Better than USNWR?

momof2inca
Wed, 08 Dec 2004 16:47:20 +0000

I just ran across this Dec. 1, 2004, article on a Berkeley website by accident. I’m not as up to date on this kind of thing as many of you are here. Anyone heard of THES rankings, a new international ranking system for colleges by the Times Higher Education Supplement, a weekly British newspaper focusing on higher-ed issues? I found it interesting that a public university (Berkeley) would be ranked higher than all but one private (Harvard). [sorry if this has already been discussed here!] MIT is third.

From the article:

"In a nutshell, here’s how the THES approached its self-imposed charge to ‘[apply] a single set of measures consistently across the world.’ Half of a ranked university’s final score was based on its reputation, calculated on the basis of “peer review” responses provided by 1,300 academics around the world, who identified themselves as able to comment on specific academic subjects and geographical areas and their top choices in each. (Berkeley surpassed Harvard in this important metric … though marks in other areas — most notably student/faculty ratio — lowered our overall ranking.)

Twenty percent of the score was based on what THES editors call “a ranking of research impact,” which is academese for the volume of citations per faculty member (the data coming from a single source, a database produced by U.S.-based Thomson Scientific). Another 20 percent relied on faculty-to-student ratios, with the editors acknowledging that despite the difficulty of making valid international comparisons on this basis, the indicator “is a simple and robust one that captures a university’s commitment to teaching.”

The final 10 percent was accorded on the strength of two factors, each relating to an institution’s “international orientation”: the percentage of overseas students enrolled and the percentage of international faculty employed.

With first-place Harvard awarded 1,000 points on these measures, every other ranked university was, in essence, graded on a curve. Berkeley, in second place, trails Harvard by more than 100 points, and third-place MIT claimed its spot with some 90 points less than Berkeley. While these gaps can’t help but emphasize a perceived distance between the top-ranked contenders, they diminish significantly as one moves down the list, with only four points separating No. 10 ETH Zurich and No. 11 London School of Economics, and a fraction of a point separating No. 13 Chicago from No. 14 Imperial College London."

It also mentions Dartmouth finished 110 places below the lowest other ivy school.

and a quote from a Berkeley graduate dean: “Every admissions cycle is another test of our reputation — one that we are in danger of failing, unless we develop a long-term strategy … for recruiting and retaining the best grad students in the country.”

Here’s the link to the article. At the bottom, there’s a link to the actual rankings, but I think you have to register to get there.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2004/12/01_rankings.shtml

– Momof2 in CA