I came across this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that reminded me of the excellence of higher ed in this country. Whatever your personal opinions of college ranking systems, students do need a way to compare schools across the globe. The article explored some of the challenges of coming up with a singular higher education ranking process when so many parties are already producing their own lists.
As of now, the two most popular international ranking approaches come from China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities and the Times Higher Education-Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings.
Each system uses different rankings methodologies but, as you’ll see after the jump, U.S. universities dominate the top of the list. I’ve also attached an explanation of the rankings from the Chronicle.
Check it out.
SHANGHAI JIAO TONG U.’S 2008 RANKING OF UNIVERSITIES
TOP 20 INSTITUTIONS
1. Harvard U.
2. Stanford U.
3. U. of California at Berkeley
4. U. of Cambridge
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6. California Institute of Technology
7. Columbia U.
8. Princeton U.
9. U. of Chicago
10. U. of Oxford
11. Yale U.
12. Cornell U.
13. U. of California at Los Angeles
14. U. of California at San Diego
15. U. of Pennsylvania
16. U. of Washington
17. U. of Wisconsin at Madison
18. U. of California at San Francisco
19. U. of Tokyo
20. Johns Hopkins U.
‘TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION’ 2008 RANKING OF UNIVERSITIES
TOP 20 INSTITUTIONS
1. Harvard U.
2. Yale U.
3. U. of Cambridge
4. U. of Oxford
5. California Institute of Technology
6. Imperial College London
7. U. College London
8. U. of Chicago
9. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
10. Columbia U.
11. U. of Pennsylvania
12. Princeton U.
13. Duke U./Johns Hopkins U. (tied)
15. Cornell U.
16. Australian National U.
17. Stanford U.
18. U. of Michigan
19. U. of Tokyo
20. McGill U.
RANKINGS METHODOLOGY: 2 APPROACHES
The best-known and most closely tracked of the international rankings, Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s “Academic Ranking of World Universities,” assigns scores to institutions on the basis of four factors: quality of education, quality of faculty, research output, and per capita performance.
Several measures are used to define each factor. Quality of education counts the number of alumni who have won Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals. Quality of faculty counts the number of staff members who have won such awards as well as the number of “highly cited researchers” in 21 fields. Research output counts papers published in the journals Nature and Science, as well as how often those papers are cited. Per capita performance is measured by adding up the weighted scores in the other categories and dividing the total by the number of staff members.
The “Times Higher Education-Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings” is more heavily focused on reviews by academics, which account for 40 percent of an institution’s score. A survey of employers contributes 10 percent. The rankings also consider the faculty-student ratio, the proportion of international faculty members and international students, and the number of citations per faculty member.