Times Higher Education rankings 2009 released

THE 2009 rankings:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/WorldUniversityRankings.html

Wow, my hometown's university (U of Toronto) moved up 12 places to #29 in the world.

Not sure how many of these offer any purely online degrees, but that would be an interesting study for someone with too much free time.

Quote: "During a recent trip to the US, it was clear to me that the UK's institutions continue to be well regarded in terms of educational and research excellence. And as I spoke with people at American institutions, it was also clear that they would continue to look to UK universities as preferential research partners." http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408565 ... of course, these rankings are coming out of the UK, so ... But good news for people doing distance graduate work through UK schools.

 

Nice to see that both my alma maters are in the Top 100 world ranking

 

#12 than than #13

Mine is #12 (not too bad) I don't is NorthCentral, I'm I missing something?

 

Yay, another ranking! Woo-hoo! But, oh no! My school is #122, which means 121 schools are awesomer than mine! Hopefully, there will soon be a ranking of all the world's people from the bestest to the worstest. I'm sure I'll be ranked bester than those stupid Michigan kids.

 

Wow! You graduated from UoP - I used to work just down the street from their campus - at lunch we would sit on a wall, eat our lunches, and watch students walk by in mini-skirts.

 

It's interesting to compare this with the most recent Shanghai rankings.

http://www.arwu.org/

The THES top ten:

1. Harvard
2. Cambridge
3. Yale
4. UCL
5. Imperial C. London
5. (tie) Oxford
7. U. Chicago
8. Princeton
9. MIT
10. Cal Tech

The Shanghai top ten:

1. Harvard
2. Stanford
3. UC Berkeley
4. Cambridge
5. MIT
6. Cal Tech
7. Columbia
8. Princeton
9. U. Chicago
10. Oxford

I'm a little struck by how the THES has British universities in four of the top six places.

Shanghai has Stanford #2 and Berkeley #3. THES has Stanford #16 and Berkeley #39. THES has UCL #4 and Imperial #5, Shanghai puts UCL at #22 and Imperial #27.

I'm inclined to say that there's a group of research-intensive universities that's found near the top of most rankings, but their precise ordering is a matter ot taste, an artifact of how variables are chosen and weighted.

In real life, universities have strengths in different research problems and approaches, even within a single discipline. So the relative rankings that actually count will depend in large part on prospective graduate students, employers and scholarly peers' interests.

It's interesting that many/most legitimate universities are among the world leaders at something. It's just that the top-of-the-charts research powerhouses are generally prominent across the board, while back-in-the-pack universities more often lead in particular research areas or in niche subjects.

 

I am in no way expert on education, and this might only be my own, personal (and possibly very misguided) opinion, but some things strike me as being very odd on this list.

USA is still the world leader in many fields, including science, so it does not surprise me that so many US universities are at the top. However, this list seems to be "Anglo-Saxons and friends" list with some other countries sprinkled on top.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408560

UK has 29 universities on this UK listing, Australia has 9, almost as many as Germany (10), and more than twice as France (4). Now, I can't really say anything negative about Australian education (I don't know much about it either way) but to have it and its universities ranked so highly above France...this is really strange. Switzerland has more world-class universities (7) than France (4), China (6) and Russia (2)?

I know research is an important component of the function of a university in the west, but is there a list which ranks universities according to the quality of education, not quality of research? Given that it is theoretically possible that in some countries research is not conducted primarily in universities, but in separate institutes (don't know for sure, just guessing here)?

 

You have to look at the ranking in its sociocultural context. Most, if not all the influential rankings are deeply rooted in an Anglo-American framework of higher education. In fact, the very concept of ranking a whole university (as opposed, for example, to ranking departments, as has been done in Germany) is very Anglo-American. And of course, the US and the UK are cultural superpowers and have their model of higher education copied by many developing and developed countries in the world.

Consequently, the criteria that are used in those rankings are determined by what is considered important in UK and US higher education. They may heavily weigh factors that are not considered overly important in other countries. I give you an example: my alma mater is the University of Freiburg (falsely named Freiburg University in the Times ranking), number 122 in the world. That's pretty good, but not nearly as good as the school ranks in most European rankings.

The school is 550 years old, has produced a number of Nobel Prize laureates, has a world-famous medical school, etc. Does this mean the professors will show up for every office hour? No. That there is regular counseling for students? Nope - a good student is expected to organize her program largely on her own. I remember spending a hot summer term in a class that was in a small crowded room without air conditioning or window. Why? Well, the room was in an old building to which no structural changes were to be made. Ancient architecture is way more important than students... Now, an American student would perceive this as extremely poor service - to Germans, it's simply not that important.

Well, just one aspect of many. But one has to keep in mind that rankings are always mirrors of a particular cultural framework and thus not universally objective. If I look at Germany's position in the world and consider how many Germans are successful all over the world, I am not overly worried about the state of our higher education system.

Woah, long post - sorry!

 

"Quality of education" is a pretty subjective topic. Research citations, student-to-teacher ratios and admissions data are relatively easy to tabulate. What creteria would you recommend be used to determine quality of education?

 

In one respect, the THES and Shanghai rankings have a heavy Eurasian bias. Look at their attitude towards small, undergraduate-focused liberal arts colleges, which are largely an American phenomenon.

In the US, such schools are considered among the best possible places to get an undergraduate education. For example, a few years ago the Wall Street Journal ranked US undergraduate programs by their ability to place students into top medical, law, and business schools. It was, in effect, an attempt to rank undergrad programs based on the perceptions of graduate schools (which one might expect to be well informed about the matter).

Of the top 10 schools named by the WSJ, some (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, MIT) would come as no surprise to those familiar with the THES or Shanghai rankings.

But other schools in the WSJ top 10 (e.g. Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore) or top 20 (e.g. Pomona, Wellesley, Haverford, Bowdoin) are totally non-existent, according to THES or Shanghai. In the US, top liberal arts colleges are perceived as viable alternatives to Ivy League and other top universities. But Europe and Asia generally don't have schools like this, and so they are not addressed in the THES and Shanghai rankings. In other words, these rankings arbitrarily exclude many of the best undergraduate programs in the US. This should provide some indication of the importance that they attach to undergraduate education.

 

Well, of the above criteria, it seems to me only research citations have to do with quality of research. Student-to-teacher ratios and admissions data have more to do with quality of education, I believe (if we are talking about admissions data to higher-level study after graduation, i.e. exit criteria). Apart from admissions data there could also be industry data, i.e. monitoring students for longer periods of time as they move into the industry. My university recently sent me a questionnaire, one to me and one to my supervisor, asking us to kindly provide them with information regarding progress of their graduate (that was 5 years after I graduated).

Peer review also? I have a friend who teaches at a local school here that has a double-degree arrangement with a UK university. At the end of the term, I believe they (she and fellow lecturers) had to justify every single final grade they awarded to an "auditor" (i.e. a professor) from that UK university, to ensure consistency in grading standards. It would be more difficult to establish this process on a wide scale, but probably not impossible, for many programs at least. Those programs that require or prefer having additional industry accreditation would probably find it easier to adapt. I vaguely remember my professors hosting a committee of foreign professors and having to justify some of their decisions regarding coursework and particular courses in my department. So such a thing already exits, if maybe at a smaller scale.

I am a certified Microsoft and Oracle trainer, and for every course I teach, I am required to have the students submit their feedback to the above named companies, grading me (subject knowledge, presentation skills, communication skills), the training materials and the course as a whole. I also remember having to do the same thing for my undergraduate courses. And while I am perfectly aware such evaluations can be misleading and have their own weaknesses, when administered for longer periods of time they do allow for both self-monitoring and peer-review, and thus can be taken as some of the criteria in determining quality of education. I would be surprised if these things are not used already.

But, as I said, I am in no way an education expert.

 

I’ve always thought that it muddies the waters to compare entire schools as opposed to comparing the departments of philosophy, the departments of history, etc. Looking at more field-specific rankings like the UK’s National Research Assessments can provide some perspective.

Yet despite all that, I admit to having a total weakness for lists, and reading the Times' list right away!

 

Last I heard, Shanghai was over in China. (Shanghai, San Francisco, easily confused.) It's hard to think that Shanghai Jiao Tong University has Anglo-Saxon bias. They aren't homers either, since they assign their own SJTU to the 200-300 level in the world. The real Anglo-Saxons, over in the UK, actually seem to take a dimmer view of American universities than these Chinese do. The Brits seem to favor their own and Commonwealth universities (and universities in Hong Kong) and they apparently haven't exactly forgiven the American revolution.

It's interesting that the THES believes that the top seven universities in the EU are in the UK.

Cambridge #2 worldwide
UCL #4
Imperial #5
Oxford #5 (tie)
Edinburgh #20
KCL #23
Manchester #26

Only then do we encounter the Ecole Normal Superieure at #28.

Actually, the Shanghai rankings do the same thing, placing the top five EU universities in the UK.

Cambridge #4
Oxford #10
UCL #22
Imperial #27
Manchester #40

Only then do we encounter the U. of Paris IV, the 'Pierre et Marie Curie' one, I believe.

My guess is that the dominance of English-language universities on both these lists might be partly due to the weight given to citation rankings. English is kind of the de-facto international language of scholarship, particularly in science, and publications in other languages probably don't get as many readers or cites.

I was happy to see that the THES actually included Chulalongkorn U. at #138. That's the leading university in Thailand and actually quite good, but it never moves the citation meter since most of its publications, particularly in the humanities, are in Thai.

I think that both lists show a bias towards science. That's probably why Cambridge comes in ahead of Oxford both places. Cambridge has always seemed to have more of a scientific tendency, while Oxford is the stronger of the two in the humanities. Several universities that only award doctorates in the sciences and engineering (Cal Tech etc.) rate very well on both lists, but neither list mentioned the U. of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

The Shanghai list includes UC San Francisco at #18 overall and at #3 worldwide in the life sciences. UCSF didn't appear on the THES top-200 list or on their top-50 biomedicine list. Rockefeller U. came in at #32 on the Shanghai list and #9 in the life sciences, the best (and only) showing for a non-RA American school. THES didn't include it on either the general or the biomedicine list.

These are clearly crude general overall research-clout rankings. But as has already been noted, in countries in which a significant percentage of research comes from non-university research establishments, such as Russia's Academy of Sciences for example, or Germany's Max Planck Institutes, some of the publication flow might be diverted leaving universities less productive. The extra-university research establishements would obviously have to be included and factored in before any comparisons are made about national research prowess.

The differences between the lists suggests to me that this isn't really an exact science and that the results shouldn't be taken too seriously.

 

Hmm, if this is regarding my comment about "Anglo-Saxons and friends", I was referring to the THES list, not Shanghai. It seems you, at least partially, agree there, albeit without the "Anglo-Saxon" wording.

But, if we were to be nitpicky, Shanghai actually was for a short time under British control in the 19th century, and for a somewhat longer period there seems to have existed an Anglo-American extra-territorial settlement in Shanghai.

Again, I am making absolutely no claim whatsoever regarding Shanghai list (even my THES comment was made with reservations), but, theoretically speaking, I don't think it is that uncommon for people from parts of what used to be British Empire to have very marked preference for anything and everything British. I've certainly seen enough of that during my 4 years in Malaysia, another former part of the British Empire. Sometimes it seemed they weren't aware there even existed any football club other than Manchester United.

 

I was pleased to see Cape Town made the list, since we have had many people from here interested in South African universities.

 

The Shanghai list includes three ZA universities.

U. Cape Town in the 200-300 class, worldwide.

U. Witwatersrand in the 300-400 class, and

U. KwaZulu-Natal in the 400-500 class.

Those are the only three universities on the entire continent of Africa, including Arabic north Africa, that SJTU places in the world's top 500.

(In past years, Cairo U. has sometimes appeared in the 400-500 class, but not most recently. So it's apparently near the 500 cusp.)