https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/rankings
- Harvard
- MIT
- Stanford
- Berkeley
- Oxford
- Cal Tech
- Cambridge
- Columbia
- Princeton
- Johns Hopkins/ U. of Washington/ Yale
- UCLA
- Chicago
- UC San Francisco
Discuss 
It’s so funny how often I read these types of threads and Michigan is left out…seriously, why stop at the top 15?
- University of California--San Diego 17 .Imperial College London/University of Michigan--Ann Arbor
- University of Pennsylvania
- University of Toronto
But now we’re leaving out Duke, Cornell, and Northwestern! :))
Berkeley #4, why then is it something like #20 in the regular college rankings? And no, this is not only graduate school. It also includes undergraduate programs as well.
The global ranking is heavily research activity related, so hardly undergrad quality comes into play. That explains Berkeley with undergrad ranking at #20 and global ranking at #4. It also explains why Princeton, which has no law, medical and business schools, is ranked #1 in undergrad ranking while it’s #9 in global ranking. Here are the ranking criteria they used:
Ranking indicator Weight
Global research reputation 12.5%
Regional research reputation 12.5%
Publications 10%
Books 2.5%
Conferences 2.5%
Normalized citation impact 10%
Total citations 7.5%
Number of publications that are among the 10 percent most cited 12.5%
Percentage of total publications that are among the 10 percent most cited 10%
International collaboration 5%
Percentage of total publications with international collaboration 5%
Number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1 percent most cited in their respective field 5%
Percentage of total publications that are among the top 1 percent most highly cited papers
If anything, these rankings show how variable and arbitrary rankings can be. Global rankings can’t compare undergrad GPAs/test scores, because universities in other countries don’t grade and test in a comparable way.
These rankings are best used to understand how American universities are perceived reputation-wise on an international scale, as compared to each other and to other top universities around the world.
^^and nationally as well.
Gee wiz, if we could just get rid of those darned undergrads, then everybody could just focus on improving their research reputation, and climbing the various US News rankings without any unnecessary distractions!
UC - Santa Cruz # 47
CMU # 77
UCs must be doing something right…LOL!
@Mastadon Oh for sure no one ranking (or any collection of rankings, really!) can tell you which school is the best school for YOU. But likewise, SAT scores, high school GPAs, and acceptance rates don’t tell you how the global academic world views American institutions when stacked against international universities like Cambridge or Oxford.
These global rankings are interesting, but don’t go picking a school over them…
“Berkeley #4, why then is it something like #20 in the regular college rankings? And no, this is not only graduate school. It also includes undergraduate programs as well.”
UCSF has no undergrad programs, none, so this is heavily weighted to grad research. And Michigan at 17 for a global ranking seems reasonable. UCSF only has a medical school though so to be ahead of other universities that have med, bus and law schools seems interesting. They must pump out a ton of stuff to be ranked so high and the fact they have reputation in only medicine/healthcare means that having no other grad programs doesn’t hurt them.
It’s actually pretty amazing to think that Princeton comes in at #9 despite the heavy weighting of grad research.
Its not like Princeton doesn’t give out graduate degrees, they just don’t have med/business/law grad schools. They award many PhD’s and Masters degrees each year.
Frankly this ranking is a ranking of the combined graduate programs at each university.
Yes Princeton has a whopping 333 total enrollment for Master’s for the 2017-2018 year.
Luska, most major graduate programs in the traditional disciplines do not encourage Master’s program, preferring to enroll PhD track graduate students. But make no mistake, Princeton is a major research institution. 14 Princeton graduate school alumni went on to win the Nobel Prize, as did 20 of its full time faculty members. Only 9 US universities have produced more Nobel Laureates. In addition to those, 6 Princeton graduate students went on to win the Fields medal (2nd highest among US universities) as did 11 of its faculty (far and away the most among all universities globally). Princeton is a research powerhouse.
Medicine generates heavy research activity.
That helps UCSF and hurts Princeton a bit in a ranking like this.
JHU is perennially #1 (or close to it) in overall research spending.
It’s a strong research university overall, but a high percentage of that spending goes to medicine (along with applied physics).
One way to compare institutional resources and priorities is to follow the money. IPEDS tracks 7 kinds of college and university revenue sources (5 for private schools plus 2 additional ones for state schools). In 2015, JHU’s revenues per full time equivalent student (in the 5 IPEDS-tracked categories) amounted to ~$171K. About 30% of that revenue came from government grants and contracts. Princeton’s revenues per student were much higher (~$380K) … but less than 5% of the 5-category total came from government grants and contracts. Berkeley and Michigan-AA revenues amounted to less than $50K per student, but in each case nearly 40% of it came from government grants and contracts. Williams College had more revenue per student than JHU ($192K), but only ~1% of it came from government grants and contracts.
So with respect to the amounts and sources of funds, each of these schools has a very different profile. If some schools have very large revenue streams that aren’t tied to research contracts, but you’re only measuring the output of research activities (which are heavily tilted toward government-initiated work in high-interest fields), then you may be getting a fairly distorted assessment (that is, unless you mainly care about research, or else you think research quality is a good proxy for everything else).
I don’t know why it’s unthinkable to y’all that Princeton might be #9 on a ranking. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder–always. Don’t take it so hard. But yeh, to many Princeton ain’t all that.
My big two takeaways are:
-public schools are well represented here (Berkeley, U Washington, UCLA, UCSF, UCSD, Michigan and so on…)
-American schools (and to a lesser degree British schools) REALLY dominate. It’s like nothing else even exists at the top.
I wonder why this is…
@preppedparent While beauty may indeed be in the eye of the beholder, telling Heidi Klum she ain’t all that is just flat out wrong! Based on the criteria of the ranking I don’t think anyone is surprised that Princeton is ranked #9. If anything I was surprised it was that high.
In MY eyes Heidi Klum isn’t all that, but that’'s because beauty is subjective. Princeton ranking #9 based on those criteria that I listed earlier, is objective (in that the rankings went by those criteria regardless of whether you agree with those criteria or not). Again, the global rankings are based mostly on research output with no undergrad quality in play, and Princeton doesn’t have medical, law and business schools. In fact, it’s grad schools are very small relative to its peer schools with the number of undergrad student population far above its grad student population. So it isn’t “unthinkable” that Princeton is #9 in the global rankings while ranks #1 in undergrad rankings. In fact, I do agree with Luska19 that Princeton came in that high in the global rankings is rather surprising without those Big 3 schools.