What foreign universities do you see as prestigious? And your own country?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

By “prestigious” I mean both well-known and that, if you heard someone went there, you’d think they were clever.

I’m interested because the perceptions of which universities are prestigious does not always correspond to the actual best ones, in that it includes the very best but misses quite a lot.

For example, I’m from the UK. Foreign universities I think of as prestigious:

USA: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, Princeton, MIT, possibly Caltech and UCA
Germany: Humboldt
France: the Sorbonne. I just looked it up and it’s not an individual university at all - maybe something like what we in the UK call Oxbridge?
Ireland: Trinity College Dublin
Rest of world: Can’t think of any but I’m sure there are some I’ve missed that I’ve actually heard of and, when reminded, would think “hmm, that person must be clever to have gone there.” Equally there are probably excellent universities that would make me just go “so, you went to university?”

And then my home country:

UK: Oxford, Cambridge, various parts of the University of London such as LSE, UCL and KCL, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Durham, Manchester. There are several others, basically Russel Group unis plus a few other good unis, but I would be very surprised if anyone other than uni admin in other countries considered them prestigious. In fact I’d be surprised if most people got past Oxford and Cambridge.

My daughter is about to go to a very prestigious art school - Camberwell College of Art - but I’d be shocked if many people not in the art world had heard of it. Because it has “college” in the title I think most of my friends even in England think J is doing a BTEC or something (that’s a pre-university qualification), not going somewhere that’s well-regarded. :smiley:

2

I kinda suspect that only the first-tier universities in each country are going to be noted elsewhere. And even within a nation, there are probably regional differences in perceived prestige- I know some schools are locally considered as commuter schools filled with losers who couldn’t manage to get in anywhere better, and outside of their local area, they’re considered perfectly acceptable schools. (University of Houston comes to mind)

3

That’s what I mean, though - there are more first-tier universities in the UK than Oxford and Cambridge, but I bet many non-Brits could only name those two. And I mean really first-tier, as in people choose other unis even though they’ve been accepted to Oxbridge.

4

UCA? Go Central Arkansas Bears!

Among the Ivies, Brown seems to be the butt of the most jokes, whereas people forget that UPenn is even an Ivy. The US has tons of ultra-prestigious liberal arts schools that most people in the US have never heard of, let alone overseas, because they’re very tiny. And expensive.

IIRC the most prestigious non-US, non-UK school is ETH Zurich, but most people probably don’t know or don’t think about it.

5

US: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Caltech
Canada: McGill, U. of Toronto, U.B.C.
UK: Oxbridge, Edinburgh
Switzerland: ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)
France: U. of Paris, Ec Norm Sup.

6

What, no love for the University of Woolamaloo?

7

Beijing University and Tsinghua University in China. The IITs in India.

8

Absolutely. They have an outstanding School of Philosophy.

And a Larch.

9

The huge Sorbonne University has been divided long into several universities. Some of them retained the name “Sorbonne” presumably because it was prestigious. However, despite using a famous name, those universities aren’t particularly better than others. In fact, there aren’t really top notch, selective, elitist universities in France that would be the equivalent of Harvard or such. Some might be considered better than others in their field (say, Orsay for sciences) but not blatantly so.

What is really prestigious in France are the “grandes écoles”, that recruit by competitive exams and train for high level jobs, such as Polytechnique, Ecole des Mines, Ecole des ponts et Ecole Centrale for engineering, Hautes Etudes Commerciales for business, Ecole Nationale d’ Administration for public service, Ecole des Chartres, Ecole Normale Supérieure, etc… which, with the exception of the last one, don’t deliver regular university degrees. You don’t get a Master’s degree or doctorate from Polytechnique or the ENA, you simply graduate from the school, which is vastly more prestigious than getting a doctorate from an university (including the Sorbonne). You could say they are very high level trade schools. I think this kind of school is pretty specific to France.

10

To give an idea, 5 out of the 7 presidents of the French 5th republic were graduates from the “Grande Ecoles”: Saint-Cyr, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole Nationale d’Administration (2), and only two were university graduates (both having a law degree).

11

In Australia you have the Group of Eight universities.

University of Woolamaloo isn’t one of them.

12

For many countries it varies by major. Americans talk a lot about “the college experience” whereas people from other countries go to college because they want a specific degree: for the schooling, not the experience.

In Spain, currently the best universities for Medicine are Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona (which have dominated that major for decades) and Universidad de Granada (who are beating the crap out of the previous champions). But for Business Law, Deusto (Bilbao), and for Law if what you actually want to do is go into politics, the Complutense (Alcalá de Henares). Mining Engineering exists in places other than Oviedo, but anybody other than Oviedo is a me-too, as is anybody teaching Chemical Engineering anywhere other than the Químic de Sarrià in Barcelona (currently part of Universidad Raimon Llull).

In Mexico, both Puebla and the Tecnológico de Monterrey are very good and attract students from all over Latin America, although with different specialties. In Costa Rica I worked with several very good engineers and the best ones were invariably from the Tecnológico or from Cartago, in CR itself.

In France the most famous one is the Sorbonne (which, ok, doesn’t even exist any more), but my college had several students from the Polytechniques de Toulouse and de Lyon who were all very good.

Anywhere in the world, if it smells like La Salle I know they have a heavy emphasis on practicality and produce lots of engineers. The Salesians started their teaching focusing on the trades; engineering schools are the upward extension of that focus. Very often their universities are born from a pre-existing HS-level trade school.

For Italy, Padova and Torino seem to produce a lot of good people in many different fields.

For the UK, the ones everybody has heard about but may not be able to place in a map or tell you what they teach are Oxford and Cambridge. Well, Law for sure (how many UK politicians studied Law in one or the other? I don’t know, but it seems as if Parliament would empty any time the boating race is on), but you know, other than that.

For the US, there is a double problem:
one, the most famous ones are those which get mentioned in most movies. That doesn’t mean they are good at either teaching or research: Pepsi gets mentioned in more movies than Cocacola, but most people happen to prefer Cocacola. I believe that both MIT and CalTech are good for research in technological fields; I’m not so sure they’re good at teaching. And while I know that going to an Ivy League college will provide the students with an automatic network, finding out which ones are good for which particular majors isn’t easy at all.
second, the ones you hear more about in other contexts, it’s usually again not because of their teaching qualities or their research, but because of their sports programs - with or without associated scandals. Knowing that Duke has a good basketball program doesn’t tell me if they’re any good at teaching biology.

13

The University of London is pretty well-known and prestigious, I’d say. It’s definitely the one I’d have mentioned after Oxford and Cambridge

14

It’s not really a university in any meaningful sense, though. Apart from processing the admin for awarding degrees, and having one bar, it doesn’t do anything - the colleges are completely independent. If you go to KCL (King’s College London) then you don’t also have the opportunity to take classes at UCL (University College London), for example. And you apply to the individual colleges, not UoL. Plus, all of the colleges of UoL are good, but some are not that prestigious - Queen Mary’s, Birkbeck, St George’s.

Nava - Oxford and Cambridge teach pretty much every subject. Most UK universities do; if they don’t, you know that from the name, like the Royal Vetinary College.

15

Vetinary? :smiley:

16

I think one thing in many countries is that a department or program at a particular school may be absolutely world-class, but the rest of the school may be merely good, or even not so great.

For example, my alma mater Texas A&M is one of the best in the world as far as things agricultural/life sciences go, but in other areas, it’s mediocre to excellent. For example, it’s also one of the premier veterinary schools in the country as well, but the liberal arts programs are not nearly so prestigious.

Or, to use a direct comparison, Harvard has a lot of top-notch programs, but Texas A&M actually has a higher-ranked engineering school.

This kind of thing is unlikely to filter outside the country except maybe for graduate students in those particular disciplines.

17

I didn’t know that, thanks.

To be clear, my mistake aside, I was mainly refering to the colleges you mentioned in your first post.

18

Skipping down this thread so that I don’t get any ideas … want to respond to this cold :smiley:

Many of my opinions about “prestigious universities” are informed by knowledge of universities that have esteemed faculty members in the linguistic fields. So it’s kind of a familiarity thing: “I’ve heard of that place … wow, she/he teaches there, too? They’ve really got a murderer’s row of phoneticians!”

  • In the U.S.: The nine Ivy League schools, MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, Cal Berkeley, UCLA, U of Michigan, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, U of Texas, Tulane

  • In the U.K.: Oxford and Cambridge. I once asked a question on the Dope about “Contenders for the U.K.'s #3 university”, and so got turned on to the University of London system as detailed in the OP.

  • Sweden: University of Goteborg, University of Uppsala

  • The Netherlands: University of Leiden

  • Germany: University of Gottingen

  • Italy: University of Pisa

  • France: “The Sorbonne” (like the OP, did not know it was not really a single entity)

  • Canada: McGill University

19

Cambridge, Oxford, Peking University, University of Tokyo

20

Who knew that the University of Central Arkansas was so well known overseas!