QS World University Rankings 2011/12

[RML]

<p>

Why not? Why exactly should we trust your opinion over the QS measurements?

</p>

<p>What I said was not my personal opinion. All other major surveys of global scope would rank Berkeley and Stanford well in the top 8. Even if you look at the subject ranking of this very survey. I’d be very surprised if the likes of Duke or Penn or JHU or Columbia would beat out Berkeley/Stanford in 3 of all fields.</p>

<p>

“Overall, QS is really pretty much a ‘prestige ranking’”

No; I don’t think so. UCL, for example, isn’t prestigious.</p>

<p>And, I agree with all of you. This ranking is bogus.</p>

[Schmaltz]

<p>“Chicago, Penn and Columbia over Stanford is not acceptable.” </p>

<p>Unless the folks doing the ranking are lying about the data they have gathered, the rankings would be accurate given those criteria. But it’s horrendous logic to say that the rankings are wrong just because they conflict with your world view.</p>

[intcir]

<p>

Collateral damage. When Cambridge is ranked ahead of Harvard and MIT and Imperial and UCL are ranked ahead of Stanford, UChicago and Berkeley, you know that the whole list would be screwed up. QS is finally able to do it’s thing, and it has reached a new height in terms of ridiculousness.

Agreed. A good sanity check is whether Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford <em>all</em> land in the top ~8 (expected companions would be Cambridge for sure, and likely Princeton). While we can spend all day making fluffy statements about how all rankings are different, these four dominate in a breadth of fields by a margin large enough that placing them outside this range pulls a ranking into the realm of silliness (i.e. the methodology is garbage).</p>

<p>

Why not? Why exactly should we trust your opinion over the QS measurements?

It relies on reputational surveys, which are not invalid per se, but QS’s have low response rates (e.g. for the employer survey, 0.9% for defense, 1.2% for law) and are not uniform by region (e.g. 13.1% for India, 1.4% for Germany). Well-informed opinions trump poorly taken “measurements”.</p>

<p>

Overall, QS is really pretty much a “prestige ranking” like USN&WR.

But then it should more or less match THES’s reputational survey in the top range because global prestige rankings are <em>extremely</em> skewed towards the top few schools. It’s not really possible to get different answers for the top range because the data shouldn’t be noisy at all (as it is when you go down the list).</p>

[UCBChemEGrad]

<p>You need to go by the QS faculty and reputation rankings. Those are all that matter.</p>

<p>Arts and Humanities

1. Harvard
2. Oxford
3. Cambridge
4. Berkeley
5. Yale</p>

<p>Engineering and Technology

1. MIT
2. Stanford
3. Berkeley
4. Cambridge
5. Caltech</p>

<p>Life Sciences and Medicine

1. Harvard
2. Cambridge
3. Oxford
4. Stanford
5. Johns Hopkins</p>

<p>Natural Sciences

1. Cambridge
2. Harvard
3. MIT
4. Berkeley
5. Oxford</p>

<p>Social Sciences and Management

1. Harvard
2. Oxford
3. Stanford
4. Berkeley
5. Cambridge</p>

<p>Academic Reputation

1. Harvard
2. Cambridge
3. Oxford
4. Berkeley
5. Stanford</p>