<p>@CaptnJack</p>
<p>I don’t really want to get too much into this discussion as it’s very subjective and has nothing to do with the OP. But I’ll talk about it briefly.</p>
<p>Now, you can’t really compare an IIT with an MIT in the sense of selectivity. India is MUCH larger than the US (population wise) and it is natural that there will be more people applying to IIT there. Also, in India, its engineering or medicine, everything else is looked down upon. You will thus have many more people applying to engineering programs in India than in other schools. Through engineering, people from IITs aspire to go into fields not necessarily within engineering.</p>
<p>Where MIT excels above all other Universities (in engineering), is the opportunities and research that they may provide to students. The resources and faculty in MIT are far greater than the resources and faculty that an IIT has. The engineering students at MIT, I would daresay, are far more interested in pure engineering research than students in the IITS. I have nothing against the IIT’s and I think they are amazing universities, my own father went to one of them, but even he said that the US engineering universities are far superior to them due to the research and money they have.</p>
<p>You can’t judge a university internationally based upon selectivity or GPA or ACT/SAT because these just differ in different parts of the world based on numerous factors such as population. But what you can judge international universities by is the amount of research that they may provide, and the opportunities that may provide to their students through this research. Research is given by money (endowments). It’s no coincidence that some of the best ranked universities in International rankings have very large endowments even though that is not a large part of their methodologies.</p>
<p>The best professors go the the places where they may research the most (true academics care more for knowledge than money). The best international students will go to where these professors are. They give students who are interested in their fields the best places to be for their fields in the world because of the research. I believe it’s fitting because the research of today is what creates the world of tomorrow (research breakthroughs are also what gains much prestige for universities), but that’s another matter entirely.</p>
<p>The IITs will become higher ranked in those rankings when they can provide the same research opportunities that MIT can provide. Then they will draw the best students from all over the world, not just India.</p>
<p>As far as your bias factor, the top 25-30 Universities in the world are pretty similar in all the rankings give or take a few schools (No Chinese schools in ARWU and British schools are anyway great).</p>
<p>Nonetheless, my point with all of this is that, whether or not the methodology is correct or not (which is completely based on opinion and not on College Confidential beliefs), more people are starting to look at those rankings as legitimate, and this trend will continue as the world grows more international.</p>