<p>It appears that Caltech beats Harvard in world university ranking to become the best university in the world in a just coming out highly visible THES ranking. Harvard is tied for second with Stanford this year.
<a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-2012/top-400.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-2012/top-400.html</a></p>
<p>Minnesota ahead of Brown???</p>
<p>yeah some of that list doesn’t make sense, brown should be way higher. And I’m not biased, I don’t even like brown.</p>
<p>This is a good example of why you dont get very sensible results when you try to rank oranges and kumquats on the same scale. Caltech is geek paradise – better than Harvard at being an institute of science and technology. But, unlike Harvard, Caltech is only a niche player in the humanities and social sciences, and a non-player in the professions (no school of architecture, business, education, government, law, medicine, public health, etc.).</p>
<p>Similar issues come up in comparing Minnesota and Brown. If you look only at undergraduate exclusivity, Brown easily trumps Minnesota. But Minnesota is an excellent public research university with strengths in many areas that Brown doesnt touch.</p>
<p>Too funny. UC Boulder (near and dear to my heart) ahead of Dartmouth and Purdue? Maybe if availability of weed is highly weighted in their algorithm.</p>
<p>^Opensecret, you raise a good point that Caltech and Harvard are different. But should these ranks look how big how many disciplines and schools an institution has? Or should it rank the quality of education a student gets once he enrolls at the given institution. I think THES does this much better than USNWR. A kid majoring in computer science, why should she care about if Harvard has Medical school or school of architecture or not? The ranking system should look from the standpoint of a student, not the whole institution. your analogy of Caltech as ‘orange’ and Harvard as ‘kumquat’ makes no sense whatsoever for this Computer Science major. Unless you plan on majoring in architecture, business, education, government, law, all at the same time, considering all these schools in the ranking makes no sense. The ranking business is fooling the parents and students alike.</p>
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<p>Of course not. He’ll only care if he’s majoring in biology or VES or is interested in taking classes at either of those graduate schools. A computer science student, I’m sure, would instead appreciate research positions in computer science and a strong CS department well funded at both the undergraduate and graduate level. </p>
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<p>I thought Williams and US Military Academy and all already beat Harvard here in the US based on Forbes? And surely Harvard is not always ranked first in the countless permutations of rankings out there? If the criteria for ranking change, the order of the school’s desirability will change.</p>
<p>[Change</a> for the better](<a href=“http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-2012/analysis-rankings-methodology.html]Change”>World University Rankings 2010-11 methodology | Times Higher Education (THE))</p>
<p>Actually, if you look at the methodology more closely, the ranking has little to do with the “quality of education a student gets once he enrolls at the given institution” at the undergraduate level, but rather with research productivity and influence (judged by reputation, the number of papers published and cited), number of PhD awards, and international reputation. </p>
<p>This is exactly what Caltech excels at- small but lots of publications each year. More LAC like institutions like Dartmouth and Brown that don’t have the large grad school environment will easily be trumped by larger state schools with more research output.</p>
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<p>I think it’s simply designed for an audience that is looking for different things than the typical high school students and their parents. It’s not the fault of the ranking when people don’t take the time to figure out what it is that is being examined.</p>
<p>“Minnesota ahead of Brown???”</p>
<p>Yes, in many areas of Science and engnineering, Minnesota is ahead of Brown. </p>
<p>When size of endowment and total research output as the major criteria, Harvard will win every game. because of its wealth and size. Harvard Medical complex has 10000 faculty, 5 times the size of Harvard college, 10 times the size of MIT, 50 times the sise of Caltech. It will beat any university on the planet by itself in terms of total research output except some of the pure research complexs in France and China. But if the total output divided by the number of faculties, it is still pretty good, but not at the top.</p>
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Even in biology, a strong research department will benefit UG students in the research opps etc. So, weighing between the med school around (Harvard) and the number one ranked biological sciences program along with strong medically oriented research labs (Caltech) can be the factors in UG education.</p>
<p>The ranking, again, should be centered on the student experience and quality of education, looking back the four years when the students graduate. The ranking should not package the whole institution in a box and treat it as a product as if every part of this product has important meanings to every student’s education. The rankings better reflect the student experience and education AFTER its all done – somehow normalized and quantified per student. Unfortunately, the ranking is a useful tool for students and parents looking forward, before even entering the college and thus, a wrongly derived ranking forces them to value all of the institution’s resources where most of it will not affect at all the student during the four years. It kind of reminds the saying, something like, 'Life is best understood looking backward. Unfortunately, life must be lived looking forward." or something like that, by Kierkegaard. The college ranking companies should serve the students and parents right by looking backward after the students have finished the four years of education, capturing what really matters to the enrolled student’s education and after the fact, instead of giving equal weights to a large part of the institution that really matters nothing to most students. That, weighing equally between the ‘possibility of benefiting from such options’ and the opportunities and resources that the student actually uses, misleads the folks using such bogus numbers in college selection. To a student majoring in Biology or Chemical Engineering or many STEM disciplines, Caltech will stand higher than Harvard. For a student to do English Literature, or Architecture, … Caltech would not be even considered and Harvard would be the world’s number one school in the THES. The rankings should have meaning to EE majors and English majors alike – and the existence of the school of architecture should not be in the ranking that an eventual STEM major will use in his or her college search.</p>
<p>^Was that in response to my post? You’re missing the fundamental point that the ranking isn’t meant to address the “important meanings to every student’s education” or something like that at all, but rather the overall contribution of the university to academia. Some rankings, perhaps including this one, are not meant to serve high school kids and their parents, despite what one thinks they should do.</p>