When I was at Uni we had exactly this game happen. I was at a uni where our department was ranked highest in the country, then the student survey went around. At the time if you talked to anyone about how satisfied they were with the course they were pretty pissed off, somehow the department had managed to mis-grade every single group project for the largest single grade of the year and as a result capped everyone's grade, which for some people was very important.
Guess what we wrote in the student survey? That we fucking loved the place. Why? Because student satisfaction counted towards the rankings and we wanted our degrees to be valuable so we wanted a good ranking. All these measures are pretty bollocks.
Of course, Oxford and Cambridge have a centuries-old historical legacy (and are both absolutely worth visiting, although I much preferred Cambridge) but they seemed more dependent on that traditional reputation. So if the “brand” of the UK goes down, it will have a direct effect on the top universities in a way that I don’t think would happen in the US.
Education, sports, healthcare, industry, space, science to name a few.
The UK also has an opposing culture, we don't invest in the long term in infrastructure or people. Even in your case, you visited the two richest universities (by a long margin) in the UK.
Numerous promises such as "northern powerhouse" have failed to materialise.
That's not really so different from the United States!
Oxford University owns pretty much the entire historic town centre, so they're sitting on a lot of assets that aren't obviously visible (beyond the colleges).
UK universities have generally very good staff benefits. 30-35 days of leave is not uncommon, on top of public holidays and the usual academia "if nobody notices" flexitime attitude. Pay is probably a little better than the US when you compare cost of living. The US has notoriously poor PhD and Postdoc salaries and several big universities have had strike action against them. Don't confuse US institutional endowment with what trickles down to researchers.
The US does have per-diem though, which is a fantastic source of beer money when traveling. UK universities are almost always penny-pinchers for staff expenses.
This is how the entirety of the UK works. All the funding goes to London, everywhere else gets nothing. All the laws are written to benefit the landlord and investor classes, everyone else gets nothing etc. Little recognition that the entire nation is meant to be one big tribe, barely any redistribution or attempts to raise up the failing parts. In my opinion, the ruling classes have never really abandoned their colonial mindset, and now their overseas power has waned they treat the rest of the UK as a colony of the City and Westminster.
A possible explanation would be brain-drain: talented mathematicians leaving too-poor Oxford for better pay in the US. Does that happen?
While the US could use (homebuilt) computers to solve engineering issues, the Russians had to resort to manual calculations. The eastern block always lagged behind in terms of computing.
> Does that happen?
All the time.
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones bennefiting from a brain drain of americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreing talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were.
The top destination for top tier UK scientists and researchers is the US. [0]
[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
More than that, though, are how amenities affect future applicants. If I was a prospective student choosing between Oxford and say, Princeton, the quality of the campus and amount of resources available would affect my decision. My impression was that Oxbridge is very much about maintaining and continuing the traditions of the UK more than anything else.
Europe campuses are buildings with just a bit more than the bare minimum you need to do the job
> Institutions in Europe and the US also fell back, and the report’s authors said the UK’s rankings had held up better than French, German, Japanese and American universities.
it feels more like a West vs the Rest (or even a Rest vs China) thing.
Add in the funding China provides to universities, and you would be disheartened if Chinese universities didn't improve
I'm not sure if I should be surprised there isn't a facet of the rating like:
"percent chance you will be disappeared for holding up a blank sheet of paper" or
"how excited other countries children are to attend."
Maybe the ranking just cares about how much money you are pouring into STEM research.
