[barry-cotter]

> Sure, oxbridge ranks higher for students, but for research, which I think is what he is interested in, French and German institutions rank higher

He’s not talking about institutions though. He’s talking about universities.

It’s not like it’s any great mystery why German and French universities don’t rank highly either. For France it’s because all universities bar the grandes écoles have always been of more or less similar selectivity, and given that all professors are civil servants on the same pay scale there’s no way to change that either. You might accidentally get a great department but you’re not going to get a great university that way.

Germany had great universities, universities with world spanning reputations, like Göttingen and Heidelberg. Then after 1968 there was a deliberate policy of leveling, so that every university is more or less of similar quality. It worked. All US Supreme Court justices went to Harvard or Yale. So little prestige attaches to which university you attended in Germany that for several of their Supreme Court justices the specific university they attended isn’t even mentioned on the Supreme Court website.

[abelaer]

Wait what, why do you mention these justices? Surely SC justices must study in the US to learn US law? Why would any of them study in another country in the first place? I would also assume all German Bundesgerichtshof justices would have studied in Germany.

[barry-cotter]

Prestige. In the US or UK different universities have different levels of prestige. In Germany they don’t. These differences in prestige are a function of differing reputations. German universities don’t generally have highly differentiated reputations. There are real universities and there are Fachhochschule and that’s it. The UK has Oxbridge, the other ancient universities, the redbricks, former polytechnics. Alternately Oxbridge, the rest of the Russell Group, all other universities. In Germany, otoh a degree from Saarbrücken is pretty much as good as one from Heidelberg. Prestige is attached to the highest degree you attained, not where you got it.