How to Compare UK and US Universities
2024 Update: Comparing Ivy League, Russell Group, Oxbridge and other US-UK Groupings
Since moving to the UK, I’ve seen references to “Oxbridge” and “Russell Group universities.” Curious as to the latter’s significance, I saw people online compare these to the US’s Ivy League. But taking these UK groupings as examples, what are their US equivalents?
Not what you might think.
Comparing Share of the Country’s Undergraduates
The Ivy League consists of eight private universities[0], generally the oldest and most storied in the US. Together, the League’s undergraduate enrollment is around 60,000 students, or about 0.5% of the US’s 11 million undergraduate students enrolled at four-year universities. [1] These eight schools comprise only around twice the undergraduate enrollment of Oxford and Cambridge.
The Russell Group consists of 24 universities. Together, the Group’s undergraduate enrollment is around 450,000, or around 30% of the UK’s 1.5 million undergraduate students. [2]
Oxford and Cambridge alone account for 1.8% of the UK’s undergraduate population, a share of the UK’s university students that is 3 times larger than the share the entire US Ivy League commands of US university students. [3]
However, the Ivy League does not include a number of US universities with elite reputations: notable among these are MIT, Caltech, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and some of the US’s top state schools.[4] Including these significantly grows the size of the Ivy-equivalent group, potentially proportional to that of Oxford and Cambride’s 1.8%.
Assuming Oxford and Cambridge are able to select “the best” 1.8% of the UK’s secondary school graduates, and this Ivy+ group we’ve just defined admits a similar percentage of US undergraduates, then these 15 or so universities are comparable not to the Russell Group, but rather to Oxbridge. [5][6]
Can a Comparison of Shanghai Rankings be Meaningful?
What is the American equivalent to the Russell Group, then? I don’t think there is one, and an examination of the Shanghai Ranking [7], which favors scientific research, Nobel prizes and citations, will give us in some cases significantly different answers as these parameters favor graduate studies and we’ve limited our analysis to undergraduate enrolment.
On the basis of rankings, the Ivy+ group is probably equivalent to Oxford and Cambridge. But the Shanghai rankings for, say, the top third of the UK’s Russell Group gives us a range from the Ivy+ to the University of Michigan, to Purdue University (all good schools, particularly in the sciences). Beyond these, the rankings go all over the place.
But then again, it’s not clear how useful rankings are in general as a filtering mechanism.
A broader question: Why is the Ivy League so small?
Harvard has 5,000 undergraduates while Oxford and Cambridge have 12–15,000 each. All of these draw from an international talent pool, but especially domestically. Why does Harvard, which serves a market that’s 5x larger than the UK, accept such a tiny number of students? Surely it’s not for want of funding. As Marc Andreesen asked in his essay IT’S TIME TO BUILD, what prevents Harvard from educating 1 million undergraduates?
If I had to guess, it’s to protect its prestige on parameters exactly like the ones used here.
Recapping:
- There is no clear UK equivalent to the US’s Ivy League, and vice-versa, but if we stretch the definition of the Ivy League and expand who we’re including (MIT, Stanford, etc.), we get a group of universities that are roughly as selective as Oxbridge, admitting around 1.8% of the country’s undergraduates.
- Harvard, Yale and Princeton together admit slightly more undergraduates than Oxford, but as a share of each country’s undergraduate population, the entire Ivy League admits less than 1/3 as many as Oxford and Cambridge combined.
- There is also no clear equivalent to the UK’s Russell Group, whose members comprise about 1/3–1/4 of UK undergraduates.
- The Ivy League is too small and rarefied, and admissions criteria are too crude to be useful signals of talent.
- Unrelated to anything here: rankings and university pedigrees are snobbish and intellectually lazy. So what am I going on about, exactly?
2024 Update: Comparing Ivy League, Russell Group, Oxbridge and other US-UK Groupings
Notes, Asides & Sources:
[0] Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth and Cornell.
[1] See National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cha#:~:text=In%20fall%202019%2C%20the%2011.0,enrolled%20in%202%2Dyear%20institutions
[2]See House of Commons Library: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7857/
[3] This does not take into account the nontrivial proportion of foreign students at both the Ivy League and Russell Group universities, though these were deducted from the UK undergraduate population and are unlikely to be a significant number of the US’s 11MM undergrads.
[4] Some of these would easily edge out most of the Ivy League’s existing members if the criterion was selectivity or ranking.
[5] Are there any psychometric assessments that are anywhere close to measuring anything to within 2%?
[6] This assumes that the top 1.8% of US undergraduates is equally qualified as the top 1.8% of UK undergraduates, which might not be correct!
[7] See Shanghai Rankings. By comparison, the homegrown QS Score uses fluffier criteria but might better benchmark the UK institutions against one another. I’ve opted for the more systematic Shanghai system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Universities
