US colleges and Japanese Google

College Search & Selection
1

<p>As a member of the infamous CC forum, I hear a lot about which universities have the best international reputation. Of course, those who are saying such things are often people who have never left the country for a significant period of time. </p>

<p>So I put it to a test myself. I inputted the top school names into a search engine to see how many hits would pop up. I made two separate rankings. The first one is when I don't use quotations, and the second one is when I did. (For those unfamiliar with Google, when you use quotations, it means you're making a specific search for whatever is in the quotes. That is, if you search for University of California (without brackets), you will get results which have University and California in the same web page, but they don't have to be together (so that University of Southern California would also pop up when you searched for this). However, if you search for "University of California", you would only get results in which "University of California" as a set phrase is used.)</p>

<p>I used the top 16 per USNWR + Berkeley. Picking the top 16 was somewhat arbitrary, but also because I know that past 16, hardly any universities are thought of as prestigious in this country other than larger public universities. I also tested Michigan, which had a pretty good showing and would have ranked a little behind Berkeley. Many of the good public schools would have done similarly, so I left out Michigan along with such schools as UCLA, U of Illinois, etc. Let's just assume that Berkeley would slightly outperform most prestigious, large publics.</p>

<p>My logic: First of all, I'll state that I used a language that I myself can speak fluently. This is a language of a nation that is outside of both the United States and Western Europe. It is also a nation which values its own domestic universities' research, so that a large research school itself won't bring up many search results just because of its research. Hence, the results should reflect which schools are the most spoken about on the internet, which is itself a good measure of prestige, although there are certainly some limitations to this logic.</p>

<p>Anyway, here are the results:</p>

<p>Ranking 1 (without quotations) - in 1000s of appearances:
1. Berkeley 928
2. Harvard 760
3. Yale 554
4. Chicago 528
5. Brown 519
6. Columbia 513
7. Stanford 330
8. Penn 284
9. Princeton 242
10. Duke 210
11. MIT 179
12. Cornell 123
13. Caltech 55
14. Dartmouth 53
15. Northwestern 52
16. Hopkins 42
16. Wash U 42</p>

<p>Ranking 2 (with quotations) - in 1000s of appearances</p>

<ol>
<li>Harvard 544</li>
<li>Columbia 301</li>
<li>Stanford 291</li>
<li>MIT 177</li>
<li>Chicago 125</li>
<li>Cornell 108</li>
<li>Princeton 105</li>
<li>Berkeley 100</li>
<li>Brown 98</li>
<li>Wash U 88</li>
<li>Yale 85</li>
<li>Penn 81</li>
<li>Dartmouth 49</li>
<li>Duke 45</li>
<li>Hopkins 30</li>
<li>Caltech 28</li>
<li>Northwestern 28</li>
</ol>

<p>Average of ranks:</p>

<p>1.5. Harvard</p>

<ol>
<li>Columbia
4.5. Chicago
4.5. Berkeley</li>
<li><p>Stanford</p></li>
<li><p>Yale</p></li>
<li><p>Brown
7.5 MIT</p></li>
<li><p>Princeton</p></li>
<li><p>Cornell</p></li>
<li><p>Penn</p></li>
<li><p>Duke</p></li>
<li><p>Wash U
13.5. Dartmouth
14.5. Caltech
15.5. Northwestern
15.5 Hopkins</p></li>
</ol>

<p>The term "university" was included in each search. So for instance, "University of Chicago" was searched for, not just "Chicago". This is particularly relevant in Ranking 2.</p>

<p>In any case, a few trends emerge. First of all, Harvard is clearly the most prestigious school in the given country, and no other school approaches it. The next group of schools are Columbia, Chicago, Berkeley, and Stanford.</p>

<p>Surprises: Yale, MIT, and Princeton are not as prestigious as they are in the U.S. Large publics are much more prestigious internationally. (In fact, I think that domestically, they are undervalued simply because public schools in general are not looked upon that highly.)</p>

<p>As expected: Northwestern, Hopkins, Wash U, Dartmouth, Caltech, and Duke are more domestic phenomena. Cornell and Chicago are more prestigious internationally than domestically.</p>

<p>In any case, I did this more out of curiosity than anything. Obviously, these results are dependent upon the country that I picked, but I think this country is a good representative of a large part of the rest of the world (perhaps 40-45%).</p>

2

<p>It’s odd that MIT didn’t do better, but otherwise I think this is surprisingly accurate.</p>

3

<p>I believe Ptongrad2000 did a similar analysis using Google trends (?) for different geographical locations. If you search the Princeton board, I think you can find it.</p>

4

<p>“Because I know that past 16, hardly any universities are thought of as prestigious in this country other than larger public universities.”</p>

<p>That is one of the most absurd statements I heard before. I would argue that the top 25-35 schools are considered the most prestigious in this country. You don’t think Vanderbilt, Carnegie Mellon, Emory, Rice, and Georgetown are prestigious in this country? They are at least just as prestigious as WashU, and I would argue even Northwestern and Chicago. Their academic reputations are just as good as the top 16, if not better, even though not everyone has heard of them. Keep in mind that some of the top 16 schools are notorious for playing the rankings game. People on this board need to stop worshiping the Ivies… I know that is why you stopped at the top 16 because Brown is ranked # 16. If you didn’t feel the need to include the lowest ranked Ivy League, you would have stopped at the top 15. Brown is an excellent school, but the average American has not heard of it and does not even know it is in the Ivy League.</p>

5

<p>slik nik:</p>

<p>I was referring to international reputation. At least with respect to the nation being analyzed, very few people are aware of the schools beyond #16. And yes, Brown was the reason I stopped at 16. Brown is basically the last internationally prestigious school on the list outside of top publics. Yes, I could’ve included below #16 in the search, but they would have all popped up at the bottom of the list. That’s not to say that they aren’t excellent institutions. This is just a measure of international prestige.</p>

<p>I will do a followup to this post showing results for the universities you explicitly mentioned.</p>

<p>Edit: Here are the results for the universities you mentioned for Ranking 2, and their theoretical ranking in parentheses. As you can see, none of them are near the top.</p>

<p>Vanderbilt 11k (17)
Carnegie Mellon 80k (13)
Georgetown 48k (14)
Emory 43k (15)
Rice 37k (15)</p>

6

<p>“Because I know that past 16, hardly any universities are thought of as prestigious IN THIS COUNTRY other than larger public universities.”</p>

<p>You were referring to the U.S.A. when you said that outside the top 16, I don’t think any university is considered prestigious. Anyway, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you misspoke.</p>

<p>Brown, and Dartmouth, for that matter are not internationally prestigious. I have traveled to India, and more people I talked to knew about Duke and Rice than Brown or Dartmouth (probably because Brown and Dartmouth are not known for engineering). I have friends at Rice from places like Russia, Portugal, India, South Korea, and China, and they even said that Brown and Dartmouth are virtually unknown there (all the other Ivies are very well known). So Brown is not quite internationally prestigious and neither is Dartmouth.</p>

<p>Again, they are both excellent schools… but if they were not in the Ivy League SPORTS CONFERENCE, they would definitely be equal to Rice, Emory, Carnegie Mellon, and Vandy in prestige in both this country and abroad. </p>

<p>I do appreciate that you gave rankings for the schools you left out the first time.</p>

7

<p>

</p>

<p>there’s no point attributing a university’s success to a single factor, when it’s all hypothetical and you can’t prove anything. Perhaps B & D are only prestigious because they are part of the ivy league, but </p>

<p>a) you can’t take the ivy league away from them
b) who gives a **** what it is that is making them successful, ultimately you want to go to a college with good faculty, top students and importantly great post-graduation opportunities, B&D excel in all three criteria.
c) The ivy league might be an athletic conference, but people use the term to signify academic excellence, exclusivity and prestige, because every single one of the 8 schools has been able to provide a world class education to its students and warrant their positions as 8 of the best 15 undergrad institutions in the US.</p>

8

<p>this is interesting. However, I wish you that you had included more schools. Probably like top 30?</p>

9

<p>Very interesting, phuriku. Comments/Questions:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>I don’t understand the point of including list 1 (unquoted) at all, or of averaging it with the other list. Isn’t 1 going to give you many false positives? Does list 1 pick up many hits that list 2 would miss (false negatives)? In the same article/site that has a valid reference to “Chicago” (without “University of”) won’t you usually also get a reference to the “University of Chicago”?</p></li>
<li><p>I wish you could tell us (without disclosing sensitive personal info) what language we’re talking about. You were querying on a rendering of the school name appropriate for that language/country (maybe a transliteration)?</p></li>
<li><p>One potential source of noise in the results is if for some reason a school suddenly becomes very newsworthy (like the VaTech shootings for example.) I can’t think of anything like that for these schools, but you might want to repeat your experiment now and then after some time passes. But if you include too many schools, the results probably will be influenced increasingly by school size, sports events, etc.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>Here’s a more complex ranking from web data (it considers site links, Google Scholar papers and citations, etc.):
[World</a> Universities’ ranking on the Web: top 6000 World Ranking](<a href=“http://www.webometrics.info/top6000.asp]World”>http://www.webometrics.info/top6000.asp)</p>

<p>Then there’s G-Factor
(“The G-factor International University Ranking measures the importance of universities as a function of the number of links to their websites from the websites of other leading international universities”):
[G-Factor</a> International University Ranking 2006: Top 300 | <a href=“http://www.universitymetrics.com%5B/url%5D”>www.universitymetrics.com](<a href=“http://universitymetrics.com/gfactor2006top300]G-Factor”>http://universitymetrics.com/gfactor2006top300)</a></p>

<p>And this (“Top 200 Colleges and Universities world-wide”, “based upon the popularity of their websites” using Google page rank, Yahoo Inbound Links, Alexa Traffic Rank):
[2010</a> University Rankings - Top 200 Universities in the world](<a href=“http://www.4icu.org/top200/]2010”>http://www.4icu.org/top200/)</p>

<p>I wonder if any of these sites are picking up non-English/non-Latin references as phuriku has done.</p>

10

<p>Phuriku, I am fairly certain that the University of Michigan is the most searched university on the web. Of course, this is not an indication of international prestige, but Michigan is definitely one of the 16 most prestigious American universities internationally. That may not be the case in the US, but abroad, Michigan’s reputation is very strong.</p>

<p>[The</a> Global Language Monitor Top 225 Colleges in US ranked by Media Buzz](<a href=“http://www.languagemonitor.com/news/top-225-colleges-in-us-ranked-by-media-buzz]The”>http://www.languagemonitor.com/news/top-225-colleges-in-us-ranked-by-media-buzz)</p>

11

<p>Counting Google hits is a really lousy way to measure school prestige - if for no other reason because this method cannot distinguish between fame and infamy, between good publicity and bad publicity. For example taking a quick look I see that “Virginia Tech” generates about twice as many hits as say “UCLA” - no doubt because of the terriible shooting that occured there and not because it is more prestigious than UCLA.</p>

12

<p>^^ Hmm. (@Alexandre) Why would Harvard’s financial troubles cause it to drop in a “media buzz” ranking? Wouldn’t they be just as likely to generate more media buzz, not less?</p>

<p>What exactly is the Global Language Monitor measuring that relates to college quality, anyway? I think there is some plausible connection between web activity and “prestige” (attractiveness, interest), but only if you can reduce some of the noise factors. GLM’s approach seems to amplify them. An event occurs, you get media buzz. How does that reflect school quality? </p>

<p>I like phuriku’s approach better. Simpler. More plausible outcomes. Not that the GLM data wouldn’t be useful for school marketing.</p>

13

<p>The thing that probably generates both the most “media buzz” and the most Google hits for a college is winning a big national athletic championship. For example Googling on “University of Florida” generates 10 million more Google hits than does “Harvard University” and three times as many hits as “Princeton University.” QED.</p>

<p>Is Florida really that much more prestigious than Harvard and and three times as prestigious as Princeton? This is a totally bogus ranking method.</p>

14

<p>I’m not surprised you didn’t include Emory and Vanderbilt. But I was surprised MIT didn’t make it in the top 10. Brown at number 5 was a big surprise for me to. </p>

<p>When people look Cal up on the search engine, they just type: UC Berkeley</p>

15

<p>^^^ Coureur makes an excellent point about the usefulness of a Google search to determine prestige when many factors play into search hits. </p>

<p>I’ll also add that many universities are known by alternate names – for example, MIT is really “Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” The University of Pennsylvania is known most commonly in the US as “Penn” (without quotes, Penn State is likely to share hits) or “UPenn” – but how is it known abroad? And then you have the language/translation issues. The University of Chicago has a similar problem, since the first search may pull up all the universities in Chicago but the second may discount all the times it is referred to as just “Chicago” or “UChicago.”</p>

<p>This was certainly an interesting exercise, but it’s validity as a measure of international prestige is questionable.</p>

16

<p>This is all pointless, because these other countries’ definition of “prestige” is highly synonymous with mere “awareness.”. It’s not based on anything substantial. </p>

<p>If you ask me what is the most prestigious watch, I might say Rolex. That’s because I’ve heard of it. However, people who are in the know about watches could cite a dozen other brands, which have less awareness, and be able to cite specific reasons why.</p>

<p>Why are the “prestige” impressions of other countries so important when those impressions are merely a function of general awareness and I-heard-it’s-good-so-it-must-be? They are as irrelevant as the opinion of the drycleaner who rates Ohio State next to Harvard because he’s heard of their sports.</p>

17

<p>Of course the shortcomings listed above are points well taken, but the data is interesting nonetheless. The performance of schools with unique names that they don’t share with a city, compass point, member of a royal family etc., or schools that don’t have multiple monikers such as Washington U. / WashU / WUSTL etc., is probably the most valid.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>The fact that “Ivy League” is the name of an athletic conference is a point made over and over by posters on CC, but it’s indicative of a lack of understanding of the history of American higher education. Most of the “Big East Conference” schools have little affiliation with one another other than the fact that they compete in athletics. But the Ivy League athletic conference is a product of its schools’ historical grouping, not the cause of it. Setting aside Cornell, which is an Ivy outlier geographically and historically, the other seven schools are the only private universities that were in existence in colonial America. They have been one another’s peers for centuries, going back to a time in which there were no other universities to be their peers. Because they provided the overwhelming majority of the higher education in the northern and middle colonies, their founding boards and faculty members in their early eras were largely drawn from one another. As other top institutions began to be established, graduates of the schools now known as Ivies often played the leading roles in their founding. Top faculty members from around the nation and the world came to view faculty status at the Ivies as the highest level of their profession and aspired to secure positions on those campuses, and accordingly, top students sought out (and continue to seek) affiliations with those schools as well. </p>

<p>The term “Ivy League” and the preeminence of the member institutions far precedes the founding of the athletic conference.</p>

18

<p>Gadad,
I don’t think one can overstate the brand value of the Ivy League. Take away the Ivy label and the non-HYP Ivies become Tufts. Still a terrific school, but the association with the brand is enormously valuable to the non-HYP Ivies. </p>

<p>As for how this is important internationally, I hope we can agree that the matter of prestige is a greater factor in these less democratic, more socially and economically stratified countries. There the imprimatur of a strong brand can have a myriad of positive benefits. In the more socially and economically mobile USA, this is less so. Furthermore, the regional distinctions of prestige are probably surprising to many internationals who don’t understand the USA. </p>

<p>As this relates to the USA, there are probably three dozen privates that have real prestige in their home regions and to varying degrees further away. For publics, their prestige can be exceedingly high in their home states/regions, but slips markedly as you move further away. For example, consider a non-top tier public like Texas A&M. In Texas, it has very high prestige. In Richmond or Dayton or Milwaukee or Portland, it has next to none. IMO, not a big deal, but to think about these schools only on a global scale misses the huge power and influence that they often wield in their local geographies.</p>

19

<p>When I typed “Washington University” in Google (US/English), it includes George Washington, Western Washington…</p>

<p>I wonder how much of a bump Brown got simply becasuse of Emma Watson…</p>

20

<p>@coureur

</p>

<p>GLM does recognize this issue (see their p. 42 of their downloadable Top<em>225</em>Fall<em>2009</em>Sample.pdf). But they don’t seem to address it too well, in my opinion.</p>

<p>The web-buzz approaches are indeed pointless with respect to the practical problem of picking a college. Still, they are interesting as experiments in how to use (or not use) machines to track public opinion on the web. If a little college wants to attract more international students, how does it first measure its brand recognition in target countries and media?</p>