So I’m looking to apply to schools that have good physics and math programs, and I have trouble comparing schools because, aside from what research opportunities are available there, I don’t have a criteria to rate them with.
So I found this website (http://www.shanghairanking.com/SubjectPhysics2014.html) and it seems to do the comparisons for me, but I don’t know by what standard. It has Carnegie Mellon as around #77 (internationally). I was wondering if anyone could confirm or deny the validity of this website’s rankings. Thanks.
I’m guessing you don’t really mean accurate. You are probably asking whether students should rely on those ratings for judgements about whether to consider attending the school. Those ratings are based on a formula that weights a bunch of variables differently and compiles them. I’m sure they take care to ensure that they don’t make mistakes. so they are “accurate”. The extent to which you should use that particular rating depends on whether your needs, values or goals align well with those of the rater. Look at how they weigh various variables. Are those the ones that are important to you? Would you choose the same ones and weigh them similarly? That is a very well respected list but it is not designed to serve as the basis for choices of colleges to attend. It can provide information that you may want to use along with information from many other places.
Here is what they say they consider “Similar to ARWU, institutions are ranked according to their academic or research performance in each subject field. Ranking indicators include alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals and Turing Awards, Highly Cited Researchers, papers indexed in Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). A new indicator, the percentage of papers published in the top 20% journals of each field, was introduced.”
This rating scale appears to reflect “impact” of each particular department on their field. It may be a better indicator of suitability for graduate training then undergrad but it does tell you something about how “good” a particular department is in terms of research and training in research.
Oh - very, very well put, lostaccount! So an undergraduate institution can have a very good physics and mathematics department pedagogically despite not outputting a lot of published research. I wasn’t considering what exactly the lists were ranking. I’m glad you cleared up my confusion around the term “accuracy” - I had a rather blurred idea surrounding it.
Yes.
Conversely, an institution can crank out many research publications, attract top scholars and boatloads of grant money, yet the top scholars who jack up the ARWU rankings may not teach undergraduates at all.
One common misconception is that Engineering and Physics are perfectly correlated; that if a university is excellent in one, it must necessarily follow that is it excellent in the other. That is not the case at all, just as Economics and Business or Biology and Medicine or Political Science and International Relations are also not perfectly correlated. Below are a few examples of this:
Universities that are stellar in Physics but do not offer Engineering or are not strong in Engineering:
Harvard University (top 5 in Physics, not top 20 in Engineering)
University of Chicago (top 10 in Physics, no Engineering program whatsoever)
Yale University (top 15 in Physics, not among the top 30 in Engineering)
Universities that are slightly stronger in Physics than in Engineering:
Cornell University
Princeton University
Universities that are equally strong in both:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stanford University
University of California-Berkeley
Universities that are slightly stronger in Engineering than in Physics
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Universities that are stellar in Engineering but not so strong in Physics:
Carnegie Mellon University (to 10 in Engineering, not among the top 30 in Physics)
Georgia Institute of Technology (top 10 in Engineering, not among the top 25 in Physics)
Purdue University-West Lafayette (top 10 in Engineering, not among the top 40 in Physics)
The ranking methodology says nothing – at least directly – about normalizing for department size. For that reason alone I would devalue this source as a guide for choosing a school. Statistics of this type, which in their essence are oriented toward graduate departments, seem to be poor sources in general for choosing an undergraduate college.
@Alexandre Fair enough. That misconception is probably what led people to refer me to Carnegie in the first place. May I ask how you are rating these universities’ departments?
@merc81 Yeah, I didn’t realize the website was primarily ranking universities based on their graduate research. Duly noted. And I’d never heard of normalizing before, but after a quick google search, if I’m correct, you mean that bigger department sizes will naturally publish more in any field, so this website has to adjust its rankings by proportionally adjusting the “amount of papers published by a university” by the department size?
@StrikerX: That’s it exactly. With proper sophistication it may be possible to take even an analysis that is poorly suited to your objectives and apply a few controls of your own to establish at least some probative value. On a practical level, however, the most counter-productive use of certain lists can be the early elimination of colleges without graduate departments, which can be excellent places to study physics and math.
Thanks for the link, btw. And CMU, from what I know of the school, has an incredible math department.
The ARWU rankings are based on measurements of research productivity and faculty distinction.
The USNWR department rankings are based on peer assessments (opinion polls of college professors/administrators). Whether one or the other is a better reflection of graduate program quality is hard to say.