World universities ranking

The Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University recently released a list of what its researchers say are the top 500 universities in the world. (As if U.S. News and World Report wasn't causing enough trouble for admissions officers.)

What surprising is how unsurprising the rankings are, by and large. The ten best universities in the world are:

Harvard University
Stanford University
Cambridge University
University of California, Berkeley
Massachusetts Inst Tech
California Inst Tech
Princeton University
Oxford University
Columbia University
University of Chicago

The top-ranked Asian university is Tokyo (14); the best Continental university* is ETZH-Zurich (27); in the Middle East, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (90). No Latin American university is in the top 100, but the National Autonomous University (in Mexico) and University of Sao Paolo (in Brazil) are part of a 48-way tie for 153rd-201st place. The top-ranked Indian university is an IIT, the best Chinese university is University of Beijing, and the best African University is University of Cape Town-- all part of a 100-way tie for 202nd-301st.

Naturally, a list like this raises methodological and common sense questions that you can drive a truck through. Obviously, the reliance on familiar indicators like Nobel Prizes and citation indexes are going to skew the results very heavily in favor of American and European institutions. Then there's the degree to which local factors play in defining status. Are Colorado State and Florida State really better in some global sense than Seoul National University, which in Korea has a stature roughly equivalent to the entire Ivy League, Oxbridge, and the Sorbonne put together? Apparently so-- but that only raises the question of whether such comparisons make sense in the first place.

Unless I'm missing them, there are also no military or service academies on the list-- a very notable absence in those countries whose military academies train a substantial portion of their managerial elite, and a not inconsiderable absence even for a nation with as vast and diverse an educational ecology as the U.S.

Still, it is interesting to think about how this list might change in the next ten or twenty years. The global preeminence of American universities is very much a 20th-century phenomenon, and owed a great deal to 1) the tremendous investment that state and federal governments made in higher education; 2) the influx of European refugee scholars and scientists in the 1930s and 1940s, who instantly transformed many American disciplines from good into world-class; and 3) the Cold War, which kept the federal funding tap open well into the 1980s. (Stanford's rise in particular has been nothing short of meteoric.)

This is not, in other words, a natural state of affairs, much as those of us from or at schools in that top tier (my alma mater is #15-- Go Quakers) would like to believe. It's worth asking what would be the consequences of a shake-up.

* Denmark doesn't appear until #59, with U. of Copenhagen (sorry, Mats and Peter!)

[via Alex Halavais]

Comments

[Peter Dreyer]

Hmmm, what's even worse, Univ. of Aarhus is only number 101... Despite that it is an interesting list (not the actual ratings, but the concept).

I guess the list would change dramatically, if it was to list universities according to specific faculties. If the list had highlighted science and technology I am sure that universities in Korea, China, India, Israel - and Aarhus would appear in top 40. If you narrow the scope for patent portfolios, the list would probably change again.

Certainly, the list will change over time, but one can hope that globalisation will lead to a convergence in ratings (meaning that the difference between a position as number 20 and 220 is minimal) due to an enhanced exchange of academic resources and collaboration. Otherwise the future looks bleak for the US and Europe (Aarhus being the exception).

[Alex]

After sleeping on it, I realized one major problem with such a list:

Lots of universities (and even more colleges) don't aspire to global influence, but have strong local or national influence. Seoul National is an excellent example: it's incredibly important within Korean government and business, but not very prominent outside Korea. Likewise, there are lots of universities in small countries that are training-grounds for their nation's elites, but don't register on the global radar.

In a similar vein, American state universities often are notable for two things: production of state elites, and research geared to the local economy. The former isn't something you can convert into global reputation (if I want to get into North Carolina politics, I don't go to the University of Virginia), but the latter can be. Texas A&M and the Colorado School of Mines, for example, both have alumni who run oil companies or ministries in the Middle East or South Asia.

So a reliance on research output measures and awards is going to view an institution through a very narrow window, and miss an awful lot. That doesn't mean such measures are utterly worthless. But we need to be very aware of their limits.

[Alex]

And I'm sure the list will change a lot over the next 20 years. It'll be interesting to see how many of the top 50 schools are new in 2025. I'll go out on a limb and predict that all the newcomers will be from the Pacific Rim-- mostly China and Taiwan, with at least one from Korea and Australia.

[Hyungsub]

It's quite embarrassing to find that the "Score on Alumni" for Seoul National University is *0*. Did you know that SNU produced the second highest number of American Ph.D.s only after UC Berkeley?

[Alex]

Okay, a SECOND problem with the report: no attempt to measure the number of graduates who go on to get graduate degrees. Though since the report was pretty heavily skewed to institutions with graduate schools, that's not necessarily surprising.

And does SNU really produce the second highest number of American Ph.D.s? That's amazing. (Wait: here's the report.)

(Another data point: according to "http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.16418/article_detail.asp">The American Enterprise, 2/3 of Korean nationals who get U.S. engineering Ph.D.s are SNU grads.)