Source: Guardian >> Read full article and comment

How the world’s best university changed my life

Patrick Barkham
Thursday 9 September 2010

This time 16 years ago I sat at the kitchen table and, with a lurch in my gut, opened a brochure that had arrived in the post. Written in the archaic language of bedders, boaties and bops, it described life at Cambridge University. This forbidding account of colleges, clubs and societies merged with my expectations of the teddy-bear-clutching Sebastian Flytes I would meet punting on the river, and I suddenly felt very small.

Cambridge University has this week taken Harvard’s place as the world’s top university, at least according to a survey of 15,000 academics who judged the quality of its research to be the best in the world. This will go down well in the ivory towers of what would otherwise be a nondescript Fenland town – it’s the kind of publicity that may reinforce the hauteur and arrogance of Cambridge, but also adds to its mystique. But this top ranking for research tells the world almost nothing about how good a place it is for young people to spend their university years in. Is Cambridge really so special and if it is, what makes it so?….Continue Reading