World's top 100 universities listed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/datablog/2009/oct/08/top-100-universities-world

by newacc • 17 years ago

8 31 17 years ago

guardian.co.uk

gdp• 17 years ago

I seriously hate these lists. Top 100 universities at doing what?

There's no point being in the crappiest department of the "best" university.

Stasyan• 17 years ago

I agree. There are pretty good technical specialists coming out of Russia, China and India. I have not found a single university from ether country.

gaius5• 17 years ago

IIT certainly should rank right up there.

jsf• 17 years ago

I agree with you if you use lists such as this one to pick the University in which you go to study or work. But I would think that as a Country, or a State they might serve as a (very) high-level indicator of how you are doing in education.

gaius5• 17 years ago

Certainly not at brand recognition. Everyone's heard of Harvard, Yale and Cambridge, no-one's heard of UCL who didn't go there (and I say this as an alum).

seldo2• 17 years ago

Well, I've heard of it, but then I went to Warwick, which is way down at #58 ;-)

radioactive21• 17 years ago

"Top 100 universities at doing what?"

The list is endless, visit their websites, look up all the teachers and programs they have going. Now research those and you will see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Top university implies that these schools have a large hub of academic progress, it might not be in a tangible form but the stuff they do at those universities does make a difference.

These schools get a lot of bad press because the big players of the world seem to come from them, but it does not diminish the contribution these higher education universities have added to the global community.

unalone5• 17 years ago

There's a difference between saying "Hey, these places are really good!" and saying "Hey, this place ranks a little bit above this place!"

I'm a firm believer in the malevolence of unnecessary statistics. The only point I've ever seen in college rankings is for people to gloat over people in other colleges. I can't imagine the benefit of knowing just how these colleges rank according to an arbitrary study.

prat2• 17 years ago

There is another link that provides slightly more info than just the rank http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/Rankings2009-Top200.ht...

Like peer review score, employer score etc. But even then, I think this is more like a voting scheme to obtain scores rather than detailed assessment of each department/ research / paper published / nobel laureates produced/ entrepreneurs produced / innovation quotient etc.

maxklein• 17 years ago

What they should do also is write how much it costs to actually attend these schools, then throw that in as a .2 weighing factor.

Continental Europe would fare quite a bit better in that case.

theoneill• 17 years ago

But (a) that would then be a different list, the 100 best bargains, not the 100 best universities, and (b) if you really want to measure what it costs, you have to factor in European taxes, since you have to pay more unless you are an EU resident.

gaius5• 17 years ago

It costs (roughly) GBP 3000 to attend as a UK citizen and GBP 9000-11000 as a foreigner depending on subject - and I believe the individual universities have no say in it, it's set by the government. So compared to the US, you could get a bargain.

fiaz• 17 years ago

I find this list hard to believe. University of Illinois Chicago is in the list and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is nowhere to be found.

I think it is widely held that UIUC ranks higher than UIC.

xiaoma7• 17 years ago

Yes. I also pointed out above that ranking U.C.L.A. above U.C. Berkeley, the flagship and leading campus of the U.C. system is nuts.

joezydeco• 17 years ago

Champaign. But yeah.

ovi256• 17 years ago

European universities could fare much better if only they would group. What that means is that in Lyon for example, the University of Lyon is legally divided in 16 institutions, Lyon 1 to Lyon 3, plus various other specialized colleges, e.g. my school, Insa de Lyon, for administrative reasons. Each is ranked separately in most lists. They do badly in Shangai Uni's ratings because each separately has 16 times less published papers, and the absolute number of publications is a big factor in most ratings.

Starting a few years ago, they started asking researchers and students to attribute their papers to "The University of Lyon", an entity that administratively does not exist, but logically it should. Most other universities I know in France are in the same situation, and have started applying similar measures.

Paris engineering colleges have grouped under a new entity, ParisTech, for example. Hopefully, this will focus attention and fix ratings. It should, because some member colleges have been around for some 1000 years, so they must be doing something right. Consider it a brand hack :)

gaius5• 17 years ago

European universities could fare much better if only they would group.

UCL, Imperial, King's and LSE are all individual colleges within the University of London.

xiaoma7• 17 years ago

MIT and Caltech got shafted in these rankings.

Also from the comments:

As for the comparative ranking of U.S. universities . . . this list does not correspond very well to some rankings done by people competent to rate our institutions.

For example, only the delusional would rank U.C.L.A. as above U.C. Berkeley, the flagship and leading campus of the U.C. system. U.C. San Diego should also rank very high, it competes very well with UCLA.

unalone5• 17 years ago

Perhaps the moral here is that ranking colleges is a stupid way to do things, that comparing a large enormous entity to another large enormous entity is silly, and that when you're really good at what you do, the difference between #1 and #40 isn't much at all.

Also: Did you REALLY repost your comment because the first time you submitted this it got swiftly downvoted? I replied to this same comment only to find it had been deleted and replaced with a dupe. Not cool.

xiaoma7• 17 years ago

I deleted it because the first time I accidentally posted it incomplete. I deleted it and posted the full comment above. It amazes me that anybody responded to it that quickly. I'd have left it if I'd seen the comment. I did reply to your comment after seeing it, if that makes you feel better.

I really don't care about karma. Apparently, you do and you dinged me twice. Congrats, but it's not really the kind of discussion I was looking for.

xiaoma7• 17 years ago

I was making a point beyond the general idea that rankings are stupid. These particular rankings, particularly of the California schools is terrible. There is a difference between ULCA and Berkley. Especially when looking at the metrics of very top level achievement, such as Nobel Prizes, the difference between #1 and #40 can be very large.

psyklic• 17 years ago

Since when was Caltech a large enormous entity? MIT admitted 1500 freshmen last year, about the size of all undergrads+grads combined at Caltech (~2000 students total).

prat2• 17 years ago

Indian Institute of Technology is not listed? That's a shame. There are 7 institutes and atleast one of them should easily be in top 10. But again that's just my opinion.

World's top 100 universities listed

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