Britain and America dominate list of best universities.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/student/news/article660845.ece

by rglullis • 19 years ago

5 24 19 years ago

timesonline.co.uk

I was surprised to see the amount of British universities at the top. <a href="http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top20..." rel="nofollow">http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top20..., Caltech guys will be happy to see they got ahead of M.I.T.<p>And we Brazilians are just happy to see that USP and Unicamp got into the list (175 and 177). I do believe, however, that Unicamp got really impressive scores for quality of faculty.

rglullis3• 19 years ago

I was surprised to see the amount of British universities at the top. http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top20... . Also, Caltech guys will be happy to see they got ahead of M.I.T.

And we Brazilians are just happy to see that USP and Unicamp got into the list (175 and 177). I do believe, however, that Unicamp got really impressive scores for quality of faculty.

pg4• 19 years ago

Can you post the list? It's so lame that they make you create an account to see it.

rglullis3• 19 years ago

http://top200.jottit.com/

nanijoe• 19 years ago

In a study done by English speaking people, is this result really a surprise?

pg4• 19 years ago

"The rankings were based on a survey for the THES of 3,703 academics worldwide..."

cglee2• 19 years ago

Not sure how this quote disproves the previous statement (English speaking bias).

mynameishere• 19 years ago

In some countries this is the result of a deliberate policy. The German and Dutch governments, perhaps from fear of elitism, try to ensure that all universities are roughly equal in quality.

http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html

Harj• 19 years ago

"Harvard, whose endowment of $26 billion (GBP13.8 billion) exceeds total annual funding for all British universities"

that gives a powerful indication of the sheer scale of the imbalance between the resources at the disposal of UK and US education institutions.

pg4• 19 years ago

Except that it's comparing a capital sum with an annual expenditure, which is rather misleading. A capital sum will ordinarily be around 20x as big as the annual income it generates (though no doubt Harvard gets better returns than the average nonprofit).

stuki• 19 years ago

No Indian university?

veritas2• 19 years ago

Apparently not...

sharpshoot• 19 years ago

woot - no 2 and no 5!

ced• 19 years ago

This will merely reflect reputation. How many people in academia have been at Harvard long enough to have an actual opinion?

Question: if China built the best university in the world today, how long would it take to reach number 1 on the list? I think decades. So much for having a yearly list.

I looked for details, from http://www.thes.co.uk/worldrankings/story.aspx . It requires registration, but here's a part of the method section:

"Our rankings contain two strands of peer review. The more important is academic opinion, worth 40 per cent of the total score available in the rankings. The opinions are gathered, like the rest of the rankings data, by our partners QS Quacquarelli Symonds (www.topuniversities.com) which has built up a database of e-mail addresses of active academics across the world. They are invited to tell QS what area of academic life they come from, choosing from science, biomedicine, technology, social science or the arts and humanities. They are then asked to list up to 30 universities that they regard as the leaders in the academic field they know about, and in 2007 we have strengthened our measures to prevent anyone voting for his or her own institution.

This year we have the opinions of 5,101 experts, of whom 41 per cent are in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 30 per cent in the Americas, and 29 per cent in the Asia-Pacific region."

The rest of the score is split:

-10% which university do recruiters favor

-20% publication count

-20% student stuff, like teacher-to-student ratio (the only example they give)

-10% I couldn't find.

So there's definitely two selection effects: how did they collect their addresses, and who decided to answer a Times Online survey. I'm pretty sure my advisor wouldn't do it. Too busy.

Furthermore, they don't give the detailed methodology, and they admit to changing it since the first published results.

Overall, it seems like an honest effort, but what's the point? Would you advise a young person to make a decision based on this ranking?

Britain and America dominate list of best universities.

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