
World's top 100 universities listed  - newacc
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/datablog/2009/oct/08/top-100-universities-world
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gdp
I seriously hate these lists. Top 100 universities _at doing what?_

There's no point being in the crappiest department of the "best" university.

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Stasyan
I agree. There are pretty good technical specialists coming out of Russia,
China and India. I have not found a single university from ether country.

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gaius
IIT certainly should rank right up there.

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ovi256
European universities could fare much better if only they would group. What
that means is that in Lyon for example, the University of Lyon is legally
divided in 16 institutions, Lyon 1 to Lyon 3, plus various other specialized
colleges, e.g. my school, Insa de Lyon, for administrative reasons. Each is
ranked separately in most lists. They do badly in Shangai Uni's ratings
because each separately has 16 times less published papers, and the absolute
number of publications is a big factor in most ratings.

Starting a few years ago, they started asking researchers and students to
attribute their papers to "The University of Lyon", an entity that
administratively does not exist, but logically it should. Most other
universities I know in France are in the same situation, and have started
applying similar measures.

Paris engineering colleges have grouped under a new entity, ParisTech, for
example. Hopefully, this will focus attention and fix ratings. It should,
because some member colleges have been around for some 1000 years, so they
must be doing something right. Consider it a brand hack :)

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gaius
_European universities could fare much better if only they would group._

UCL, Imperial, King's and LSE are all individual colleges within the
University of London.

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fiaz
I find this list hard to believe. University of Illinois Chicago is in the
list and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is nowhere to be found.

I think it is widely held that UIUC ranks higher than UIC.

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xiaoma
Yes. I also pointed out above that ranking U.C.L.A. above U.C. Berkeley, the
flagship and leading campus of the U.C. system is nuts.

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prat
Indian Institute of Technology is not listed? That's a shame. There are 7
institutes and atleast one of them should easily be in top 10. But again
that's just my opinion.

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maxklein
What they should do also is write how much it costs to actually attend these
schools, then throw that in as a .2 weighing factor.

Continental Europe would fare quite a bit better in that case.

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theoneill
But (a) that would then be a different list, the 100 best bargains, not the
100 best universities, and (b) if you really want to measure what it costs,
you have to factor in European taxes, since you have to pay more unless you
are an EU resident.

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gaius
It costs (roughly) GBP 3000 to attend as a UK citizen and GBP 9000-11000 as a
foreigner depending on subject - and I believe the individual universities
have no say in it, it's set by the government. So compared to the US, you
could get a bargain.

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seldo
However, top US universities are very generous about scholarships for high-
achieving individuals even if they are non-nationals. UK universities have
very few scholarships to start with and most of them are closed to non-
citizens.

I come from Trinidad & Tobago, and most of my schoolmates went to American
universities for this reason: UK universities are completely unattainable to a
non-western income.

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xiaoma
MIT and Caltech got shafted in these rankings.

Also from the comments:

 _As for the comparative ranking of U.S. universities . . . this list does not
correspond very well to some rankings done by people competent to rate our
institutions.

For example, only the delusional would rank U.C.L.A. as above U.C. Berkeley,
the flagship and leading campus of the U.C. system. U.C. San Diego should also
rank very high, it competes very well with UCLA._

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unalone
Perhaps the moral here is that ranking colleges is a stupid way to do things,
that comparing a large enormous entity to another large enormous entity is
silly, and that when you're really good at what you do, the difference between
#1 and #40 isn't much at all.

Also: Did you REALLY repost your comment because the first time you submitted
this it got swiftly downvoted? I replied to this same comment only to find it
had been deleted and replaced with a dupe. Not cool.

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xiaoma
I was making a point beyond the general idea that rankings are stupid. _These_
particular rankings, particularly of the California schools is terrible. There
_is_ a difference between ULCA and Berkley. Especially when looking at the
metrics of very top level achievement, such as Nobel Prizes, the difference
between #1 and #40 can be very large.

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unalone
Nobel Prizes are _not_ a metric for achievement. That's _insane_. It's the
most selective and irritatingly limited metric you could come up with.

What I'm trying to get you to understand, xiaoma, is that if ranking anything
is stupid, then it doesn't make sense to point to a certain ranking system and
say "Gee, that's stupid." Of course it's stupid. It's ranking.

