In Japan the top two universities are also “public” (i.e. financed through the government): Tokyo University (Todai) and Kyoto University (Kyodai) - both really hard to get into, as I understand it, and once you’re in it’s pretty much your meal ticket. The private universities like Waseda are all second-tier.
They don’t seem so special. They can’t even abbreviate their name correctly! 
My contribution is Wossamotta U.in Frostbite Falls, MN. It’s famous the world over.
It’s a school of Pratchett studies. Smart people, but sometimes unbearable. 
Eight Ivies. Unless you’re counting Barnard, which is in it’s own grouping of 7 (Sisters).
Or Radcliffe which is even less independent from IL.
Nah … just had “nine” in my head.
The Ivy League schools used to play a nine-game football schedule during the 1980s, when I followed college football most closely.
That’s definitely the case in Germany, where perceived excellence is granulated mostly at the department or even chair level, the universities as a whole having comparable levels of funding.
In tech in the Bay Area, these are the schools outside of the US that people tend to pay attention to:
Canada: Waterloo, UBC, McGill, Toronto
India: Any of the IITs but IIT Bombay, IIT Madras & IIT Hyderabad in particular
China: Tsinghua, Peking and Shanghai Universities
UK: Cambridge but not Oxford. Edinburgh, Manchester and Birmingham also merit a mention.
Europe: ETH Zurich, Delft, Ecole Poly, Uppsala
Australia: Melbourne, Sydney, UNSW, ANU
Israel: Technion, Tel Aviv
Asia: National University of Singapore, KAIST, NTU
Japan: Tokyo & Kyoto
Middle East and Africa: Nothing from this region comes to mind.
I’m American.
Domestic: UC Berkeley, California institute of technology, Massachusetts institute of technology, Harvard.
International:
UK: Oxford & Cambridge
South Korea: Seoul National University
China: Tsinghua University
India: IIT
Really, the tertiary educational system of California deserves to be in a class all its own. MA has a good system too, but not as good as California. California has the best public and private schools in the nation. UC Berkely, UCLA, UCSD, UCSF, UCSB, USC, CalTech, Stanford, etc. Basically the public schools are world class and the best schools in that state (UCB, Caltech, Stanford, etc) are all easily in the top 20 on earth.
I think the ratio of nobel prizes to faculty and students at CalTech is far higher than MIT. I"ll check again.
MIT has 85, Caltech has 35, so MIT has 2.5x more. However MIT has 5x more students and faculty. So per capita CalTech is doing twice as good on that front.
Not that it matters, but worth mentioning about the quality of California’s higher educational system. Someone who went to the UC system once said that an average school in the UC system was about equal to a top school in most states or nations, and that a top public or private school in California was among the top in the world.
My point is that domestically, California is in a totally different class than the rest of the country.
The best examples are probably American University Beirut and maybe Cairo University. Saudi Arabia also has a lot of highly ranked ones but I don’t know anything about them.
It’s important to note that UCSF is a med school only, not offering undergraduate classes, and thus doesn’t really compete with the others and is sometimes in a separate category.
My nephew got his PhD from MIT. They’re world-class at that technology thing, but why would anyone go to MIT for Linguistics or Theater Arts (genuine degree programs)?
On the other hand, the University of Chicago currently has four Nobel Laureates on its faculty. Does anyone really put it in the category of “prestigious”?
Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at MIT so I can understand why someone would want to study there. However I agree with you on concepts like theater arts. I’m not sure why you’d pursue that at MIT.
E.g. US News puts it at #4 among national universities, tied with Stanford and Columbia. Forbes says #20. I bet its Econ majors are insufferable, but still…
Queen Mary is pretty well regarded for law, especially research LLM’s.
Yes, but generally speaking Cambridge is more known for the Sciences and Oxford for the humanities, exceptions exist, of course. Of course, it does also depend on which College you go to.
For Pakistan, I would say
Law: Sindh Muslim Law College Most senior judges are from there.
Medicine: King Edwards formerly part of Punjab University.
Sciences: Government College, NUST and the various University of Engineering and Technology Campues.
Social Sciences: Lahore University of Management
Sciences.
Business School: IBA Karachi.
I can see wanting to do it as a second degree, as well as, since the American requirements for University degrees include things like “and 3 credits from the Humanities”, being a college which can give students those credits in a field that lots of techies like as a hobby.
It sounds like the kind of schools where the gaffer, sound engineers and electrician positions would fill in no time 
Actors, perhaps not so much.
For me, it’s London School of Economics after Oxbridge, then I’d probably guess Edinburgh.
Absolutely! I’d rank it higher than probably half the Ivies. No matter where you rank it numerically, I can’t see anyone not thinking it’s prestigious. It routinely shows up high on those best universities in the world list, too. Here. For example, at #9.
People don’t think of University of Chicago much anymore because it no longer has Division I NCAA athletic programs. But the school was a founding member of the Big Ten Conference and won seven conference football titles before disbanding it’s football program in 1939. Chicago withdrew fully from the Big Ten in 1946.
U of Chicago felt at the time that it had to make a decision to go all in for athletics or all in for academics, as it was thought internally that the institution could not fully support both endeavors.
I highly doubt that, especially if you’re talking international prestige. Or even domestically. I went to Northwestern, which has Division I NCAA sports and a similar ranking to U of C on the US World News lists, but I’d consider U of C significantly more prestigious, despite lack of athletics. I mean, how can’t you? It has 89 Nobel laureates affiliated with it. Only Harvard, Columbia. and Cambridge have more.
Because that’s not what most people would think of when you ask about “prestigious”. It would be “places you’ve heard of and have a positive image of”.
USAian here. Foreign Universities that tick off my “wow, you must be pretty smart” box:
Canada - University of Toronto, McGill, University of British Columbia
UK - Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College
Switzerland - ETH Zürich
France - l’université Pierre et Marie Curie, Ecole Polytechnique
China - Tsinghua University
Iran - University of Tehran
Germany - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
India - Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
Russia - Lomonosov Moscow State University