<p>For a project in one of my classes on online networks, I looked at re-ranking the US's top schools. I'm part of sharing it here since it might be of some interest to this community. I used Google's PageRank and normalized measures of the domain's Alexa Ranking (a measure of traffic) and number of inlinks to the entire domain name. I normalized the last 2 factors by dividing by graduate student population size and then taking the cumulative normal distribution. (Graduate student size had the highest correlation between the 3 factors used for ranking). </p>
<p>here are the new rankings (top 20) I came up with:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Harvard University
University of California--Berkeley
Stanford University
Cornell University
Pennsylvania State University--University Park
Yale University
University of Wisconsin--Madison
University of Pennsylvania
University of Michigan--Ann Arbor
University of Washington
University of Texas--Austin
University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign
Princeton University
University of California--Los Angeles
Carnegie Mellon University
University of Virginia
California Institute of Technology
Columbia University
University of Chicago</p>
<p>These rankings would probably change if I used more than just the top 50 universities from USNWR. This ranking is definitely not perfect, future research I have in mind is to build the web between .edu addresses only to get an objective view on peer assessment. I can also look at the internet from 10 years ago and find inlinks and similar measure of PageRank (Kleinberg's HITS algorithm). </p>
<p>Another interesting fact is that there arent' many universities with PageRank 9. Those in the US that have page rank 9 are Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Yale, Caltech and Berkeley. </p>
<p>Just throwing this out there!</p>