Princeton #12 best school QS rank

PtonGrad2000
Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:59:30 +0000

Wow, you Penn guys seem pretty excited about this.

Kshul, this is the second thread you’ve started on the Princeton board regarding this ranking and another Penn visitor started a third one.

These should really be consolidated but, in the absence of that, let me just link to my previous comments.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061104870-post5.html

Last year THES had Princeton in 6th place. This year it has it in 12th. The only change has been in the reporting of the student/faculty ratio where Princeton has reported its full-time faculty number whereas other schools appear to have reported full-time faculty plus a very large number of non-instructional staff members. Both Harvard and Yale reported between 2 and 3 times as many faculty members as they report on their websites and in the Common Data Sets. This drove their student/faculty ratios down to very low levels.

Here are the breakdowns by category.

[Individual Category Scores in the THES 2008 Rankings](World University Rankings | Times Higher Education (THE))

Here’s something you might consider. If you leave out the student/faculty ratio score and sum all the other individual scores for each school using the same weighting as THES does, then here is the ranking for U.S. institutions on a scale of 0 to 100.

96.4 = Princeton (Princeton and CalTech are so close as to be tied)
96.3 = CalTech

95.6 = Harvard (Harvard and Yale are so close as to be tied)
95.3 = Yale

92.8 = U. of Chicago (Chicago and Penn are so close as to be tied)
92.6 = Penn

85.1 = U. of Michigan

82.9 = MIT

81.1 = Columbia

80.7 = Stanford

80.1 = Cornell

Voila! Leave out the student/faculty ratio score and Princeton comes out on top. The above ranking thus includes peer review (i.e. general reputation), employer review score, faculty citations score, and percentage of international staff and students and leaves out the scores for faculty/student ratios. I believe that the individual schools have interpreted the data request by THES differently for this category and have reported numbers that can’t be compared fairly.

All of that having been said, any school near the top of this ranking (even the way it’s calculated by THES) should feel proud.