<p>The most surprising placement I see is UCSD. It’s two spots lower than UCLA, and it’s ranked above Penn, Hopkins, and Michigan. It’s probably a bit higher than it should be, but otherwise it’s the usual suspects.</p>
<p>Any ranking that puts UC San Francisco up there clearly isn’t focused on measuring anything about undergraduate education, since UCSF is a grad school and medical only only - no undergraduates.</p>
<p>Can someone explain NYU’s inclusion? I thought with the exception of applied math, NYU was only strong in fields not likely to generate international prestige, eg languages, art history, theatre, etc. Glad to see that UCI is on the list.</p>
<p>Timetodecide, while Rice is an outstanding school, its overall research output is much less than that of ASU. There are plenty of great undergraduate schools, including my own, that weren’t included in the list.</p>
<p>Here we see how differences in criteria can significantly change the rankings.</p>
<p>Rankings like this, which appear to be mainly about research output, can produce a very different ranking from those based on undergraduate admissions selectivity (or, “how good are the worst undergraduate students at the school?”).</p>
<p>The problem with the meta ranking is that some of the averages are thrown off by one ranking which is far different than the other two. ARWU and THE both rank Stanford at 2, whereas QS ranks it at 15; This can also be seen with UCLA which is ranked 31st by QS but ranked 12th and 13th by ARWU and THE.</p>
<p>Taking a look at the median would be better imo :)</p>
<p>NYU has arguably the top philosophy department in the world, or if not that, certainly one of the top 5. It’s also very strong in economics, and strong (top 20 or higher in the U.S.) in sociology, English, history, and political science. It has a top 5-ish law school, a top 5-ish school of public affairs, a top 10-ish business school, and a top 20-ish research-oriented medical school. Apart from medicine and math, however, NYU is not generally a powerhouse in STEM fields. Nonetheless, if you have leading faculties in law, medicine, business, and most of the social sciences and humanities, and they’re productive, they’re going to get cited a lot, and the school will do quite well in rankings like the ARWU. I also wouldn’t pooh-pooh art history; a lot of people, especially in Europe, take art history very seriously, and if NYU faculty are making important contributions to the field, they’re going to get cited. </p>
<p>I would also note that, New York being New York, NYU tends to attract, retain and develop a disproportionate share of faculty whose work has a strong international focus, or are themselves the products of transnational academia with relationships and a following on both sides of the Atlantic. Many also have celebrity or “public intellectual” status, either previously acquired and carried with them to NYU or developed in New York (where better, after all?) and consequently tend to become household names in academic circles. These attributes can help get you a leg up in world citation counts.</p>
<p>I like the meta ranking, probably because it fits pretty closely with my intuitive sense of how the U.S., Canadian, and U.K. universities stack up in overall faculty strength (though I probably wouldn’t put Boston University in the top 50). The aggregate rankings reflect underlying academic strengths that tend to push through any idiosyncratic metrics or weightings that may knock particular schools down in particular rankings. I would hasten to add that this should not necessarily be used as a guide to where undergraduates should study.</p>
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<p>Well, there are two Asian universities in the top 50, University of Tokyo at #22 and Kyoto University at #24. Seems about right to me. It’s harder to know where to rank the top Chinese universities. It’s probably overloaded with British universities (8 in the top 50 worldwide seems very high) and probably light on continental European universities (only 1 in the top 40 and 4 in the top 50), probably because two of the three rankings used to construct this come out of the UK.</p>
<p>U Utah surprises me; IMO it shouldn’t be in the top 100 (and replaced with either an Asian university or a Continental European one).</p>
<p>But the three rankings seem to short-change undergraduate education. Undergraduate educational quality should be given some weight since:</p>
<p>1) Many of those who use the rankings are shopping for undergraduate education</p>
<p>2) Many of those who go to college are not advancing on to graduate school and, for this reason, poor undergraduate quality is going to hurt on the job market (or in grad school for those who do go on to grad school)</p>
<p>My professors, some of which might have contributed to any one of the three, always complain about undergraduate education not being taken into account.</p>
<p>Could you post a link to your source that these three rankings do not give undergraduate education “some weight”? I’m not saying you’re wrong I’m just really curious as to what methodology that they use.</p>
<p>I always thought of the ARWU rankings as more about research and published papers than the quality of undergraduate teaching. That’s why I’m not surprised to see some of the bigger state universities listed above universities like Rice or Carnegie-Mellon.</p>