MIT overtakes Cambridge and Harvard to top spot in QS world university rankings
topuniversities.com
topuniversities.com
Phil Baty, deputy editor of Times Higher Education, acknowledged that Alexandria’s surprising prominence was actually due to “the high output from one scholar in one journal” — soon identified on various blogs as Mohamed El Naschie, an Egyptian academic who published over 320 of his own articles in a scientific journal of which he was also the editor.
In 2009, an administrator at Clemson University in the U.S. revealed that the college had "... manipulated class sizes, artificially boosted faculty salary data and gave rival schools low grades in the rankings' peer reputation survey" with the goal of improving its U.S. News & World Report college ranking. This helped the university rise from #38 to #22 over a seven-year period (2). A few weeks ago, Emory University admitted it had also manipulated data/lied over a period of more than 10 years in order to improve its U.S. News & World Report ranking (3).
My takeaway from these incidents: Not only are university ranking systems imperfect to begin with, but it's also possible to game the system ... and it happens every year.
1. New York Times: "Questionable Science Behind Academic Rankings" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/education/15iht-educLede15...
2. USA Today: "Clemson official: School manipulated rankings " http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-06-04-clemson-ra...
3. Reuters: "Emory gave incorrect data to publications that rank U.S. colleges" in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/17/usa-emory-ranking-idINL2E8JHNG320120817
Just for the record: I recently read (presumably on HN, too) about a ranking where somebody asked lawyers to rank schools according to their prestige. Penn-State always got ranked in the middle, even though it didn't have a law school at all. So, in a sense it doesn't even matter if administrators are cheating or not...
The important thing shouldn't be education, but what is done with it.
Here is a messy and incomplete list of cool things created by people from lower ranking universities:
Python: University of Amsterdam. Ruby: University of Tsukuba. PHP: University of Waterloo. Javascript: University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Rails: Copenhagen Business School Django: University of Bath and Missouri School of Journalism Drupal: Ghent University Linux: University of Helsinki MySQL: Helsinki University of Technology and ?? Perl: Seattle Pacific University Java: University of Calgary Objective C: Furman University and ?? C++: University of Aarhus C#: Technical University of Denmark
For example, Stanford and Rice University have the same student-to-faculty ratio, and their endowments are proportional, but Stanford has 2 graduate students for every undergraduate student, whereas Rice is one of the smallest Division 1 schools AND has fewer graduate students. So when Rice claims undergraduates interested in interacting closely with faculty in cutting-edge research will have ample opportunity to do so, one could argue they may be more likely to provide that to undergrads than even Stanford. Because I've compared experiences with Stanford folks, I don't think Stanford is behind Rice in that category, but the fact is, I'm comparing against one of the very top schools. So perhaps my argument holds for most universities that are ahead of Rice in the rankings, but a student is going to have to really dig to figure that out, and perhaps speak with students and faculty at each university to grasp the differences that matter to him or her. And that's only in the category of undergraduate participation in research--there are many other questions students face that these rankings can't properly answer.
Clearly there is a need to capture certain metrics and display that as quantitative information, and the difference between, say, the top 10 and the 90-100 is probably relevant, but the difference within the top ~20 is so minimal its largely irrelevant.
It really galls me when people make decisions about undergraduate or graduate schools (or, probably employees, although this is a position I'm yet to be in) based on these kinds of rankings. Clearly it should factor to some extent (i.e. Harvard vs. Jeremey's University of Rubishville[1]) but there are MANY much more important factors to consider.
The irony is that the rankings are 50% opinion based, which basically amounts to identifying where people think are prestigious. I wonder what people use to identify which the prestigious universities are - they can't possible go and visit them all, but if only there were some kind of online ranking they could use to get an idea...
[1] When I went to undergraduate, this was the fictional university my younger brother suggested he might end up going to.
As for the distinctions among the generally assumed top tier -- be it Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, or what have you -- these seem pretty irrelevant in praxis. Go to the school that interests you the most and is the best fit for you. If you should be so talented and lucky as to get into all of the best schools, you're probably the kind of person whose life isn't going to take a dramatic turn for the worse because some ranking system suddenly places your alma mater at #2 or #3.
The only two groups who place serious stock in the rankings are high schoolers and the chronically insecure.
I can see why you would want to go to a university as high up this list as possible, because you want your degree to be from an institution that potential employers will recognise. In the UK at least, having an Oxbridge degree will automatically doors to some opportunities that aren't otherwise easy to get into.
But, if you're actually concerned about the quality of education that you get (hint: if you're spending 3+ years on it then you probably should be), then bear in mind that individual faculties and departments within universities vary a lot and a ranking system can't replace doing your own research.
Also, I'm not sure that it is correct to say that science and engineering are more "specialized" in their entirety than liberal arts are. All of Harvard's engineering, for instance, is contained in a single department. Doesn't that make Harvard more "specialized" towards liberal arts?
Edit: This goes equally to the other responses to my comment.
But few of the MIT grads I've known (wonderful people, all) appear to have benefited that much from this opportunity. They're nerds through and through.
Maybe the technical course load precludes exploring non-technical subjects. Or maybe the experience of 4 years almost exclusively around young scientists and engineers tends to alter one's perspective. Maybe it's that I've only been around conventional technical MIT grads (EECS, Physics, not Philosophy).
Maybe that's a totally superficial assessment, but in terms of the quality of facilities, research going on and the interaction I had with professors they were awesome. I don't think this is surprising though - the US is a lot bigger (and I visited a lot of the top universities) so you'd expect there to be more high quality institutions, because there are simply a lot more students/faculty.
This is why I find the UK occupying a lot of the top ten to be someone dubious. No slight against the British academic world, but four out of the top six when adjusted for funds and population just seems ridiculous.
- Academic Peer Review 40% - Global Employer Review 10% - Citations Per Faculty 20% - International Student Ratio 5% - International Faculty Ratio 5% - Faculty Student Ratio 20%"
I have no idea why it is weighted so heavily. Presumably most students care about where employers hire from, and most researchers care about citations/research impact.
Shrug.
Clearly a Sanford man does the former.
http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2012.html
The Top ten universities listed there are
1 Harvard University 2 Stanford University 3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 4 University of California, Berkeley 5 University of Cambridge 6 California Institute of Technology 7 Princeton University 8 Columbia University 9 University of Chicago 10 University of Oxford
I'd guess that the absence of a med school pulls down Berkeley's ranking somewhat. When you start comparing research funding and activity, the med schools play a huge role in pumping up the numbers.
(In particular, I'm comparing the ranking of Stanford and MIT in surveys from the UK and Asia.)
Do you share lecturers among colleges, or is there one college that all computer science majors attend?
And the colleges are more than semi-automonus - they have their own academics, own money, and they do their own admissions.
The analogy usually used for the benefit of American-tourists (not meant patronisingly, it's just empirically surprisingly effective) is that it's like Hogwarts. You have the colleges/houses (like gryffindor and hufflepuff) where you live (at least in 1st year) and eat and play sports for, but lectures and the degree in general (like potions class) are all done in faculties with people doing the same course but in other colleges.
Most lecturers and professors will belong to a college too, but they'll still be lecturers in a faculty rather than a college. In Cambridge there is an academic rank called 'College Lecturer' but like most things that doesn't mean what it says, and is probably designed to confuse and intimidate foreign people, like everything else (for example May Week when all the college balls are held after exams, is in June, and the weeks start on Thursday and end on Wednesday). [Lest the po-faced take me seriously, it's not actually designed to confuse people, it's just there's a lot of vestigial baggage that it's not worth the effort of changing [like removing an appaendix when it's not causing you problems] when you've been around almost a millennium and where a switch to the Gregorian Calendar was more recent than when the desk in your study was built.]