In the 2010 Times Higher Education "top universities" list, Alexandria University in Egypt ranked ahead of Georgetown and Delft. It also beat out Harvard and Stanford in the subcategory that measured the impact of research (1). Here's what happened:
Phil Baty, deputy editor of Times Higher Education, acknowledged that Alexandria’s surprising prominence was actually due to “the high output from one scholar in one journal” — soon identified on various blogs as Mohamed El Naschie, an Egyptian academic who published over 320 of his own articles in a scientific journal of which he was also the editor.
In 2009, an administrator at Clemson University in the U.S. revealed that the college had "... manipulated class sizes, artificially boosted faculty salary data and gave rival schools low grades in the rankings' peer reputation survey" with the goal of improving its U.S. News & World Report college ranking. This helped the university rise from #38 to #22 over a seven-year period (2). A few weeks ago, Emory University admitted it had also manipulated data/lied over a period of more than 10 years in order to improve its U.S. News & World Report ranking (3).
My takeaway from these incidents: Not only are university ranking systems imperfect to begin with, but it's also possible to game the system ... and it happens every year.
3. Reuters: "Emory gave incorrect data to publications that rank U.S. colleges"
in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/17/usa-emory-ranking-idINL2E8JHNG320120817
Thanks so much for all the data! I was just about to write a "well, hopefully nobody on HN cares about these rankings" post, trying to remember some of the facts I read about, but your post summarizes these data so well, no need to post at all.
Just for the record: I recently read (presumably on HN, too) about a ranking where somebody asked lawyers to rank schools according to their prestige. Penn-State always got ranked in the middle, even though it didn't have a law school at all. So, in a sense it doesn't even matter if administrators are cheating or not...
Absolutely. I do hope pedigree will matter even less in the future as formal education hopefully matters less as well.
The important thing shouldn't be education, but what is done with it.
Here is a messy and incomplete list of cool things created by people from lower ranking universities:
Python: University of Amsterdam.
Ruby: University of Tsukuba.
PHP: University of Waterloo.
Javascript: University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Rails: Copenhagen Business School
Django: University of Bath and Missouri School of Journalism
Drupal: Ghent University
Linux: University of Helsinki
MySQL: Helsinki University of Technology and ??
Perl: Seattle Pacific University
Java: University of Calgary
Objective C: Furman University and ??
C++: University of Aarhus
C#: Technical University of Denmark
I've been reading through all the comments, many of which complain about bias. That's only part of the problem. Often students applying to graduate school have a better idea of what they're looking for, but for undergraduates the metrics that they're weighing with other factors such as campus life are much murkier, and these rankings don't analyze the questions that deeply.
For example, Stanford and Rice University have the same student-to-faculty ratio, and their endowments are proportional, but Stanford has 2 graduate students for every undergraduate student, whereas Rice is one of the smallest Division 1 schools AND has fewer graduate students. So when Rice claims undergraduates interested in interacting closely with faculty in cutting-edge research will have ample opportunity to do so, one could argue they may be more likely to provide that to undergrads than even Stanford. Because I've compared experiences with Stanford folks, I don't think Stanford is behind Rice in that category, but the fact is, I'm comparing against one of the very top schools. So perhaps my argument holds for most universities that are ahead of Rice in the rankings, but a student is going to have to really dig to figure that out, and perhaps speak with students and faculty at each university to grasp the differences that matter to him or her. And that's only in the category of undergraduate participation in research--there are many other questions students face that these rankings can't properly answer.
Clearly there is a need to capture certain metrics and display that as quantitative information, and the difference between, say, the top 10 and the 90-100 is probably relevant, but the difference within the top ~20 is so minimal its largely irrelevant.
It really galls me when people make decisions about undergraduate or graduate schools (or, probably employees, although this is a position I'm yet to be in) based on these kinds of rankings. Clearly it should factor to some extent (i.e. Harvard vs. Jeremey's University of Rubishville[1]) but there are MANY much more important factors to consider.
The irony is that the rankings are 50% opinion based, which basically amounts to identifying where people think are prestigious. I wonder what people use to identify which the prestigious universities are - they can't possible go and visit them all, but if only there were some kind of online ranking they could use to get an idea...
[1] When I went to undergraduate, this was the fictional university my younger brother suggested he might end up going to.
The only ranking system that ever seems to matter is the generally assumed ranking within the public consciousness. It doesn't matter if John Doe University emerges from out of nowhere one year to unseat Harvard on some arbitrary list; the general public is still going to assume Harvard is a top school, and probably will not have heard of John Doe U.
As for the distinctions among the generally assumed top tier -- be it Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, or what have you -- these seem pretty irrelevant in praxis. Go to the school that interests you the most and is the best fit for you. If you should be so talented and lucky as to get into all of the best schools, you're probably the kind of person whose life isn't going to take a dramatic turn for the worse because some ranking system suddenly places your alma mater at #2 or #3.
The only two groups who place serious stock in the rankings are high schoolers and the chronically insecure.
I turned down UCL and KCL to go to Bristol, which is lower rated than both on this year's list.
I can see why you would want to go to a university as high up this list as possible, because you want your degree to be from an institution that potential employers will recognise. In the UK at least, having an Oxbridge degree will automatically doors to some opportunities that aren't otherwise easy to get into.
But, if you're actually concerned about the quality of education that you get (hint: if you're spending 3+ years on it then you probably should be), then bear in mind that individual faculties and departments within universities vary a lot and a ranking system can't replace doing your own research.
I never realised Imperial was so high up. Among some people, it's seen as where you go if you fail to get in to Oxbridge. (are we done dick-waving now?)
You thought (some people think) it was where people went if they didn't make Oxbridge, but you didn't realise it was highly ranked? That makes little sense.
I can't comment on the methodology used to rank the universities, but I think it's interesting that a specialised (as opposed to "fully comprehensive") university has come out on top. MIT would probably not be a great choice of university for someone looking to take an arts degree :-)
MIT certainly doesn't have the humanities breadth of Harvard, for instance, but the humanities that MIT does have are remarkably good. Some of my fellow MIT students at the time went to MIT because they thought the extra-curricular music programs were better at MIT than at Harvard. I got my SB from MIT in Philosophy. MIT's Philosophy program is considered to be in the top few in the country, as is its Linguistics. I was taught creative writing by Joe Haldeman, photography in dark rooms that had been built by Minor White, psychology by Susan Carey, etc. Every MIT student is also required to take 8 classes in humanities, complete a humanities concentration in a particular field, and take a certain number of humanities that have a very significant writing requirement. MIT's business school is in the top few in the world.
Also, I'm not sure that it is correct to say that science and engineering are more "specialized" in their entirety than liberal arts are. All of Harvard's engineering, for instance, is contained in a single department. Doesn't that make Harvard more "specialized" towards liberal arts?
I 100% will take your word for it on the quality of some elements of MIT's humanities faculty (not being ironic).
But few of the MIT grads I've known (wonderful people, all) appear to have benefited that much from this opportunity. They're nerds through and through.
Maybe the technical course load precludes exploring non-technical subjects. Or maybe the experience of 4 years almost exclusively around young scientists and engineers tends to alter one's perspective. Maybe it's that I've only been around conventional technical MIT grads (EECS, Physics, not Philosophy).
I'm a nerd through and through too. Being a nerd doesn't mean that you can't have an appreciation for some kinds of humanities, though, especially if you take a very analytical approach to it. E.g., Psychology at MIT is rather scientific, and Philosophy is rather logical. And for creative writing, I, of course, wrote Science Fiction.
I like your formulation. There are many parts of culture that the analytical mindset cannot approach, alas. I spent a few years hanging around fine arts grad students and let's say that is a whole different ball game.
Not entirely true. MIT students are required to take, on average, at least one humanities course a semester even if they are doing a purely tech degree. I was a comparative media studies major there and the faculty was incredible. A lot of the professors are poached or borrowed from Ivy league schools. The linguistics department in particular is amazing. You can also cross register for courses at Harvard or Wellesley, which is awesome. About a quarter of the folks in my dorm were music majors (along with something else of course.) Humanities majors are common, humanities-only majors are rare, but I don't think any of us felt like the humanities education there was anything but world class.
If the ranking is by perceived quality, then I guess this makes sense: it's much harder for an institution to be best in the world at many diverse subjects.
I have two degrees from the UK, and am currently doing a PhD in the US. During the application process I visited 8-10 different graduate schools in the states, and honestly, I felt like any one of them would be comfortably in the top 5 in the UK.
Maybe that's a totally superficial assessment, but in terms of the quality of facilities, research going on and the interaction I had with professors they were awesome. I don't think this is surprising though - the US is a lot bigger (and I visited a lot of the top universities) so you'd expect there to be more high quality institutions, because there are simply a lot more students/faculty.
This is why I find the UK occupying a lot of the top ten to be someone dubious. No slight against the British academic world, but four out of the top six when adjusted for funds and population just seems ridiculous.
It may have something to do with the fact that ranking organization is in the UK. The same thing happens with a few other 'academic' rankings I have seen.
- Academic Peer Review 40%
- Global Employer Review 10%
- Citations Per Faculty 20%
- International Student Ratio 5%
- International Faculty Ratio 5%
- Faculty Student Ratio 20%"
Pretty sure 'Academic Peer Review' is just asking other academics what they think of the university. Which essentially makes this a marketing/branding game by the sounds of things.
I have no idea why it is weighted so heavily. Presumably most students care about where employers hire from, and most researchers care about citations/research impact.
Isn't that a bit partisan? There are some big names above it (Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, Yale, ...) - coming behind some of those doesn't make it a bad university.
1 Harvard University
2 Stanford University
3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
4 University of California, Berkeley
5 University of Cambridge
6 California Institute of Technology
7 Princeton University
8 Columbia University
9 University of Chicago
10 University of Oxford
All ranks are biased. But I don't think four universities from UK can make into top 10. Cambridge and Oxford maybe, the other two not so much. Regarding the rankings from ARWU, I think Berkeley and Columbia is a bit too high on the list.
Berkeley has a hudge breadth of top ranked Phd courses, so depending on how you account for that it matters greatly. It also has a surprisingly strong brand internationally, including in Asia. So, smart people think differently depending upon where you are getting the data from. (What USA tennie-boppers think is "prestigeous" doesn't always play well in other areas, etc).
I agree about Berkeley. Looking over the various departmental rankings, Berkeley and Stanford are the only universities that (at the PhD level) seem to be near the top in every discipline.
I'd guess that the absence of a med school pulls down Berkeley's ranking somewhat. When you start comparing research funding and activity, the med schools play a huge role in pumping up the numbers.
I loved Cambridge but honestly the Computer Science course was pretty poor. It won't have helped that the best first-year lecturer, Arthur Norman, retired recently.
You're taught in faculties just like anywhere else. There is a Department of Computer Science or Department of History or whatever, and those are where everyone goes for lectures. You have 1-to-1 or 1-to-2 teaching sessions in your college (or at least, organized by your college), with some kind of relevant academic in the college (taught by a PhD student, PostDoc, professor, depending on who is availble, who the director of studies thinks is good, what level of undergrad etc).
The analogy usually used for the benefit of American-tourists (not meant patronisingly, it's just empirically surprisingly effective) is that it's like Hogwarts. You have the colleges/houses (like gryffindor and hufflepuff) where you live (at least in 1st year) and eat and play sports for, but lectures and the degree in general (like potions class) are all done in faculties with people doing the same course but in other colleges.
Most lecturers and professors will belong to a college too, but they'll still be lecturers in a faculty rather than a college. In Cambridge there is an academic rank called 'College Lecturer' but like most things that doesn't mean what it says, and is probably designed to confuse and intimidate foreign people, like everything else (for example May Week when all the college balls are held after exams, is in June, and the weeks start on Thursday and end on Wednesday). [Lest the po-faced take me seriously, it's not actually designed to confuse people, it's just there's a lot of vestigial baggage that it's not worth the effort of changing [like removing an appaendix when it's not causing you problems] when you've been around almost a millennium and where a switch to the Gregorian Calendar was more recent than when the desk in your study was built.]
Lectures are organized by the relevant subject's department, independently of the colleges; in many ways the departments are as autonomous as the colleges. But supervisions, the more important part of the Cambridge style of teaching, are organized by your college (though smaller colleges with only a few students in a given subject will often share supervisions, and even the biggest colleges might send you elsewhere to be supervised if you've picked an obscure specialization in your third year). Almost all colleges offer almost all subjects (there are a few special cases like st edmund's which is a dedicated theological college AIUI), but some do have a reputation for particular subjects; many (but by no means all) computer science students (in general most students don't have a minor in the UK, especially in Cambridge) go to either Trinity Hall (for its history/reputation and its generous internet usage policies) or to Churchill (which is physically closest to the Computer Science department)
In my college there were four computer scientists in my year. We had two lecturers in the college, who gave us tutorials. Then we join the rest of the computer scientists throughout the University for lectures.
And the colleges are more than semi-automonus - they have their own academics, own money, and they do their own admissions.
I'm judging from the first-year course, which I was so unhappy with that I switched to mathematics; maybe it gets better later on. But what I saw was an operating systems course that was basically rote memorization, and two programming courses that taught very little; the ML course spent too long teaching the very basics, and students were handheld through the only actually contentful exercise. The java course was supposed to be more about real-world programming, but taught very old-style C-in-java that would be undesirable at any company I've worked at. It was all just very boring and useless; my supervisor tried to introduce some more interesting exercises (my supervision partner found it all equally trivial), but by the end of the first term he'd given up on finding us anything challenging. Conversely at least two of my friends passed all the exercises and the exams but quite clearly had no understanding of computer science or how to program.
Phil Baty, deputy editor of Times Higher Education, acknowledged that Alexandria’s surprising prominence was actually due to “the high output from one scholar in one journal” — soon identified on various blogs as Mohamed El Naschie, an Egyptian academic who published over 320 of his own articles in a scientific journal of which he was also the editor.
In 2009, an administrator at Clemson University in the U.S. revealed that the college had "... manipulated class sizes, artificially boosted faculty salary data and gave rival schools low grades in the rankings' peer reputation survey" with the goal of improving its U.S. News & World Report college ranking. This helped the university rise from #38 to #22 over a seven-year period (2). A few weeks ago, Emory University admitted it had also manipulated data/lied over a period of more than 10 years in order to improve its U.S. News & World Report ranking (3).
My takeaway from these incidents: Not only are university ranking systems imperfect to begin with, but it's also possible to game the system ... and it happens every year.
1. New York Times: "Questionable Science Behind Academic Rankings" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/education/15iht-educLede15...
2. USA Today: "Clemson official: School manipulated rankings " http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-06-04-clemson-ra...
3. Reuters: "Emory gave incorrect data to publications that rank U.S. colleges" in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/17/usa-emory-ranking-idINL2E8JHNG320120817