The Times Higher education released its 2016 ranking of global universities a couple of days ago. Here are the top 10 schools
1 California Institute of Technology
2 University of Oxford
3 Stanford University
4 University of Cambridge
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6 Harvard University
7 Princeton University
8 Imperial College London
9 ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
10 University of Chicago
The Times introduced two variables into its metrics to give some European schools a better chance to rise up in the ranking. Personally, I don’t think they really are very instructive. These variables International Outlook and Industry income carrying weights of 7.5% and 2.5% respectively, give enough boost to some European schools to have some of them figure in the top 10.
I ran the numbers without those two factors and looked at only Teaching, Research and Citations and here is how the rankings shake out
1 California Institute of Technology
2 Stanford University
3 University of Oxford
4 Harvard University
5 University of Cambridge
6 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7 Princeton University
8 University of Chicago
9 Yale University
10 University of California, Berkeley
11 Imperial College London
12 University of California, Los Angeles
13 University of Pennsylvania
14 Columbia University
15 Johns Hopkins University
16 University College London
17 ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
18 Cornell University
19 University of Michigan
20 University of Toronto
21 Carnegie Mellon University
22 Duke University
23 London School of Economics and Political Science
24 Northwestern University
25 New York University
26 University of Edinburgh
27 National University of Singapore
28 University of Washington
29 King’s College London
30 Karolinska Institute
31 LMU Munich
32 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
33 Heidelberg University
34 University of Tokyo
35 University of California, San Diego
36 University of British Columbia
37 University of Melbourne
38 KU Leuven
39 École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
40 University of Texas at Austin
41 University of Wisconsin-Madison
42 Peking University
43 University of California, Santa Barbara
44 McGill University
45 University of California, Davis
46 Georgia Institute of Technology
47 Tsinghua University
48 Humboldt University of Berlin
49 University of Hong Kong
50 Wageningen University and Research Center
Notwithstanding the fact that rankings are a poor way to pick a school, this ranking at least does not seem to penalize public universities as much as the USnews ranking does.