World's top 100 universities listed | Hacker News Reader

World's top 100 universities listed

guardian.co.uk

8 pointsnewacc34 comments

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

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

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.

IIT certainly should rank right up there.

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.

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).

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

I don't set much store by relying on the prestige of a university as a substitute for what the graduate's done with their career but still, it's annoying to get mistaken for the University of Central Lancashire!

"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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

Champaign. But yeah.

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.

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.

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.

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.

However, top US universities are very generous about scholarships for high-achieving individuals even if they are non-nationals. UK universities have very few scholarships to start with and most of them are closed to non-citizens.

I come from Trinidad & Tobago, and most of my schoolmates went to American universities for this reason: UK universities are completely unattainable to a non-western income.

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.

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.

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.

I should add, though, that having the entire comment greyed out, only with a single unfriendly response would be a bit disappointing.

Other people will respond if they have something to say. Isn't that how it always works?

Your current comment is the exact same as your other comment. You edited that one, then deleted it as it got voted down. I believe that you didn't do it for karma, but still it was silly.

Look, I delete all kinds of unfinished or mis-entered things on the computer all the time, including emails, comments, blog entries and pages in employee training manuals. Why leave something up that's in error?

When I was writing my comment originally, I wrote the first line, tabbed over to the article to get the quote and tabbed back to this site and saw that I couldn't submit the comment. I hit the back arrow and then cut and paste my quote into the comment. Then I saw a comment was already there, cursed the fact that light accidental taps on my ASUS laptop's mouse pad get interpreted as clicks, deleted my comment and posted the corrected version. It was then that I saw a response to the [deleted]. Then I refreshed and finally saw the multiple downvotes and your comment along with odd insinuations about my personal motivations.

The cruftiness of the delete functionality and the entire... fuck it. This is just pissing me off. Forget it.

What I mean is: Why did you delete it after you'd already edited the original comment? I'm curious.

I had intended to delete it, not edit it.

Not too long ago, I had an unpleasant situation in which I was locked from editing my own comment. That's why I don't have much confidence in the edit feature. I hadn't realized how the delete feature also sucked until this thread.

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.

Nobel Prizes are not a metric for achievement. That's insane. It's the most selective and irritatingly limited metric you could come up with.

What I'm trying to get you to understand, xiaoma, is that if ranking anything is stupid, then it doesn't make sense to point to a certain ranking system and say "Gee, that's stupid." Of course it's stupid. It's ranking.

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).

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