[barry-cotter]

Not true of the UK, France, Korea or Japan. I don’t know if they care about what are basically league tables but any educated citizen would find it no more difficult to reel off five to ten of their best universities than an American would to list Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT etc.

I can see how it would look weird from a German, or possibly a Dutch or Nordic perspective but a deliberate effort to bring up the bottom and limited attempts to raise the top is extremely different from the US system, where there are large and growing returns to excellence.

Also the US elite just have smaller enrollments as a share of population. Oxbridge, the grandes écoles or Korea’s top three enrol 1-2% of yearly students. The top ten US universities maybe a tenth of that.

[roel_v]

From within Dutch universities, rankings are considered very important (more by the non-academic staff than by the academics). The general public doesn't really care all that much yet, but they do more and more each year. It's especially for international (student) recruiting that the rankings (national and international) are important, and that's seeping through into everything else for last 10 years or so now.

(not disagreeing with you, just adding some nuance about the direction of things)

[akjssdk]

As a Dutch PhD student, I am not sure I agree. There is some hype around the rankings of the universities and specifically the bachelor and master tracks at a given university, but not many students really care about them. I certainly did not choose my university based on their ranking, and don't know many that did. Choice is based much more on travel distance and other factors, not on perceived quality of a university. I also would not be able to point out the best universities in the Netherlands, which says something as well.

[roel_v]

Also, I think as a student you're quite shielded from it. Ask your professor (not the postdocs or the assocs, the real ones) some day, I'm sure they have an opinion on it.

[akjssdk]

Yes for sure, in academia the perceived ranking is quite important. But, at least in my field, ranking is decoupled from the ranking of a university and is more on a department basis. I.e., the physics department of a specific university might be well regarded internationally, even though the university itself not so much. This is of course helped by the fact that Dutch universities are all quite highly ranked.

[roel_v]

Fair enough, although I'm not sure how what you say is at odds with what I said. As you indicate, Dutch students don't care much if any (yet). It probably depends on the university as well. The highly international ones (Wageningen, Maastricht, some institutes in Enschede, maybe Delft, at least the TU?) certainly do.

[arethuza]

I think in the UK it is easy - both universities are ranked as excellent!