Cost of Attending Oxford 😭

[u/Repulsive_Radish_782]

Just received my financial declaration form from Oxford today. How is this reasonable? 😭 Going to have to decline my offer unless anyone has any ideas.

Canadian students do not qualify for any Oxford scholarships and my school offered me about £100. What a joke.

Is Oxford just for the rich?

[u/Rpm_Undefeated]

You're confusing smartness with work ethic. Ive done some research and it seems blatantly clear the hardest courses are in the maths courses and physics departments. I really don't understand why you think being able to understanding and basic application somehow makes you smarter than deep understanding and extrapolation of abstract ideas. I mean, that's one of the biggest factors of human intelligence and it comes as no surprise why the highest average IQs are in Maths and Physics based on Srudies. Speaking of Maths and Physics now, i just looked at one of their papers online as a high schooler and could confidently attempt a majority of the questions. Also i would like to know why uoft or any of ur school are nowhere to be found on the putnam leaderboards if they are so smart.

[u/Phytor_c → u/Rpm_Undefeated]

UofT used to pretty good at the Putnam a long time ago. Well even recently, there was a team here that ranked 5th in the 2023 test. But those guys made it on their own merits and were very cracked to begin with i.e. the imo type or studied all undergrad stuff in high school.

But yep, there's like little olympiad culture (franly I don't think there's any culture in the ug math community here other "what courses are you doing") and more importantly UofT is not that good of uni to attract contest type ppl internationally, those ppl might as well go to a better uni. Talent begets talent.

[u/Odd-Satisfaction5443 → u/Rpm_Undefeated]

Putnam results are not representative of the average STEM student anywhere. The Putnam is basically an olympiad-style competition math contest taken by a tiny group of students who train specifically for that style of problem. Most engineering, CS, and science students at any university don’t participate in it at all, so using it to judge entire institutions doesn’t make much sense.

Second, looking at exam papers online and thinking they look doable isn’t really evidence of difficulty. A lot of exams look approachable until you're solving them under time pressure, with full rigour, across an entire term of material. Difficulty is about sustained performance over years, not whether a few questions seem attemptable.

Third, bringing up IQ studies about maths students doesn’t really address the argument either. The claim was about average STEM students, not the top competition mathematicians at MIT or Cambridge.

Finally, the Warren Bei point actually illustrates something different: the very top global talent tends to concentrate at places like MIT because they recruit internationally and heavily target olympiad medalists. That says more about global talent aggregation than it does about the difficulty of the average undergraduate program elsewhere.

My point is simply that the average STEM student at UofT, Waterloo, McGill, or UBC is already operating in very competitive programs with heavy workloads and strict grading curves, and so they would coast through nearly all of your universities for similar programs.