http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/08/cambridge-worlds-best-university-harvard

It will be interesting to see how the rankings compare with the THE next week.... which predicts big upsets for British universities.

Boring...

It's not boring for university marketing departments ;)

U.S. schools humbled in world rankings

The headline in yesterday's release of the QS World University Rankings was that Cambridge displaced Harvard as the best university in the world, at least by one measure.

This is apparently the first time in the history of the London-based Quacquarelli Symonds university rankings that someone other than Harvard has ranked first.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/09/_2_harvard_university_9918.html

QS World University Rankings 2010

1. University of Cambridge, UK
2. Harvard University, US
3. Yale University, US
4. UCL, UK
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US
6. University of Oxford, UK
7. Imperial College London, UK
8. University of Chicago, UK
9. California Institute of Technology (Caltech), US
10. Princeton University, US
11. Columbia University, US
12. University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), US
13. Stanford University, US
14. Duke University, US
15. University of Michigan, US

Who on this board would reject an offer by Oxford or Stanford to join UCL...

me. ucl is miles head of stanford in the area of law that interests me most: public international law. there is simply no comparison. go to the stanford law school website and laugh at the basic offerings in international law they offer, and compare that to the goldmine of legal talent at ucl.

erhh, I also doubt that UCL is ahead of Oxford and Stanford. For the LLM, one has to admit, Yale is considered to be the most reputable law school worldwide. I don't think that any serious person will doubt that.
The university rankings are overall rankings, guys, so please take a closer look at the separate QS ranking for social sciences... Which is not to say that I'm not happy about Cambridge topping the table :-)

really, what makes yale 'better' than cambridge? different faculties have different strengths. i'm sure if you asked professors at the best law departments in the world, they would roundly acknowledge that cambridge is hands down the best place in the world to read public international law. oxford is the best place in the world for jursiprudence. cambridge isn't 'better' than yale. yale is undoubtedly one of the world's best law schools, but you can't say that one place is uniformly 'better' than another. sweeping statements like that are not only imprecise, but wrong and misleading.

Every law program has its niche. Many current and former Harvard students have told me that their law school is overrated; however, they are grateful for the fact that it is viewed with awe throughout the world. Cambridge is viewed as superior to Oxford in many parts of the world, yet Oxford is domestically viewed as superior to Cambridge. Yale is an outstanding law school, but it is small, and its graduate programs are targeted at educating professors. Thus, you won't find nearly as many Yale law grads throughout the world in leadership positions, in comparison to those from Cantab/Oxon, Harvard, etc.

Frankly, prestige only goes so far in the world of legal practice. Aside from some of the behemoths, most law firms ultimately care about individual ability, drive, and potential. Ten years into law practice, few people will care where you studied law (at least in the US, although I understand that this may not be the case in the UK).

Unfortunately, the first job is often based on the prestige of your law program. However, as a partner at a well-respected law firm, I can tell you that the prestige is quickly covered by heaps of papers, books, and late nights.

@good_gosh: Well, of course there are specializations and stuff. No doubt that Cantab might be better in let's say PIL. On the other hand, you might as well say that QMUL is better in IP, but would you really choose it over Cambridge? Probably not, because one of the most important things about your LLM degree is the title which you can attach to your name later on. I doubt that anyone will ask you about the courses you took, but everybody will notice the shiny little "Cantab." attached.

I certainly hope you won't question that there is such a thing as "general reputation". In this field,however, Yale (according to my experiences), is considered to be the most reputable law school (although everybody knows that they target academic careers). So, what the hell is misleading here?

well it depends what you're after. if you're after the best IP courses you would go to QMUL. if say you were an undergraduate at oxbridge, then you don't need the glamour of an oxbridge bcl/llm, and if you're targeting an IP set/firm, then QMUL would make more sense, wouldn't it?

perhaps the most important reason Yale is considered the most reputable US law school is that twenty years ago some journalists at the US news ranked it above Harvard. Inertia did the rest. and I would strongly dispute that it is considered the most reputable law school. oxbridge certainly strongly rivals it, and Oxford's BCL programme is considered by many THE most prestigious graduate law programme in the world. In many ways the BCL/Cambridge LLM are MUCH more reputable than the Yale LLM, because unlike the Yale programme they actually offer advanced graduate level legal study, whereas Yale only offer the basic law school courses to the LLM students. like i said, if you took the list of the Yale law faculty, the Harvard law faculty, and the Oxford and Cambridge faculties and gave it to a group of world-leading legal academics they would be hard-pressed to identify the 'best' group, and i don't think that the yale list would be selected any more frequently than the other three. so the statement that yale is the 'best' is strongly misleading and reductionist. nonetheless, if you want to insist that it is, then you're free to do so, but you can't possibly substantiate your claim.

I would guess that the Yale LL.M is so reputable because of their selective admissions policy.

I don't know of any other law school that admits so few students for it's (general) LL.M. This does more to enhance the prestige of Yale's LL.M programma than the curriculum does, I think.

Dear Gosh,
neither can you, so please stop freaking out here. The reputation of a law school is quite a subjective matter, and all I was trying to tell the people who asked is that from the many people I've spoken to about this, nearly all had the impression that Yale is even above Harvard as a law school. Luckily, we're all free to choose whatever law school we'd like to apply to and I'm pretty sure that many applicants will apply at YLS, HLS and (!) Oxbridge anyway.

The newly-released Times Higher Educational rankings oust Cambridge and Oxford to joint 6th place behind Harvard, CalTech, MIT, Stanford and Princeton.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2010-2011/top-200.html

UCL and KCL take big tumbles.