

Britain and America dominate list of best universities. - rglullis
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/student/news/article660845.ece
I was surprised to see the amount of British universities at the top. &#60;a href="<a href="http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top200/" rel="nofollow">http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top20...</a>" rel="nofollow"&#62;<a href="http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top20...&#60;/a&#62;&#60;p&#62;Also" rel="nofollow">http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top20...</a>, Caltech guys will be happy to see they got ahead of M.I.T.&#60;p&#62;And we Brazilians are just happy to see that USP and Unicamp got into the list (175 and 177). I do believe, however, that Unicamp got really impressive scores for quality of faculty.

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ced
This will merely reflect reputation. How many people in academia have been at
Harvard long enough to have an actual opinion?

Question: if China built the best university in the world today, how long
would it take to reach number 1 on the list? I think decades. So much for
having a yearly list.

I looked for details, from <http://www.thes.co.uk/worldrankings/story.aspx> .
It requires registration, but here's a part of the method section:

 _"Our rankings contain two strands of peer review. The more important is
academic opinion, worth 40 per cent of the total score available in the
rankings. The opinions are gathered, like the rest of the rankings data, by
our partners QS Quacquarelli Symonds (www.topuniversities.com) which has built
up a database of e-mail addresses of active academics across the world. They
are invited to tell QS what area of academic life they come from, choosing
from science, biomedicine, technology, social science or the arts and
humanities. They are then asked to list up to 30 universities that they regard
as the leaders in the academic field they know about, and in 2007 we have
strengthened our measures to prevent anyone voting for his or her own
institution.

This year we have the opinions of 5,101 experts, of whom 41 per cent are in
Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 30 per cent in the Americas, and 29 per
cent in the Asia-Pacific region."_

The rest of the score is split:

-10% which university do recruiters favor

-20% publication count

-20% student stuff, like teacher-to-student ratio (the only example they give)

-10% I couldn't find.

So there's definitely two selection effects: how did they collect their
addresses, and who decided to answer a Times Online survey. I'm pretty sure my
advisor wouldn't do it. Too busy.

Furthermore, they don't give the detailed methodology, and they admit to
changing it since the first published results.

Overall, it seems like an honest effort, but what's the point? Would you
advise a young person to make a decision based on this ranking?

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nanijoe
In a study done by English speaking people, is this result really a surprise?

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pg
"The rankings were based on a survey for the THES of 3,703 academics
worldwide..."

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cglee
Not sure how this quote disproves the previous statement (English speaking
bias).

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rglullis
How many people in the academia _do not_ speak English?

~~~
at
Not sure how many.

But I know a significant amount of scientific papers are published in other
languages than English, e.g. in Chinese language on Wanfang Data
(www.wanfangdata.com - affiliate of Chinese Ministry of Science and
Technology). This is probably the case in many other non-English languages.

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mynameishere
_In some countries this is the result of a deliberate policy. The German and
Dutch governments, perhaps from fear of elitism, try to ensure that all
universities are roughly equal in quality._

<http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html>

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Harj
"Harvard, whose endowment of $26 billion (GBP13.8 billion) exceeds total
annual funding for all British universities"

that gives a powerful indication of the sheer scale of the imbalance between
the resources at the disposal of UK and US education institutions.

~~~
pg
Except that it's comparing a capital sum with an annual expenditure, which is
rather misleading. A capital sum will ordinarily be around 20x as big as the
annual income it generates (though no doubt Harvard gets better returns than
the average nonprofit).

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rglullis
I was surprised to see the amount of British universities at the top.
[http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top20...](http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/top200)
. Also, Caltech guys will be happy to see they got ahead of M.I.T.

And we Brazilians are just happy to see that USP and Unicamp got into the list
(175 and 177). I do believe, however, that Unicamp got really impressive
scores for quality of faculty.

~~~
pg
Can you post the list? It's so lame that they make you create an account to
see it.

~~~
rglullis
<http://top200.jottit.com/>

~~~
veritas
Wow... not one mention of the Indian Institutes of Technology which may just
be the toughest engineering schools on the planet. Just have a look at their
entrance exams...

Bias anyone?

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cperciva
High entrance requirements are only one of the factors which define a good
university. I'd say that the quality of teaching and the quality of research
performed are more important than the quality of incoming students.

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plinkplonk
The IITs have a good _undergraduate_ program, one of the best in the world.
The graduate and research output of the IITs is nowhere as good. In fact , the
research in particular is fairly mediocre, compared to say Stanford or MIT.

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stuki
No Indian university?

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veritas
Apparently not...

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sharpshoot
woot - no 2 and no 5!

