They are both crappy universities too:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/e...hing-nobel-in-deceiving-ourselves-764880.html
Oxbridge's budget and endowment are a fraction of top American private universities'. For this reason, their graduate programmes are particularly easy to get into; anyone willing to spend about $35,000 on fees can buy a masters degree from Oxbridge. But of course most S'poreans don't know that. In Singapore, you can still con people with an Oxbridge degree.
It's slightly harder to gain admission to Oxbridge as an undergraduate (around 30% acceptance rate) but the selectivity is nowhere near American schools like Harvard (7%), Stanford (8%), Yale (8%), etc.
The only exception is maybe Trinity College, Cambridge. It still has pretty high admissions standards.
Finally, someone else in the thread who has some clue.
Yes indeed. Its very much easier getting a place in Oxbridge than American universities. However in Singapore, most people don't know this and this is the reason there are farmer graduates from here who try to apply to some lacklustre b-school or MSc course in Oxbridge in order to tell others in the office that they're overseas grads.
However, most of them who apply still do not get in.
Overall, this applies to both US and UK universities - it's much harder to get into the undergrad programme of the SAME department of the SAME university, than the post grad programme like master's. In fact, the higher up you go, the easier it is to get a place. Undergrad is the hardest, next is Master's, easiest to get a place is PhD.
This applies only when comparing the SAME department. For instance, obviously its easier to get into Yale undergrad engineering (because Yale is NOT known for engineering, MIT/Caltech are) than the super prestigious Wharton b-school in Upenn.
I've touched on this in a previous post. A guy in MIT PhD who got into MIT undergrad is not smarter than a guy who got into MIT undergrad of the same department. The first guy just chose to stay on. A guy with NUS PhD is 100 times dumber than a guy in the worst undergrad department in Oxbridge or HYPSM.
The idiots in this thread who wont be able to understand the logic above include the guy who just posted the George Bush post.