Devil's Advocate: Does St Andrews Deserve Its Academic Standing?

YES: Georges Toulouse

We can all agree that St Andrews is not exactly Oxford or Cambridge. We’re much smaller, slightly colder, do not have one-on-one tutorials, and are not exactly producing the same quantity of research. Ensues a refrain which one often hears in St Andrews and elsewhere: ‘How on Earth is St Andrews competing with Oxford and Cambridge in national rankings?’

Here’s what I feel inclined to argue: academic prestige should not be defined by the metrics of yesterday, especially not in a world where university schooling’s importance is rapidly shifting.

Before addressing our University’s merits compared to those of other British institutions, I think it’s useful to compare it to other universities worldwide. St Andrews is over 600 years old — thrashing Harvard by 220 years — and has managed to maintain itself as a globally relevant institution without the laughably large endowments, luxurious campuses, research grants, and — I know this firsthand — fresh raw milk at breakfast. Without charging 100,000 a year for cups of milk and a diploma, and given the university funding model in the United Kingdom, St Andrews is doing remarkably well for a little university lost on the coast of Fife. 

Domestically, Oxford and Cambridge still reap the benefits from their glorious past as beacons of British taste and culture, with the plethora of prime ministers who once sat on their benches, their beautiful campuses, in their funny little outfits. But gone are the days when Oxford and Cambridge ruled as the pearls of education in the United Kingdom — there are other ways of doing things nowadays. Do you need one-on-one tutoring to learn things? Do you need pompously decorated colleges to study efficiently? Is having the Prince and Princess of Wales as alumni not at least as good as claiming Margaret Thatcher as one of your own?

Maybe we aren’t necessarily the most rigorous academic institution — I must say, from experience, one does end up with much free time. Maybe our professors aren’t, you know, Hillary Clinton or whatever, but we still get to chat to leaders in their fields, who can open our minds to the world. 

In this day and age, where the value of a university degree is once again questionable, maybe academic prestige should come from a different source than the past. We might not have all the fluff, all the illustrious alumni, but St Andrews gives us the ability to study what we want, to change our minds, to mess up a few times along the way. I would argue one comes out a better-rounded individual than the Oxbridge types who got in for Modern Languages just to have a diploma from there. We get to be ourselves, to read what we want, to not be crushed by excessive testing, to live a life as well as study. That ought to be the source of academic prestige in this world: creating people who don’t want to shoot themselves and have actually learned something, not only about their subject of study, but also about life in their university years.

NO: Milly Smith

Readers, let me ask you a candid question: was this university your first choice? Because I have a sneaky suspicion that many of you, as little boys and girls, grew up dreaming of punting, golden cloisters, gowned dinners in wood-panelled halls, and real academic prestige. Yet, after a rejection email and a little cry, we all settled on this one instead. Rather embarrassingly, I can even recall a night in Fresher’s week when, clearly in a state of squash and vodka-induced delirium, we went around the table sharing anecdotes from our Oxbridge interviews, like a weird, slightly pathetic version of Never Have I Ever. 

Now, I don’t mean to exclude the 20% of our student body that have the misfortune of hailing from across the pond. I’m sure you have had your own share of Ivy League rejection, as I cannot otherwise understand why you’d choose to relocate from California to Fife. 

However, by the time I’d matriculated, St Andrews managed to bag the top spot in The Times’ Good University Guide 2022, and year-after-year the accolades just kept coming. As of 2026, The Guardian puts us at number two, sandwiched between Oxford and Cambridge. People spoke of a change to the status quo, a crack in the great Oxbridge duopoly. I thought perhaps I would no longer be a disappointment to my Oxbridge-graduate parents (no luck on that front, unfortunately). 

Yet, is this league table success deserved, you ask? Well, when I sit in a tutorial which is silent enough that we can hear a car’s indicator two streets away, I sometimes struggle to consider myself amongst the brightest minds of our generation. How could we possibly ever survive one-on-one supervisions when most people can’t even seem to locate the module reading list? For most, their tenure at university seems to require less academic exertion than one Maths GCSE class. 

The next issue is that, at this university, we only have to submit about four essays a semester. Students describe the ‘generational lock-in,’ fuelled by copious amounts of Red Bull and self-hatred, that it takes to complete one 1500-word coursework essay. Now, dear friends, imagine a university where an assignment was due weekly! The horror! The venerable institution of Aikman’s Bar and Bistro might be forced to close its doors if such a thing were to happen; its regular patrons would have to relocate their nightly routines to the Main Library, swapping Jubel for JSTOR. They’d all be stabbing themselves in the head with a biro, hoping to reawaken all the brain neurons damaged from a four-year long episode of binge-drinking. 

Yet, we need not lament our situation. The lucky few of us who haven’t actually managed to acquire pint-induced brain damage finish our time here with a pat on the head from Sally Mapstone and a piece of paper proclaiming that we’ve received a degree from an academically prestigious institution. What more could you want? Apart from maybe a river and some punting.

Illustration by Maya Mason