ANU (2 Viewers)

[Dichromate]

Lol my bad for the jumping to conclusions

But really ANU ranks as the best uni in Australia overall and in Arts and Humanities so if prestige was a factor ANU would be the top choice I guess. That being said, having checked the employment stats of ANU/USYD/UNSW/MQ/UTS/Newcastle there's less than a 5% difference between them, and ANU would be really good because they're close to a lot of big national firms and Parliament (so if you wanted to go into politics you're quite close to everything). Prestige has a limited role in employment in the end

ANU is not in any way shape or form the best university in Australia, especially for undergrads.

The thing it most has going for it is the better opportunity to live on campus. The teaching at the undergrad level is not particularly standout, in a lot of ways the facilities are not that great, and being in Canberra isn't actually that great for career opportunities.

If you're in Law, Sydney and Melbourne are both far better choices for:
-opportunity to get experience
-'prestige' of the law school and relevance to the local industry
-opportunity to network

The actual student life is WAY better at a "Sandstone" University too and probably at Monash and UNSW as well.
ANU has:
-a cohort of local students who won't break with the friends they went to school with and who go to/from uni like it's still high school
-a massive cohort of internationals who you won't interact much with but who still take up space
-an overall small cohort of undergrads compared to the other Go8 universities, so the absolute number of people you have to interact with gets rather restricted. A lot of clubs and societies are pretty small and not that active as a result, you have a few really big active ones - major political clubs, law students society, debating society, all the international ones, etc and a periphery of smaller ones that don't do that much.

There are a way bigger range of clubs and societies and there's way more to do at other Go8/Sandstone uni's if you must go to a prestigious uni. I mean gees, UQ for instance has societies for each different stream of engineering, it has a powerlifting club with it's own gym, it has multiple business/commerce clubs relevant to different areas, eg: finance as opposed to economics, as opposed to accounting, that are all actually real clubs that do stuff.

Also as for going into politics - no way.
Canberra is the last place you'd move if you wanted to become a politician for more reasons than I care to type.