I think people are also unaware of how tiny the undergraduate populations of elite US/UK universities are, especially if you (like me) did not grow up or go to school in those countries.
There are few better ways of illustrating the difference than to look at the top U.S. colleges and compare them to a highly-ranked Canadian university, like the University of Toronto where I work. The first thing you’ll notice is that American schools are miniscule. The top 10 U.S. universities combined (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc.) have room for fewer than 60,000 undergraduates total. The University of Toronto, by contrast, alone has more capacity, with over 68,000 undergraduate students.
In other words, Canadian universities are in the business of mass education. We take entire generations of Canadians, tens of thousands of them recent immigrants, and give them access to the middle classes. Fancy American schools are in the business of offering boutique education to a very tiny, coddled minority, giving them access to the upper classes. That’s a really fundamental difference.
Oxford (12,510 undergraduates) and Cambridge (12,720 undergraduates ) are less tiny, but still comparatively small, especially since the UK population is about 1.75x Canada’s.
I think people are also unaware of how tiny the undergraduate populations of elite US/UK universities are, especially if you (like me) did not grow up or go to school in those countries.
Quoting a 2015 article from Joseph Heath, which I found shocking at the time:
Oxford (12,510 undergraduates) and Cambridge (12,720 undergraduates ) are less tiny, but still comparatively small, especially since the UK population is about 1.75x Canada’s.