Composite Ranking of Research Universities for Undergraduate Study

College Search & Selection
1

I came up with my ranking based on four other rankings based on what I am looking for in my future undergraduate institution. This ranking works for me and it will serve as a starting point in my college search and selection process. I thought I would share it with others, in case there are others on this site who value the same things as I do.

Here is my background to help you decide if you should completely ignore this ranking because it may not be relevant to you at all :slight_smile:

**Short profile **
I am a white female who will most probably be full pay because my parents make too much money to qualify for any need based aid. I am also a high stats applicant from a moderately sized competitive public school. I will most probably apply ED somewhere to maximize my chances of admission but have not decided where yet.

** My ideal school profile** I want to attend a moderately sized university which will provide a well rounded liberal arts education. The school’s academic profile is important to me, since my parents will be spending a lot of money on my education. I am primarily focusing on universities with a good balance between teaching and research. Teaching for the obvious reason and good research because I believe undergrads can indeed benefit from attending a strong research university, provided teaching at that university doesn’t take a back seat. So I would be interested in universities which have a strong record of both teaching and research. I also want my fellow students to be high achieving and academically gifted, because I think that will enhance my academic experience. Sports is not a big focus of mine, but I do want a well rounded college experience.

**I used the following rankings **

USNews - Raw score weighted at 50%

CWUR - Raw score weighted at 25%

  • According to their website: The Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) publishes the only global university ranking that measures the quality of education and training of students as well as the prestige of the faculty members and the quality of their research without relying on surveys and university data submissions.*

ARWU - Raw score weighted at 10%

  • According to their website: ARWU uses six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Reuters, number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance of a university.*

RUR ranking - Raw score weighted at 15%

  • According to their website: Their ranking is an overall university ranking which measures performance of world universities by 20 unique indicators and 4 dimension areas: teaching, research, international diversity, financial sustainability *

Based on the above choices, here is how my composite ranking rated the Universities

Rank Name Scaled Score
1 Harvard University 99.00
2 Stanford University 94.14
3 Princeton University 92.78
4 MIT 92.71
5 University of Chicago 91.55
6 Columbia University 91.16
7 Yale University 89.35
8 Caltech 86.19
9 UPenn 84.04
10 Cornell University 81.66
11 Johns Hopkins 81.48
12 UC, Berkeley 81.47
13 Duke University 79.56
14 Northwestern 79.02
15 UCLA 75.05
16 WashU 73.87
17 Dartmouth College 73.86
18 Brown University 72.46
19 Vanderbilt University 71.67
20 University of Michigan 71.45
21 Notre Dame 70.62
22 Rice University 70.53
23 University of Virginia 68.95
24 Emory University 68.21
25 USC 67.69
26 CMU 66.97
27 UNC Chapel Hill 66.67
28 Georgetown 66.32
29 Tufts University 65.94
30 New York University 65.65
31 UC, San Diego 65.58
32 Wisconsin–Madison 64.62
33 Univ of Washington 63.64
34 University of Illinois 62.63
35 Wake Forest 62.58
36 Univ Rochester 62.47
37 Boston University 61.44
38 Georgia Tech 61.40
39 Case Western 61.36
40 UC, Santa Barbara 60.69
41 UC, Davis 60.62
42 UT Austin 59.95
43 Ohio State University 59.32
44 University of Florida 59.23
45 UC, Irvine 59.11
46 Boston College 58.67
47 Pennsylvania State 58.58
48 University of Miami 58.39
49 Brandeis University 58.21
50 Univ of Pittsburgh 58.19
51 Univ of Minnesota 57.66
52 William and Mary 57.58
53 Univ of Maryland 57.45
54 Purdue University 57.30
55 Tulane University 57.12
56 Rutgers University 56.74
57 Northeastern Univ 56.46
58 RPI 56.42
59 George Washington 56.24
60 Lehigh University 54.34
61 UC, San Francisco 54.11
62 Texas A&M University 53.95
63 Univ of Colorado 53.03
64 University of Utah 49.86
65 University of Arizona 48.97

2

Seems you have a lot of time on your hands lol. This list seems to not change much from general “prestige” ranking. I will say that the ARWU ranking seems useless and a fluff ranking. I wonder what would happen if you change the ARWU with the Times Higher Education ranking ( for American Universities).

3

I’m a statistics nerd so I’m going to ask questions, lol.

But why did you decide to weight the U.S. News rankings at 50%? Particularly since U.S. News rankings are more about inputs and the selectivity of the student body than teaching and research. Faculty resources only make up 20% of the rankings, and the biggest percentage of this is represented by class size. Faculty salary is another 35%, which I think is absurd, since that has nothing to do with the quality of teaching but does benefit wealthy universities (who are also heavily benefited by a bunch of other areas, like alumni giving). Actually important factors that have the potential to affect the quality of education are only weighted at a total of 25% of the faculty resources category.

The AWRU raw score would actually be a much better indicator of research prowess, although those may not directly affect undergraduates. Although there are issues there too - some science fields are simply less likely to publish in Nature or Science; some strong universities may not have strong mathematics departments (which is what the Fields Medal is awarded for) or may not be strongly represented in the fields the Nobel Prize is awarded in, but still have strong research in other areas - things like that.

This list also, by necessity, leaves out small liberal arts colleges that could be really good places for undergraduates interested in research careers to go. The small classes and close working relationships with professors more closely mirror the graduate school experience, and LACs disproportionately send students onto PhD programs. At most elite LACs, the faculty come from the same top programs as research professors and still do research, with the extra commitment to teaching and training undergraduates.

4

@juillet Thank you for your insights and questions. I am very aware that rankings by definition are not perfect and each ranking has its problems. So I decided to use multiple rankings to remove biases in any one ranking.

Also I don’t intend to use this as a definitive list obviously. As you stated, LAC’s are not included here, but that is because the rankings I used did not really evaluate them (except USnews).

I gave USnews the most weight because it is focused on the undergraduate experience. It has its issues, but for me, their methodology works because I personally do value some of the things they measure, like smaller classes and other proxies of staff and student quality, however imperfect those metrics might be.

I used the AWRU because I do think that ranking is a good indicator of research prowess, but I did not weigh it heavily because I am not going to be a graduate student. I want to get some of the benefits of research, but don’t want to give high priority to a University that is focused on graduate students/research only. I also combined it with the CWUR rankings which is more comprehensive.

Finally I used RUR because they actually do give importance to both teaching and research in equal measure, which resonated with me. I thought they were a good counter to USnews in some respects and measured international perceptions as well, which was a plus

5

Of course, none of those rankings actually have anything to do with ranking the undergraduate teaching experience. Harvard is at the top of everyone’s rankings, but no one anywhere seems to rave about the actual undergraduate learning experience at Harvard. Not even Harvard itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html

6

And I would include Forbes, which is more outcomes-based.

7

@PurpleTitan For me the Forbes ranking was not really relevant. First it uses very suspect data, like Payscale and Rate my professors.com etc, which I don’t have any faith in. It also favors particular majors, doesn’t take into account the fact that the coasts are more expensive to live in etc. I feel that my outcome will be dependent on my major, where I choose to live, etc. Since I don’t plan to major in Engineering which skews the salary data in a big way, I did not want to make my decision based on Forbes’s outcome based ranking. I wanted to focus on input based measures for myself

I am sure for some the Forbes ranking makes more sense. For me it did not. I am focused on attending an academically good university. I don’t want to judge that decision on “what becomes of my peers, once they graduate”

8

In my opinion this ranking is one of the most important. It shows how many times each university is ranked in top 10 in a particular subject. Here is the top 10 list worldwide based on this criteria.

http://cwur.org/media.php

Institutions with the most Top-10 placements worldwide are:

  1. Harvard University, USA (112 Top-10 subjects)
  2. University of Toronto, Canada (66 Top-10 subjects)
  3. University of Michigan, USA (57 Top-10 subjects)
  4. University of Pennsylvania, USA (54 Top-10 subjects)
  5. Johns Hopkins University, USA (51 Top-10 subjects)
  6. University of California, Berkeley, USA (50 Top-10 subjects)
  7. Stanford University, USA (48 Top-10 subjects)
  8. University of Oxford, United Kingdom (47 Top-10 subjects)
  9. University of Washington, USA (45 Top-10 subjects)
  10. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA (41 Top-10 subjects)
9

^ Again, these are research rankings that don’t have much relevance for undergrads. If it did, no one in their right mind would attend a liberal arts college, and liberal arts colleges wouldn’t have the highest percentage of students seeking a PhD.

10

AWRU rankings have zero relevance to the quality of undergrad education. In fact, once could argue that the higher the AWRU ranking, the lower the quality of undergrad education as professors are pumping out more research (with grad students) instead of being involved in the undergrad education. Plus, citations are easily skewed and Chinese universities pump out tons of papers with little merit. That’s why their uni’s are so highly ranked in AWRU (check out their engineering rankings where 6 out of the top 20 are Chinese universities; if you know anything about the quality of education at Chinese universities - with the possible exception of Tsinghua - this shows you how easily these rankings can be manipulated.)

11
12

@nevrgiveup here are a few other composite rankings that aggregate specifically college rankings.

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1929411-composite-ranking-of-usnews-top-20.html

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1933948-here-s-a-new-college-ranking-based-entirely-on-other-college-rankings-p1.html

13

@Penn95 Thank you! Very interesting.

As I have said though, for my requirements, I did not want to use the outcome based rankings, since they don’t measure things that are important to me. I care more about inputs since outcome is based on individual grit, major, company you work for, industry, location etc etc, none of which those rankings control for. I also don’t care for the value based metrics because I’m going to be a full pay student in all probability and my ROI based on my parents investment will be very different.

What I really wanted to get a feel for is which universities do a good job balancing undergraduate learning and research and attract quality students and faculty to their campuses, so I focused on aggregating rankings that would help me with that.

14

I think USNews has the best undergrad ranking because they focus on that level. I would weight some things differently and get rid of the HS counselor rep ratings, but at least they try to focus on the “college” part of the university. Others focus on the whole university, or international rep, or research/PhD output – not undergraduate quality. So I think weighting USNews at 50% was just fine. In fact, the more research and grad/PhD programs and students a school has, the less quality time and resources a school can spend on/with their undergrads.

15

Saw your other thread and it looks like you are trying to come up with a short list of top 20 universities to apply ED to maximize your chances of acceptances.

Not sure I fully agree with your approach, but if that’s what you’re going with, from your top 20 list above, I would visit and further explore:

Barnard College at Columbia University, Hopkins, Northwestern, WashU and Vandy.

16

@arwarw Thank you! Can you share some insights on why those schools please?

17

Can you afford a private LAC? Have you considered the University of Richmond? I’m biased because I’m transferring there, but it’s a great size LAC and a lot of kids begin to research their freshmen year. They also have the Richmond Guarantee which makes $4000 available for research or a summer internship to every undergraduate student. If you are looking for a feel similar to Wake Forest, Elon University, Vanderbilt, etc. Look into some other private LACs in the South too.

18

Ugh. Another composite ranking thread

19

@rvalover7 Thank you for your suggestions! Yes, LAC’s are definitely on my list to further evaluate. I am a little concerned about some of their sizes (I fear some may be too small for my liking), but I am sure there are some great colleges there. Will definitely look at University of Richmond!

20

@nevrgiveup Awesome! If you have any questions about Richmond feel free to message me and ask, I would be more than happy to help! Richmond has a little under 4,000 undergraduates, but the campus is large, and you definitely would have your voice there, but also a sense of community. Wake Forest is a little bigger with a little under 5,000 undergraduates. LACs are great. I know a lot of people are worried about the small size, but its a huge benefit in the classroom.