<p>For a project in one of my classes on online networks, I looked at re-ranking the US’s top schools. I’m part of sharing it here since it might be of some interest to this community. I used Google’s PageRank and normalized measures of the domain’s Alexa Ranking (a measure of traffic) and number of inlinks to the entire domain name. I normalized the last 2 factors by dividing by graduate student population size and then taking the cumulative normal distribution. (Graduate student size had the highest correlation between the 3 factors used for ranking). </p>
<p>here are the new rankings (top 20) I came up with:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Harvard University
University of California–Berkeley
Stanford University
Cornell University
Pennsylvania State University–University Park
Yale University
University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Pennsylvania
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
University of Washington
University of Texas–Austin
University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign
Princeton University
University of California–Los Angeles
Carnegie Mellon University
University of Virginia
California Institute of Technology
Columbia University
University of Chicago</p>
<p>These rankings would probably change if I used more than just the top 50 universities from USNWR. This ranking is definitely not perfect, future research I have in mind is to build the web between .edu addresses only to get an objective view on peer assessment. I can also look at the internet from 10 years ago and find inlinks and similar measure of PageRank (Kleinberg’s HITS algorithm). </p>
<p>Another interesting fact is that there arent’ many universities with PageRank 9. Those in the US that have page rank 9 are Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Yale, Caltech and Berkeley. </p>
<p>Just throwing this out there!</p>