<p>This is from the Times Higher Education Supplement. </p>
<p>The ranking includes universities from all over the world, but I’ve included here an abridged version including only US universities. If you’d like to look at this in more detail, the link can be found at the bottom of this post. </p>
<p>Their top 10 universities in the world are:
Harvard
Cambridge (UK)
Oxford (UK; up from #3 last year)
Yale (up from #4 last year)
Imperial College, London (UK; up from #9 last year)
Princeton (up from #10 last year)
Caltech
UChicago (up from #11 last year)
University College, London (UK; up from #25 last year)
MIT (down from #4 last year) </p>
<p>Here’s their list including only US schools:</p>
<li>Harvard </li>
<li>Yale </li>
<li>Princeton </li>
<li>Caltech </li>
<li>UChicago </li>
<li>MIT </li>
<li>Columbia </li>
<li>McGill </li>
<li>Duke </li>
<li>UPenn </li>
<li>Johns Hopkins </li>
<li>Stanford </li>
<li>Carnegie Mellon </li>
<li>Cornell </li>
<li>UC Berkeley </li>
<li>Northwestern </li>
<li>Brown </li>
<li>UMichigan </li>
<li>UCLA </li>
<li>BU </li>
<li>NYU<br></li>
<li>UT Austin</li>
<li>University of Washington </li>
<li>Wisconsin-Madison </li>
<li>UC San Diego </li>
<li>Darthmouth </li>
<li>U Illinois </li>
<li>Emory </li>
<li>University of Pittsburgh </li>
<li>Purdue </li>
<li>U of Maryland </li>
<li>Vanderbilt </li>
<li>Case Western </li>
<li>Penn State </li>
<li>Rice </li>
<li>Rochester </li>
<li>UC Davis </li>
<li>Georgia Tech </li>
<li>Georgetown </li>
<li>U Colorado </li>
<li>UVA </li>
<li>UC Santa Barbara </li>
<li>USC </li>
<li>Ohio State </li>
<li>Texas A&M </li>
<li>U Arizona </li>
<li>U Florida </li>
<li>IU Bloomington </li>
<li>UC Irvine </li>
<li>U Minnesota </li>
<li>UNC </li>
<li>Notre Dame </li>
<li>Michigan State </li>
<li>Tufts </li>
<li>Washington University St. Louis </li>
<li>U Mass, Amherst </li>
<li>Rensselaer Polytechnic</li>
</ol>
<p>THES - QS World University Rankings 2006 - Top 200 Universities
THES - QS World University Rankings 2006 - Top 200. How do they compare to last year's rankings? And who is number one? Click the institute names to be directed to the profile of the chosen university.</p>
<p>Rank School Name Country
1 Harvard University United States
2 University of Cambridge United Kingdom
3 University of Oxford United Kingdom
4= Yale University United States
4= Massachusetts Institute of Technology United States
6 Stanford University United States
7 California Institute of Technology United States
8 University of California, Berkeley United States
9 Imperial College London United Kingdom
10 Princeton University United States
11 University of Chicago United States
12 Columbia University United States
13 Duke University United States
14 Peking University China
15 Cornell University United States
16 Australian National University Australia
17 London School of Economics and Political... United Kingdom
18 Ecole Normale Sup</p>
<p>1 Harvard University United States
2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology United States
3 University of Cambridge United Kingdom
4 University of Oxford United Kingdom
5 Stanford University United States
6 University of California, Berkeley United States
7 Yale University United States
8 California Institute of Technology United States
9 Princeton University United States
10 </p>
<p>This ranking is quite flawed. Kind of annoying, because I like seeing Chicago so up there. Yale is another university that stands out as an error. There's no way Yale should be as high as 2 as a research university.</p>
<p>Shanghai-Jiaotong is probably the most accurate university ranking system.</p>
<p>While these rankings may be flawed, I think they do a great deal to disabuse seriously misinformed notions about which schools are making it in a research environment and those that a clearly not. Setting aside college alone, when I hear people making comparisons broadly between schools like Georgetown, Brown or Dartmouth with institutions like Columbia, Berkeley, or Johns Hopkins along the lines of their economic and R&D impact, these rankings becomes a pretty good source to point to. I think they are especially helpful for policymakers far afield from elite academia attempting to identify which schools can most effectively utilize federal funds. They tend to highlight the many achievements of a place like Chicago, which does not have the lobby behind it on the Hill that Yale or Harvard does.</p>
<p>I don't get your point exactly. I think the rankings, though they may vaunt Chicago, unfairly demerit Stanford, Berkeley, and Hopkins all of which are research powerhouses.</p>
<p>I am not talking about the difference between number 1 and number 20, rather about schools that people generally associate as top tier in the United States but that fail to make the top 50 or even 100 in these broad based, non-collegiate rankings (Dartmouth, Georgetown, etcetera).</p>
<p>Take a look at the Shanghai ranking quoted above. I think it does a good job of sorting out the top tier on a research basis, whatever the quality of the exact number. I wouldn't have expected this necessarily based on its methodology...but the top 20 is a good top 20 I'd say, though there are some institutions that seem to have an out-of-whack ranking, IMO, like Michigan not making the top 15 or 20, or University of California, San Francisco (effectively, Berkeley's med school) making such a high ranking when it's so specialized a uni in the areas of medicine, biosciences, nursing, and dentistry.</p>
<p>One ranking I thought was somewhat reflective of the true state of the colege world was Brian Leiter's University rankings. He was at the University of Texas at the time and was mostly known for his Law School Rankings. He goes to some length to explain the approach taken.</p>
<p>TOP 20 UNIVERSITIES NOT PRIMARILY SCIENCE/ENGINEERING</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard University </li>
<li>Princeton University </li>
<li>Stanford University </li>
<li>University of Chicago </li>
<li>Yale University </li>
<li>Columbia University </li>
<li>University of Pennsylvania </li>
<li>Brown University </li>
<li>Cornell University </li>
<li>Duke University </li>
<li>Emory University </li>
<li>Johns Hopkins University </li>
<li>Northwestern University </li>
<li>Rice University </li>
<li>University of California, Berkeley </li>
<li>Washington University, St. Louis </li>
<li>Brandeis University </li>
<li>Dartmouth College </li>
<li>University of California, Los Angeles </li>
<li>University of Michigan, Ann Arbor</li>
<li>University of Wisconsin, Madison</li>
</ol>
<p>That's a damn good ranking, idad. I like the tier rankings. Chicago actually ranks #2 in his rankings in overall score, but instead of pointing this out, he just listed the schools in tiers, which is how it should be. Any ranking having Caltech with the highest total score is one I can usually trust.</p>
<p>Top 5 Universities That are Primarily Science/Engineering Schools</p>
<ol>
<li><p>California Institute of Technology</p></li>
<li><p>Massachussetts Institute of Technology</p></li>
<li><p>Carnegie-Mellon University</p></li>
<li><p>Case Western Reserve University</p></li>
<li><p>Georgia Institute of Technology</p></li>
</ol>