So the World Reputation Rankings for 2018 are out - they essentially rank universities around the world based on their international reputation.
The top 10 breaks down thus:
Thoughts? Do students look to pure “prestige” rankings like this that reflect a world view?
Academic reputation is a low-priority issue for most students. I’d bet more students care about whether the football or basketball team is highly ranked. Otherwise, they decide based on price, location, school size, where their friends are going, whether the campus is pretty, and does the school have the major they want.
I was looking at the list, and thought it was interesting how perceptions of particular US universities differ between people in the US and people outside of the US. For example, in the US most people are going to have a higher ranked perception of Brown and Washington U than Penn State, but worldwide Penn State is ranked higher than Brown and Washington U.
US students could care less about how the “world” feels about prestige rankings.
Well, yes, @Gator88NE but people from all around the world read CC, and many of them do care about whether a college can help them in their home country.
And also, isn’t a world reputation a college’s “true” reputation? We live in an international world now, and moving forward, and that cannot be denied. Students today will be interacting with, interviewing with, and being hired by professionals that have ties all around the world. To keep ones head buried in the sand and view the US News rankings as God is maybe a bit…naive?
Yes and no. We also still live in a world where hyper-local factors have a large influence. The connectivity of the world affects many things but academic reputation I think is far more limited. Much of the interconnectivity effects is a sum of many micro-level effects (usually economic).
When it comes to college, you local jobs (anywhere, not just in the US) are still typically working off local/regional reputations. I don’t think the THE rankings will correlate much for any country’s local jobs (a vast majority of jobs - I’d challenge people to list a significant portion of jobs where the hiring is done at a truly global scale for a single position in a single location). So I don’t think writing off the THE rankings is burying your head in the sand for most cases. There are certainly edge cases where one cares about truly global prestige, but even today “global” jobs will likely be influenced by a specific set of local reputations, not the sum average of global reputation of all locales.
At a sociological/political level, I suspect that even as the world becomes interconnected, local environments will only become more important. Distinct cultures and diversity of all sorts aren’t going to disappear but rather become more differentiated. People have read too much sci-fi to want a single-government single-culture world, and that diversity of culture will keep the local and regional reputation of schooling (and more) important.
You can see the distinction happening even with accents. I can’t find the specific academic paper source, but the gist is that accents and regional dialects are actually strengthening through globalization, not merging. Some articles:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpvx4/why-humans-dont-have-a-universal-language
https://www.wired.com/2008/06/st-essay-23/
@ktjordan78 - if you read @Gator88NE carefully, you will see that the population that was polled (senior, published academics) has exactly zero overlap with the population (professionals) that does 99.5% of the hiring on a global basis.
So, your statement about “true” reputation is only true for people seeking research jobs in academia - which is typically Phd candidates, not undergraduate candidates.
It is interesting to note that the criteria for “best teaching environment” among this population of academics is based on how efficient the school is at producing Phd students - which is just the opposite of what you want if you are an undergraduate.
Why do those arbitrary man-cooked weights matter? When you adjust those weights for no apparent reasons, the ranking becomes different.