[The Brain]

We don't have elite universities in the sense that they command special respect in wide circles or are well established in general culture, like for instance Oxford/Cambridge etc. What university you went to pretty much only matters within your professional field. The main divide is between the older unis and the large number of new (<40 y/o) "universities" out in the boonies that are no where near qualified to carry the name.

Uppsala (1477) and Lund (1668) universities have the most traditions and are respected, Uppsala in particular if I may say so. Other high status places are the Royal Institute of Technology (1827), Chalmers University of Technology (1829), the Stockholm School of Economics (1909) and Karolinska Institutet (medicine, 1810).

Stockholm University (1878) has no special rep. It's big, 'sall.

[Admiral Yi]

And Stanford, which is arguably the most prestigious American university outside the Ivy League, wasn't founded until the 1890s IIRC, well after dozens of state universities that are just mid-level schools in terms of prestige.

Stanford's prestige is arguably a result of the PC and internet revolutions.

Brain: how did a uni in Sweden end up with a name like Chalmers?

[Richard Hakluyt]

I suppose we should be grateful that Chalmers does not specialise in nautical technology 

[dps]

And Stanford, which is arguably the most prestigious American university outside the Ivy League, wasn't founded until the 1890s IIRC, well after dozens of state universities that are just mid-level schools in terms of prestige.

Stanford's prestige is arguably a result of the PC and internet revolutions.

Uh, no.  I know that it was considered a prestigious school back when I was in jr high and high school in the 70s.

[The Brain]

And Stanford, which is arguably the most prestigious American university outside the Ivy League, wasn't founded until the 1890s IIRC, well after dozens of state universities that are just mid-level schools in terms of prestige.

Stanford's prestige is arguably a result of the PC and internet revolutions.

Brain: how did a uni in Sweden end up with a name like Chalmers?

Chalmers was founded in 1829. The university is named after the major benefactor, William Chalmers, one of the directors of the successful Swedish East India Company in Göteborg.

His father was a Scotsman who moved to Sweden in 1722.

[garbon]

And Stanford, which is arguably the most prestigious American university outside the Ivy League, wasn't founded until the 1890s IIRC, well after dozens of state universities that are just mid-level schools in terms of prestige.

Stanford's prestige is arguably a result of the PC and internet revolutions.

Uh, no.  I know that it was considered a prestigious school back when I was in jr high and high school in the 70s.

And certainly Stanford has long been seen as the pinnacle of education in California. That's the sole reason that I actually applied.

[Admiral Yi]

Up until the dot.com boom I considered Berkeley more prestigious than Stanford.

[The Larch]

The university where I got my degree was founded in the XVth century. It's no big deal.

[dps]

Up until the dot.com boom I considered Berkeley more prestigious than Stanford.

I always just considered them a bunch of misguided lefties, at best.

[Jacob]

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

Ah okay yeah. That's a significant difference.

[garbon]

Up until the dot.com boom I considered Berkeley more prestigious than Stanford.

I always just considered them a bunch of misguided lefties, at best.

When trying to look up on this - found this interesting article on rankings:

http://www.usnews.com/news/national/articles/2008/05/16/the-birth-of-college-rankings

When U.S. News started the college and university rankings 25 years ago, no one imagined that these lists would become what some consider to be the 800-pound gorilla of American higher education, important enough to be the subject of doctoral dissertations, academic papers and conferences, endless debate, and constant media coverage. What began with little fanfare has spawned imitation college rankings in at least 21 countries, including Canada, China, Britain, Germany, Poland, Russia, Spain, and Taiwan.

Today, it's hard to imagine there ever was a void of information to help people make direct comparisons between colleges, but such was the case in 1983 when we first ventured into the field. The editors back then, led by Marvin L. Stone, thought the project was worth attempting because a college education is one of the most important—and most costly—investments that people ever make. (Of course, that perspective is even more relevant today when the price of an undergraduate education at some private universities hovers in the $200,000 range.) So the magazine designed a survey and sent it out to 1,308 college presidents to get their opinions of which schools offered the best education. The winners: Stanford (National Universities) and Amherst (National Liberal Arts Colleges).

That academic-reputation-only method was repeated in 1985 and 1987. In 1988, we started to use statistical data as part of the ranking methodology, evaluating those numbers along with the results of the survey. In 1997, in another pioneering step, the America's Best Colleges rankings made the leap online at usnews.com. The online version, viewed by millions, has substantially more information and extended rankings than there is room for in the magazine.

Of course, we've changed the ranking formula over the years to reflect changes in the world of higher education. In general, the biggest shift has been the move toward evaluating colleges less by the quality of the students they attract (inputs) and more by the success the school has in graduating those students (outputs). We operate under the guiding principle that the methodology should be altered only if the change will better help our readers compare schools as they're making decisions about where to apply and enroll.

Higher ed's response. It helps to have this principle to focus on when the inevitable criticisms of the rankings and their influence arise. Chief among the criticisms is the idea that it is impossible to reduce the experience that any given college has to offer to a number on a list. A fair enough observation, but one that does little to help the student who will have to choose just one to attend. Another criticism of the rankings is that they often substitute as a sort of performance evaluation measure for the school and its employees. U.S. News is keenly aware that the higher education community is also a major audience and consumer of our rankings. We understand how seriously academics, administrators, and governing boards study and analyze our rankings and how they use them in various ways, including benchmarking, alumni fundraising, and advertising to attract students.

Based on the success of the college rankings, we decided to expand the process to other levels of education. The America's Best Graduate Schools rankings debuted in 1990 with annual listings of medical, engineering, law, business, and education schools.

Our newest education ranking is America's Best High Schools, first published in the fall of 2007. It identified the 100 best public schools out of more than 18,000 across the nation. Just as when we embarked on college rankings, setting up the process wasn't easy, but it's already proved to have enormous weight with our readers.

[Ideologue]

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

Nor here, or at least law school-wise; it may be something of a necessary condition, if far from sufficient.  USC Law: old as shit, considered shit.

I suppose I regret not doing better in high school, as I could've gone to a much better university if I'd actually given a shit during high school--on the other hand, my flameout freshman year had nothing to do with my smarts, and ultimately I rather enjoyed my second try.  I'm pretty sure the name of the school is less important than the fact I wasted my time on a hobby instead of vocationally-minded training.

I do regret not going to either a significantly better law school (I could conceivably have made it into a Tier 1), or a significantly worse one (free or vastly reduced ride in exchange for bumping up their LSAT median).  And rank/"prestige" matters a lot for law schools, at least in the U.S.  The top schools are, of course, Yale, Stanford and the Mihali School of Law and Class Warfare.

[crazy canuck]

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.

I am going to disagree with you BB.  In my experience the business and legal elite in Canada come from the schools you listed.  Sure there are few outliers that come form the U of M but they are the exception that proves the rule.

I agree with you regarding the political elite but that is, I think, explained by the fact we dont really have a "political elite" in the same way as the US or UK.