As these rankings are based upon number of publications, bigger universities with post graduate/professional schools are at an advantage.
Methodology:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/methodology-world-university-rankings-2020
In several of the factors, adjustments are made for institution size or for the scale of activity in various disciplines.
Just a couple things that immediately struck me about the 2020 THE rankings:
-
How did Cal Tech go from 5th last year to 2nd in just one year?
-
How did Princeton surpass Harvard this year given much smaller scale grad schools where research outputs are based from? Heck, Princeton doesn’t even have Law, Medical and Business schools…
I don’t pay much attention to any rankings except for entertainment purposes, but these two things just jumped out at me.
This ranking takes out the fluff/manipulatable stuff found in the US News one (Pell Grants, Social Mobility, Alumni Donations, test scores) and focuses more on the pure educational/reseaarch aspect of things which is in my view more accurate. These rankings are still more for discussion more than anything - major rankings make more sense to me for making any determinations.
According to Times Higher Education:
Why is international outlook (including international staff) is important? Again, according to Times Higher Education:
Hmmm. A British publication has two of the top three schools and three of the top ten located in England. No bias there…
^
Imperial seems to be the real winner. Compared to the AWRU ranking, Cambridge and UCL rank the same, Oxford ranks a little higher (+6), and Imperial ranks noticeably higher (+13).
THES
1 Oxford
3 Cambridge
10 Imperial
15 UCL
AWRU
3 Cambridge
7 Oxford
15 UCL
23 Imperial
@ProfessorPlum168 except it adds this fluffy thing called “international outlook”, probably something that really helps Oxford and Cambridge. I wonder if it would help them if they included EU students as domestic. I doubt this criteria would be as beneficial if they did.
If sorted by teaching, the top 10 are:
- Stanford
- Caltech
- Yale
- Cambridge
- MIT
- Oxford
- Princeton
- Harvard
- UChicago
- Peking U
If sorted by research, the top 10 are:
- Oxford
- Cambridge
- Harvard
- Caltech
- Stanford
- Princeton
- Yale
- Tsinghua U
- ETH Zurich
- MIT
Rankings of UK universities are helped by research, in addition to international outlook.
I love the “The only university ranking to be independently audited by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers”. Basically means they checked that the numbers were collected and added up correctly. Nothing about how valid/applicable the data is.
More UK-based journals taking publication from fewer UK universities helps them.
This factor struck me, too, as a little “fluffy” at first.
However, if you’re trying to measure both the quality/quantity of knowledge discovery, and also its global impact, then maybe it makes sense to try to capture that. After all, this is a “world” ranking.