International Rankings

Graduate School
1

<p>Let's compare USN&WR with the criteria used by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) ranking:</p>

<p>[ol]<br>
[li]Peer review: 40% </p>[/li]
<p>[li]Citations per faculty : 20% </p>[/li]
<p>[li]Recruiter review: 10% </p>[/li]
<p>[li]Proportion of international faculty: 5% </p>[/li]
<p>[li] Proportion of international students: 5% </p>[/li]
<p>[li]Student/faculty ratio: 20% </p>[/li]
<p>[/ol]</p>

<p>Basically, criteria (1) and (2) measure research quality, (3) measures employability, (4) and (5) assess international outlook, and (6) is an indicator of teaching quality. Criterion (1) also measures perceived overall quality. </p>

<p>As you may know, THES is an international ranking (like the Chinese ARWU). The top 25 universities in the United States according to the latest THES list are:</p>

<p>[ol]</p>

<p>[<em>] Harvard
[</em>] Yale
[<em>] MIT
[</em>] Stanford
[<em>] Caltech
[</em>] UC Berkeley
[<em>] Princeton
[</em>] Chicago
[<em>] Columbia
[</em>] Duke
[<em>] Cornell
[</em>] Johns Hopkins
[<em>] Penn
[</em>] Michigan
[<em>] UCLA
[</em>] UT Austin
[<em>] Carnegie Mellon
[</em>] NYU
[<em>] UC San Diego
[</em>] WU St Louis
[<em>] Vanderbilt
[</em>] Brown
[<em>] Emory
[</em>] Case Western Reserve
[li] Dartmouth College</p>[/li]
<p>[/ol]</p>

<p>PS: I'm sure many posters in this forum will criticize the THES methodology, but I can confirm that, from an international perspective (especially in Europe and Latin America), the list above matches far more closely the usual relative prestige of US universities than the USN&WR ranking.</p>

2

<p>In case you are interested in research quality only (more relevant for graduate school than colleges), the best ranking available is the one based on the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, which is based on objective indicators such as:</p>

<p>[ul]</p>

<p>[<em>] Percentage of faculty with published journal papers.
[</em>] Percentage of faculty with a published book.
[<em>] Books per faculty.
[</em>] Journal papers per faculty.
[<em>] Citations per faculty.
[</em>] Percentage of faculty with papers cited by other authors.</p>

<p>[/ul] </p>

<p>The top 11 national universities in the US in the latest FSP index ranking are:</p>

<p>[ol]
[<em>] Harvard
[</em>] Caltech
[<em>] UC San Francisco
[</em>] MIT
[<em>] Yale
[</em>] Carnegie Mellon
[<em>] WU St Louis
[</em>] Vanderbilt
[<em>] Johns Hopkins
[</em>] Duke
[li] Penn[/li][/ol]</p>

<p>Source: see this link.</p>

<p>No ranking gives a perfect measure of quality. You should look carefully at the ranking methodology and see which one suits best what you are looking for as a student . Personally, I value research quality and scientific qualification of the faculty above anything else (i.e. I want to be taught by professional researchers who are experts in their field). Others may give greater weight instead to teaching quality, class size, or quality of the student body. As I said, rankings are very relative and have different meanings to different people.</p>