All the Ivy League schools (Harvard:1, Columbia :4, Princeton:7, Yale:8, Cornell:9, Penn:11) but Dartmouth (44) and Brown (81) were rated well. Brown’s relatively low placement (although it is obviously still high compared to most of the thousands of schools in the world) is pretty surprising given the ratings of their peers. They do relatively poorly across nearly every index included in this rating scale.
Anyone know why their ratings are so low relative to peer schools?
Compared to Harvard that had 1’s across the indices, Brown has (see below for what loads on each label):
81 (international rank 50 (national rank) 64(quality of ed) 43(alum employ)) 73 (qual of fac) 121(Pubs 67(Citations) 76(influence) 99 (Broad impact) 200 (patents) 52.01(score)
Anyone know why these are so low? Why are the publications, influence and other factors so much lower than their peer schools. Just to give you an idea about where Brown sits on the list, It is below Florida (60), U of Arizona (68), Utah (7), College Park (72), Notre Dame (77), Georgia Tech (80) and Rochester (81). It is very surprising to find it so low. Cornell, in contrast, is listed with a World rank of 10.
Brown was 77 in 2013
Brown was 66 in 2012
What the rankings mean:
These are not “reputation” ratings. Rather, they are corrected for the size of the school and reflect:
Quality of Education (25% based on # of university’s alumni who have won major international awards, prizes, and medals relative to the university’s size);
Alumni Employment (25% based on # of university’s alumni who have held CEO positions at the world’s top companies relative to the university’s size)
Quality of Faculty, (25% based on # of academics who have won major international awards, prizes, and medals)
Publications (5%, # of research papers appearing in reputable journals)
Influence (5% based on # of research papers appearing in highly-influential journals)
Citations (5%based on # of highly-cited research papers)
Broad Impact (5% based on university’s Hirsch-index-average impact of each faculty member)
Patents (5% based on # of international patent filings [5%]
Brown and Dartmouth are undergraduate-focused institutions much like LAC’s. When a Dartmouth or Brown undergrad goes on to do research or graduate work at say Cornell or Harvard , I suspect the graduate school gets the credit in this type of ranking.
And yes, like arwarw points out. Almost all of these metrics are heavily weighted towards graduate school things, not undergrad things. Don’t try to tell me Williams or Amherst or Pomona are bad schools but I bet they would get absolutely destroyed in this ranking system.
Could these ratings omit research in the medical school? Maybe those don’t count towards Brown. There is no need for name calling on this site. If you don’t want any questions pertaining to your favorite school, then just call this site PR. A school that can only handle positive PR is a school with problems. I don’t think that is the case for Brown. But ResaissanceMom, you project that sentiment about Brown.
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Princeton is rated high on this same ranking and there is little difference in the ratio of college students to graduate students between Princeton and Brown… But, it could be that the ranks don’t include the medical school. If so, then Brown would obviously be disadvantaged since I would expect a sizable proportion of resourced go into the medical school and I’d expect that the lions share of research and citations are associated with the medical school.
@lostaccount the guy who ranked the schools, Nadim Mahassen, gives his methodology here:
[LINK DELETED BY MODERATOR]
If you have any questions or concerns, I wouldn’t hesitate to email Nadim. I’m sure he’d be excited to get any sort of feedback on his rankings. Best of luck with this.
Let’s think about what some of these metrics mean:
of CEOs of top companies is 1/4th of a University's value? So my biophysics/classics double major classmate who won a fulbright to go work on sustainable water purifications systems in Africa who might spend his whole career in the NGO sector earns no points for Brown unless he wins a major international award? Whereas if instead of working to bring clean water to remote African villages he had developed the next Britta filter, then he'd have earned major points for Brown? Does that seem fair? Why CEO only? If a school managed to somehow produce literally every CSO/CMO in the healthcare sector, every CTO/CIO in the tech sector, every CFO in the country but not a single CEO that school gets docked 25% but a similarly sized school that produces 2 CEOs and no other executives will be ahead of them in that category?
These are not “reputation” rankings? How do you think half of these major awards (which account for half of the ranking) are determined? They either directly take into account reputation or they are based on previous things that do (e.g. grants). That’s like saying Miss America is an objectively scored competition because they average numerical scores together at the end. Unless there is zero human judgement at every point in the process or at the very least the judges are completely blinded to anything that could be used to determine the pedigree of the person being judged (which, for example, is not the case in awarding NIH grants - what schools you went to and what schools your collaborators are at is part of the scoring), everything is at least somewhat a reputation ranking.
What percentage of these major international awards/prizes/medals (worth 50% of the score since they count for alumni and faculty) have undergraduate teaching/undergraduate mentoring as the most heavily weighted factor? Certainly the Nobel Prizes and National Academies do not - I don’t even think undergraduate teaching/mentoring is factored in at all for Academies (I know it’s not for Nobel), let alone being a minor factor.
I wannabeBrown, the disparity in ratings persists regardless of which of the variables you consider or how they are weighted.The difference is marked across every single indicator so the weighing is irrelevant. Princeton has a similar ratio of college students to graduate students and it is rated markedly higher on every single indicator.
about the reputation- The CWUR ratings are not similar to reputation ratings of the News and World Report which is based on ratings by others in the field in terms of the reputation of an academic department. Major academic awards are given only after a serious review of a researchers body of work. It may not be as inclusive as you’d like, but it is not trivial. A Fulbright is awarded on the basis of promise not achievement. Someone awarded a Fulbright might complete work that is recognized as being outstanding-and worthy of an academic award, although by no means always. Regardless, the significant difference between Brown and the other Ivy League schools would persist even if those ratings were not included because Brown is rated considerably lower across all the indicators used. If you don’t think any of them are important, then obviously this disparity is of no interest to you. But, if Brown’s medical school is excluded, then obviously that would explain the disparity. If so the ratings would certainly not reflect Brown’s productivity and impact.
Also, none of the major rankings include “teaching ability”. That is really an elementary through high school dimension in terms of ranks and ratings. By college and particularly at universities, that dimension is less important and is likely to vary across individuals within departments. In contrast, it is usually more of a priority in small liberal arts colleges.
Still, the reason for the large disparity between Brown and Princeton, for example, remains unclear.
Again, study the guy’s detailed methodology - you should be able to readily google his paper. He’s a Saudi Physicist who seems to have data-mined predominately math and science prize lists. As pointed out no undergraduate awards like Marshall, Rhodes, Fullbright etc… are factored in ; and few, if any, artistic or literary awards like Pulitzer prizes, where Brown has excelled as of late.
No argument here that Princeton is an exceptional university - huge endowment and large faculty and administrative staff relative to it’s small student body. Super star faculty in both the arts and sciences. I’m guessing some of Princeton’s labs like the PPP have larger operating budgets than all of Brown U or Dartmouth College.
It’s not remotely unclear. They reflect different priorities than this guy’s methodology. Brown’s graduate school is an afterthought. I loved loved loved my time at brown and never for a moment did I consider it for graduate school. Being an undergrad there is probably the worst advertisement for their grad school because you see how much more important the the undergraduate program is. I don’t know enough about Princeton to say this with certainty, but given the people I know who have been involved in the graduate school there, I don’t get the sense that it’s as low on the totem pole as it is at Brown. It may be comparatively sized to brown, but it gets larger institutional priority than it does at brown.
I think these are solid (not perfect, but not bad) graduate school rankings. These are not good undergraduate rankings.
And maybe I misunderstood your pointC but I wasn’t saying these are similar to USNWR rankings, but I thought you were implicitly stating that these rankings are clearly more objective and less biased than USNWR. I just want to caution thinking things like research funding and publications are bias free.
Oh my! I wonder if Brown administration is conducting emergency meetings right now to figure this mess out. All hands on deck. They just have to leap frog Rockefeller U. next year on this random guy’s college ranking spreadsheet. Whatever it takes.
arwarw, while I don’t think the Brown Administration is probably too concerned, your snarky response ignores the fact that every time Brown ranks highly on a list, my Twitter feed and Facebook timeline light up with the news trumpeted by Brown. I too think these ranking lists are only reflective of the criteria used and the validity of the data and, in the case of the #81 ranking, I’m not sure either is valid. But to suggest that these rankings don’t concern the administration is, I think, naive. I have seen other ‘world’ rankings where Brown rates higher and, furthermore, being #81 in the world would be nothing to apologize for, even in a more legitimate ranking.
I think @arwarw has a good point with Rockefeller University(29). It has no undergraduate students and each year they accept 25-30 PhD or PhD-MD students. But they have many laboratories and work more like research institute not educational institute.
Rockefeller is a great choice to highlight what these rankings are really about. A research institute with no undergraduate student body working exclusively on the biomedical sciences is the 29th best university in the world.