<p>Seems to track ARWU very closely.</p>
<p>Interesting, but for a list as broad as this, how useful is it for undergrads, let alone someone studying a specific area, even at the grad level? Harvard is great, but it’s not exactly known as the school for getting a Ph.D. in engineering.</p>
<p>@MrMom62
Well, at a undergraduate level, it tells you which universities have the most research intensive faculty; but, since the ranking is not per capita, some of the meaning is lost. </p>
<p>I’m kind of peeved how 10% of the ranking, the number of PhD awarded, basically just measures how much of a degree mill each of the schools are despite the fact it likely helped my alma mater.</p>
<p>It probably didn’t help that greatly. FWIW, UCLA generally places between the top 10 to top 15 in international rankings. This is seen in this ranking, in the Times Higher Education rankings, and in the ARWU.</p>
<p>It is interesting to see UTexas at 30 internationally while it is 53 nationally.</p>
<p>It seems that they use very different criteria for the international ranking vs. the national ranking. Seems that research prowess is weighed much more heavily in the international ranking, which is why a bunch of state flagships and UCs, many of whom are research heavyweights, are near the top of the list while Dartmouth and Brown are nowhere to be seen.</p>
<p>Well let’s get real here. Top notch research is a primary goal for truly world class univerisites. These are the places where life changing discoveries are often made. There are many, many colleges where one can get an excellent undergraduate education. A much smaller number of insitutions are strong at all levels of education and research. </p>
<p>I think this is the ARWU ranking that USNews has expropriated under its name. </p>
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<p>The same could be said about the national and regional college rankings as well. They are meaningless without context.</p>
<p>Yep, good point. There are are schools inside the USN top 20 that are not IB targets and there are schools outside the USN top 20 that are IB targets, and investment banking is one of the most prestige-conscious industries. You can find examples like that for any industry, in fact.</p>
<p>Kudos to U of Michigan and the University of Toronto, both out ranking Yale. btw, I read an article in the Washington post that said that reputation played a huge part in the global rankings as well. So question: how much weight did they give to reputation exactly?</p>
<p>Here is the methodology. </p>
<p>In general, the so called “global rankings” (Times, ARWU …) assume that a research university’s primary purpose is to create knowledge - so the rankings attempt to quantify both the quantity (number of papers published) and quality (number of times a research paper is cited by other research papers) of research, as well as the university’s ability to produce graduates who will presumably produce knowledge in the future (i.e. Phds). Sometimes, the results of a reputational survey are included. The differences in the various world rankings tend to stem from the relative weightings and normalization processes applied to the various factors. Sometimes they use the same database (Thompson Reuters). </p>
<p>This particular ranking:
Gives reputation a 25% weight-
-12.5% global
-12.5% local.
Phd production is given a 10% weight
-5% for total output
-5% for output per faculty member
Quantity of publications is given a 12.5% weight
Quality of publications is given a 32.5% weight -
-12.5% for total number of citations
-10% normalized to account for differences between fields
-10% for the percentage of citations.
International collaboration is given a 10% weight</p>
<p>30-40% of the rank is based on sheer quantity (Phd’s, publications, citations) so schools with large Phd programs tend to do well in this ranking (and other world rankings).</p>
<p>The relevance of this ranking to undergraduate education depends on:</p>
<ol>
<li> Your personal opinion of how relevant the latest research generated knowledge is to undergrad education</li>
<li> How accessible you believe the knowledge generated by the school’s research actually is to undergrads </li>
<li> How you believe the time demands for generating knowledge and guiding Phd students will affect the school’s ability to teach undergrads.</li>
</ol>
<p>Brown is ranked #106 which is lower than its Times world rank (#54)
Dartmouth is ranked #242 which is lower than its Times world rank (#152)</p>
<p>In terms of other small, undergrad-focused research universities:</p>
<p>Rice is ranked #89 which is slightly lower than its Times world rank (#69)
Tufts is ranked #91 which is about the same as its Times world rank (#88)</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/articles/methodology”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/articles/methodology</a></p>