<p>Seems to me, though, that the “international outlook” ranking is going to systematically favor STEM-heavy universities because collaborative research papers are much more common in the sciences than in the social sciences or humanities. The chances that a philosopher or historian will publish a paper with an international collaborator are pretty low; people in those fields tend to work solo. More generally, it seems likely that the more non-STEM faculty a university has, the lower its “international outlook” score is likely to go. It’s also my perception (though I don’t have data to back it up) that American universities tend to hire a lot more international faculty and attract more international grad students in STEM fields than in non-STEM fields, so again STEM-heavy (and social science, humanities, law, and business-light) schools are going to be systematically favored.</p>
<p>Also, my gut tells me European universities are going to score better on “international outlook” than American universities because the countries are smaller and close together, there free movement of students and faculty across borders, and I believe these days a fair amount of their research money comes through the EU which is probably going to want to promote collaborations across member states.</p>
<p>You didn’t mean circular, you meant contradictory or self-defeating.</p>
<p>The line between university in college is surely a fuzzy one. Many on this board, i imagine, would rather call Caltech a college than a university, like Williams or Dartmouth. But i don’t think such an assessment would be accurate. Surely, Caltech does university-level research with many of the top universities in the field, and it offers many more PHD (and has a similar percentage of grad. students) as many top research universities. That percentage is typically much higher than you’d find at any liberal arts college.</p>
<p>It seems that Caltech puts us in a quagmire: we can compare Caltech to LACs, who it matches in number of students and perhaps student-to-faculty ratios. But Caltech is still incomparable to these colleges in terms of research. The opposite point could be made with universities.</p>
<p>Overall, I think Caltech is closer to being a university; it’s just a very small, specialized university. But as a result of this, we may wonder if it’s fair to call the others its ‘peers’ or compare them within the same ranking.</p>