2010 ARWU College Ranking

Graduate School
1

<p>Harvard tops Chinese university rankings for eighth year
By D'Arcy Doran (AFP) – 4 hours ago</p>

<p>SHANGHAI — Harvard topped a ranking of world universities published Friday by a Shanghai college for the eighth year running -- a list dominated by US institutions and sharply criticised in Europe.</p>

<p>The University of California at Berkeley was second, followed by Stanford, according to the list of 500 institutions compiled by Jiaotong University's Centre for World-Class Universities, available at <a href="http://www.arwu.org%5B/url%5D"&gt;www.arwu.org&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p>

<p>The rankings are focused almost entirely on a university's achievements in scientific research, and do not cover the humanities -- prompting concerns that they do not accurately reflect an institution's overall performance.</p>

<p>Jiaotong uses criteria such as the number of Nobel prizes and Fields medals won by staff and alumni, the number of highly cited researchers on staff, and the number of articles by faculty published in Nature and Science magazines.</p>

<p>The rankings have come in for sharp criticism, notably in Europe, where officials say the criteria are biased against European schools.</p>

<p>The list was the first global ranking of universities when it made its debut in 2003. It was intended to benchmark the performance of Chinese universities, amid efforts by Beijing to create a set of world-class research institutions.</p>

<p>The highest-ranked non-US institutions this year were Britain's Cambridge and Oxford universities, in fifth and 10th places respectively.</p>

<p>Also in the top 10 were Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Princeton, Columbia and the University of Chicago.</p>

<p>In 20th place, the University of Tokyo was the best rated in the Asia-Pacific region.</p>

<p>US schools accounted for 54 of the top 100 universities.</p>

<p>The European continent's top-rated institute was the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, at 23rd, while Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris was the highest-ranked French school in 39th position.</p>

<p>The top Chinese schools were Peking University and Tsinghua University, which were in the tranche of institutions ranked 151st to 200th.</p>

<p>France -- keen to improve its results in Jiaotong's rankings, which favour larger universities -- is investing five billion euros (6.5 billion dollars) in "Operation Campus" to group universities into larger research centres.</p>

<p>France's minister for higher education, Valerie Pecresse, visited Jiaotong last month to promote the campus campaign and lobby for French universities.</p>

<p>A Norwegian minister also visited Jiaotong last year and Denmark's science and innovation minister is due to come next month to discuss the rankings, the Shanghai university said.</p>

<p>However, experts have argued the rankings may have limited value for universities outside China.</p>

<p>Michaela Saisana, an analyst for the European Commission, has studied the rankings' methodology and believes it fails to account for the specific strengths or missions of the world's top schools.</p>

<p>"They're fine for explaining how close the Chinese are to the rest, such as Europe or the US, but not for comparisons amongst universities," she said.</p>

<p>The European Union plans to issue its own rankings by next year -- offering ratings by academic discipline in map form, as a way to help students with the application process.</p>

<p>Source: AFP:</a> Harvard tops Chinese university rankings for eighth year</p>

2

<p>Just out!! Millions of people across the world are logging-on to its website now I believe. Hence, the official website is down at the moment…sorry…=.="</p>

<p>Official Website: <a href=“http://www.arwu.org/[/url]”>http://www.arwu.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

3

<p>“Harvard tops Chinese university rankings for eighth year”</p>

<p>lol, no ****.</p>

4

<p>“The University of California at Berkeley was second, followed by Stanford…”</p>

<p>Congrats, UCBChemEGrad!! ;p</p>

5

<p>If the site is still down, here’s an alternate source: <a href=“Redirect Notice”>Redirect Notice;

6

<p>Looks 10x better than the Forbes garbage. At least this one is based/focused on graduate programs/research, not on ratemyprof.</p>

7

<p>Shanghai rankings rattle European universities</p>

<p>Published: 12/08/2010 at 11:55 PM
Online news: World </p>

<p>Research fraud and limited academic freedom make China an unlikely arbiter for international university excellence, but a Shanghai school’s rankings are making Europe’s education ministers sweat.</p>

<p>Since 2003 Shanghai Jiao Tong University has been publishing the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), one of the two most prominent world university rankings updated on an annual basis. </p>

<p>France’s higher education minister travelled to Jiaotong University’s suburban campus last month to discuss the rankings, the Norwegian education minister came last year and the Danish minister is due to visit next month.</p>

<p>Dozens of university presidents have also made the trip.</p>

<p>“We believed the results would be of interest to university experts and scholars all around the world but we never imagined the rankings would be so influential,” Ying Cheng, the executive director of Jiaotong’s Centre for World-Class Universities, told AFP.</p>

<p>The centre has compiled its annual “Academic Ranking of World Universities” since 2003, listing what it sees as the 500 best schools in the world.</p>

<p>It uses criteria such as the number of Nobel prizes and Fields medals won by staff and alumni, the number of highly cited researchers on staff, and the number of articles by staff published in Nature and Science magazines.</p>

<p>The rankings are focused almost entirely on achievements in scientific research, and do not cover the humanities.</p>

<p>For seven years, Harvard University has topped the survey. Stanford University was runner-up last year and the University of California, Berkeley, was number three.</p>

<p>The only non-US schools in last year’s top 10 were the University of Cambridge at number four and its rival Oxford at number 10.</p>

<p>The 2010 survey is due to be published by Sunday.</p>

<p>The idea for the rankings was born in 1998, when Beijing decreed China needed several world-leading universities. The rankings aimed to define what made a university world-class and see how Chinese schools stacked up globally.</p>

<p>It was the first of its kind, and Britain’s Times Higher Education Supplement published its own world list a year later.</p>

<p>But the debates over the rankings mainly take place outside China.</p>

<p>“The Chinese universities are not ranked as well as some people expected, so they are not willing to talk about them,” Ying said.</p>

<p>In France, the Jiaotong rankings spark a surge of articles decrying the poor performance of the country’s universities.</p>

<p>In Rome, not having a university in the top 100 leads to soul searching, but Spain will celebrate a top 200 placement as a national success, said Michaela Saisana, who analysed the rankings’ methodology for the European Commission.</p>

<p>“Germany, France, Italy and Spain are the countries that have been most shaken by this university ranking,” Saisana said.</p>

<p>But she argues the Shanghai rankings should not be a universal benchmark because they fail to account for the specific strengths or missions of the world’s top schools.</p>

<p>“They’re fine for explaining how close the Chinese are to the rest, such as Europe or the US, but not for comparisons amongst universities,” she said.</p>

<p>France – keen to improve its results in Jiaotong’s rankings, which favour larger universities – is investing five billion euros (6.5 billion dollars) in “Operation Campus” to group universities into larger research centres.</p>

<p>Higher Education Minister Valerie Pecresse visited Jiaotong last month to promote the campus campaign and lobby for French universities, Ying said.</p>

<p>In 2009, Pierre and Marie Curie University was the highest French showing at number 40.</p>

<p>The criteria aim to shift the culture within universities, Ying said.</p>

<p>“Increasing publications is not very easy because you have to change the organisational culture,” he said.</p>

<p>“My university is a very good example. At the beginning, professors were saying: ‘It is impossible if you ask me to publish in international journals’.”</p>

<p>In 1998, Jiaotong published 130 papers in journals per year; now, its faculty and researchers produce more than 3,000 a year, Ying said.</p>

<p>Other schools are also stepping up. Eight Chinese universities ranked in the top 500 in 2004 and last year that number rose to 22.</p>

<p>Ying acknowledges the research scandals – Jiaotong suffered one four years ago when it dismissed the creator of China’s first home-grown digital signal processor. The chip turned out to have been stolen from Motorola.</p>

<p>He also says that academic freedom should be expanded and Chinese universities will need more autonomy from the central government.</p>

<p>But by pushing researchers to compete in the wider academic world, China is fighting “bad traditions”, Ying said.</p>

<p>Link: [Bangkok</a> Post : Shanghai rankings rattle European universities](<a href=“http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/world/190808/shanghai-rankings-rattle-european-universities]Bangkok”>http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/world/190808/shanghai-rankings-rattle-european-universities)</p>

8

<p>Whoa, looks like I’ll have to grab my student ID card and fly to China to get me some shawties.</p>

9

<p>Both the Chinese ARWU and the Times ranking (THES) are far more representative of world-class quality than the silly USN&WR list.</p>

10

<p>Who cares what the rest of the world thinks? Faculty and academics are soooo overrated. Schools should be ranked mostly by the results of a few hours test by 17-18 year olds. After all, what does the rest of the world know about which universities are truly great?</p>

11

<p>Those people never know how to do the sensitive analysis. They should group them like this:</p>

<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Berkeley, Caltech, Cambridge, MIT, Stanford</li>
<li> Columbia, Princeton
.
.
.</li>
</ol>

<p>etc.</p>

<p>It is meaningless to differentiate 0.3 point while the whole formula has so many self-selected terms. They also never factored in the quality of the students. Otherwise, the rankings would be totally different.</p>

12

<p>I prefer the USNWR rankings. As stated by the AFP article, these rankings mean squat for those interested in the humanities :(</p>

13

<p>

</p>

<p>rjkofnovi, I usually don’t agree with you, but I could frame this quote. :slight_smile: Assuming I read your sarcasm right, this is a very good point that I find is often overlooked by the prestige-obsessed.</p>

14

<p>Well thanks for the compliment reesezpiecez103. I think it was a compliment? Sort of? ;-)</p>

15

<p>Why British Universities don’t attract China’s best</p>

<p>By Peter Foster World Last updated: August 13th, 2010</p>

<p>Britain and Europe have fared dismally again in an annual Chinese ranking of top international universities. Should we be concerned? I think we should, and here’s why.</p>

<p>According to the list compiled by Shanghai’s Jiaotong University, the United States accounts for a staggering 54 of the top 100 institutions, with Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford and MIT taking the top four slots.</p>

<p>Cambridge comes in 5th and Oxford 10th, however this can’t obscure the fact that when it comes to first-choice places to study for the brightest Chinese, the US is trouncing Europe.</p>

<p>Europe protests that these rankings, which are heavily skewed towards science, are not a good measure of merit, but that misses the fact that they reveal the attitudes and priorities of top Chinese looking to study abroad and a fundamental weakness in the UK higher education system.</p>

<p>According to a British-Australian economics Phd candidate that I’ve been talking to at Peking University (China’s equivalent of Oxbridge) all the really top students want to go the US to study. And they wouldn’t be seen dead in the UK.</p>

<p>The reason is partly economic: with their massive endowments US universities can afford to fund places for the best candidates in order to attract the very best to their research programmes. Their focus is all about merit, not money.</p>

<p>By contrast, British institutions are seen to be using foreign students as a cash-cow to be mercilessly milked, subsidising the fees of homegrown students and shoring up their books at a time when funding is being cut by central government.</p>

<p>Among her classmates, she says, the overwhelming perception is that the students who go to UK universities are the children of the rich and politically well-connected who couldn’t quite cut it at the top level and win scholarships to the US.</p>

<p>For the very top Chinese students, who have succeeded in the toughest and most elitist selection programme in the world, to go to a British or Australian university, is she adds damningly, to “throw out the very elitism their genius had helped them attain.”</p>

<p>Britain congratulates itself on the number of Chinese students visiting – education as a whole is worth 20bn pounds to the UK economy in 2009 – but it is failing to realise that it’s actually getting China’s second string. Not dummies, for sure, but not the cream either.</p>

<p>In a global economy where developed countries can never compete on cost, surviving only on keeping their technological edge, this is a very dangerous path to be embarking on.</p>

<p>“The UK university system think they are so great because so many Chinese are coming, but they don’t see which Chinese are coming,” says my woman in the quadrangle.</p>

<p>By using foreign students as a source of funding first, and excellence second, we are “risking our global standing for the sake of cheaper degrees for the locals.”</p>

<p>In her view, we are in a race to the bottom.</p>

<ul>
<li>How UK universities fared in the Jiaotong Top 100: Cambridge (5) Oxford (10) University College London (21) Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine (26) University of Manchester (44) University of Edinburgh (54) King’s College London (63) University of Bristol (66) University of Nottingham (84) University of Sheffield (88) University of Birmingham (99).</li>
</ul>

<p>Source: [Why</a> British Universities don’t attract China’s best – Telegraph Blogs](<a href=“http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peterfoster/100050574/why-british-universities-dont-attract-chinas-best/]Why”>http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peterfoster/100050574/why-british-universities-dont-attract-chinas-best/)</p>

16

<p>

</p>

<p>Not saying I completely disagree with your sentiment, but the ARWU rankings certainly have severe limitations. Do you honestly think, for example, that Dartmouth is somewhere in the 77-100 range of the best universities in the US? Equivalent to George Mason, LSU, and University of Alabama at Birmingham? And weaker than UMass, Miami, UC-Santa Cruz, Oregon State, and Arizona State? Not to mention that Washington, Illinois, and Minnesota are at least 120 spots ahead of Dartmouth. Personally, I’d choose to go to Dartmouth over any of those schools. In the end, this ranking penalizes schools that are undergrad dominated and disregards strength in the humanities, which is something many US students LOOK for when choosing a college. I chose Dartmouth somewhat randomly…I could have made the same point with Brown as another example. This ranking seems more applicable for *science *grad programs, in my opinion.</p>

17

<p>Dartmouth and Brown are more large LACs with a few grad programs than full universities so their ranking is not too important in this case. But if you wanted to study chem engineering or many other such areas you might be better off at UMinn than either Brown or Dartmouth.</p>

18

<p>Any world ranking that ranks IIT so low around the 400s area is stupid. Period. </p>

<p>This is graduate school rankings and should not be of anyone’s interest here. We’re focusing on undergrad education, are we not?</p>

19

<p>The idea that there is some big gap or wall between undergrad and grad school is plain wrong. It is more like a continuum with the most advcanced often crossing from one to the other.</p>

20

<p>I agree with barrons</p>

<p>You have to realize that doing undergrad somewhere with an incredible graduate school can pay huge dividends to your undergraduate education.</p>