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Comment by anyfoo | Hacker News Reader

Then why do European universities, many of them very prestigious and much, much older than American ones, base their admission on grades and tests?

Given that in most European countries (I think, it'd definitely the case in Germany) tuition isn't a thing either, one can reasonably conclude that admission to an elite university is linked to academic prowess, at least to a higher degree than American universities.

I went to an elite university (can't deny that I'm a bit proud of that), and except maybe for the possible of highly limited stipendia, neither I nor my parents would have had any money to make that happen otherwise.

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Have to admit my American ignorance here, but outside of music schools I cannot think of any major elite universities outside of maybe oxford and Cambridge? I’m curious if Europeans could name a few Ivy League American universities? Maybe I’m the uncultured exception, but I don’t think most Americans even talk about foreign universities (I have no doubt to our own disadvantage)

You might not have heard about European universities (though maybe that's just because they tend to be named by city, so ETH Zürich, Paris etc. doesn't stick as a university name like "Harvard" and "Yale" do), but you probably have heard from people at those universities: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Werner Heisenberg, Nils Bohr, ...

I didn't pick contemporary names because the closer you get to today, the less likely you are to know such names unless you are specifically interested into their specific field. You can look them up, though.

No doubt American universities are not less prestigious, but to think that nothing of relevance happens outside of the US, well... You might have heard of CERN at least. ;)

In fact, when making this post - max planck institute and cern so on came to mind, but was not confident it was a schools vs research Institute ? Certainly there is no shortage of great minds from universities around the world, it’s just they don’t seem to nearly have the US BRAND awareness

* edit: on second thought i suppose I am not adequately equipped to talk about global brand awareness as it originally stated. Curious how other countries see collegiate prestige outside of their own or if US colleges have some extra factor?

Don't underestimate the impact of US cultural imperialism. We've probably all seem shows or movies where some kid wants to get into Yale or Harvard. How many European movies do people see in the US?

I think another factor is that the admission system is different. I only know about Germany, but you don't have to apply in the same way at a university and your grades from school are what matters there isn't some additional test like GRE or SAT. So it plays less of a role culturally and has thus less opportunity to be a topic at all in shows and movies even if Americans were to drown in European media.

Imperial college, LSE, Groningen, Moscow Univ, Utrech

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