Goodbye Oxbridge, Hello Golden Triangle

There was elation this week in Bloomsbury, London’s university enclave, and a dark, dark cloud over Oxford as the latest Times Higher-QS higher education rankings put University College London (UCL) ahead of Oxford for the first time.
UCL emerged as number four in the world, just behind Harvard, Cambridge and Yale. Non-Oxford academics could barely hide their smirks: Oxford had taken its eye off the ball and allowed an upstart without so much as a single “dreaming spire” to steal its crown. Just as galling, Oxford shared fifth place with Imperial College, another London upstart!
Oxford is still top in other rankings, but that is not the point. Oxford never considered any other rival outside of Cambridge. Both have their centuries-old traditions, medieval cloisters and quadrangles and a term symbolising academic quality and leadership that they share -Oxbridge. What does London University have to match that? A massive “Stalinist” art-deco structure (Senate House) that would not look out of place in a batman movie and said to have been earmarked by Hitler as his likely headquarters once he had conquered Britain.
Imperial College has been snapping at Oxford’s heels for some time. But the “technical college” did not count. Oxford still produced the country’s politicians and lawyers, and convinced itself it could hold its own in pure science, while Imperial was for “engineers” (said with a slight sneer).
Not far from Bloomsbury in a straight line that runs from Holborn, to Aldwych and the Strand with their hotch-potch of Victorian and more modern buildings are the London School of Economics and Kings College. They are further down the rankings but both have formidable reputations.
So what is behind the rise and rise of London? There are a few obvious areas. UCL and Imperial are world class institutions for biomedical research and UCL has been described as having “the world’s best medical school”. Certainly, Oxford and Cambridge medical students seem to spend a lot of time in their second and third years worrying how to get “down” to London to further their careers.
Oxford and Cambridge have huge and ancient endowments but the Wellcome foundation, Britain’s largest charity, and many others provide massive funds to UCL and Imperial for research.
Meanwhile, many science postgrads take one look at Oxford’s manky old-fashioned facilities and make a bee-line for Imperial with its spanking state-of-the-art laboratories in leafy Kensington, or send off for prospectuses for US universities.
But it is not just about science. There is a difference in atmosphere in humanities and social sciences. Oxford is cosy, smug, traditional and quintessentially British.
UCL is edgier, slightly bohemian, more modern in outlook and a great deal more outward looking (it calls itself the Global University). The same is true of LSE - if rather less bohemian and edgy - with more than half its students from overseas.
For years banks and top legal firms favoured Oxbridge, not just as academic powerhouses, but the collegiate atmosphere meant their graduates were eminently clubbable, very suitable for a life in legal chambers and bank board rooms. But there were changes afoot with globalisation and emerging markets. The British club had given way to the global village.
The LSE was closer to the City and specialised in the subjects the City wanted in an era of globalisation. Imperial had the mathematical and scientific brains for that and the new knowledge economy.
A partner in a magic circle law firm recently told me that in recruiting new graduates they took “ten from Oxford, ten from Cambridge and ten from “elsewhere, with an international background,” a euphemism for London, with a sprinkling from Warwick, Edinburgh and St Andrews.
Oxford still believed it was turning out leaders rather than technocrats. It should have seen the warning signs. Oxford has not disappeared from the top, but the top has become a little more crowded.
The Foreign Office and Whitehall threw open their doors beyond Oxbridge more than a decade ago looking for talent with an international outlook. Recruitment agencies, which burgeoned during the boom years, had begun to refer to the Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Elite (ie. private) schools began to notice how hard it was to get their top scholars into London’s best colleges. Last year the head of a top boys school which regularly gets 30-40 pupils into Oxbridge was enraged when not a single offer of a place was forthcoming from UCL. He complained to the admissions office and was given short shrift.
Preparing pupils for Oxford and Cambridge and their idiosyncratic admissions processes (particularly the interview) had been honed to a fine art by such schools. They successfully turned their pupils into the kind of people those universities wanted. They had not yet got a handle on how London (interviews are a rarity) worked.
The emergence of UCL has been a wake up call for them, too. One highly sought-after school has rewritten its prospectus. Its 2008 edition said “we regularly get many pupils into Oxford and Cambridge.” The new one says “We regularly get many pupils into the Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities.”