<p>This ranking system strips away the frills and comforts that so many Americans feel are necessary for a college experience. What are left are academic strength and record of accomplishments. The Chinese are a no nonsense sort of people when it comes to academics and business. Less “show” and more “go”.</p>
<p>Their ranking system is not at all bogus. They carefully define their criteria for measurement and the weighting of each component factor. And again, they stick to objective, measurable academic criteria, which are mainly academic output and actual acomplishments. Contrast this with, for example, U.S. New & World Report, who uses quite a few non-academic criteria, such as peer assessment (elitist and self-serving IMHO) and alumni giving rates, and indirect academic criteria, such as class size, graduation rates.</p>
<p>Rockefeller University? They don’t even have an undergraduate program!</p>
<p>UCSF is only a medical school.</p>
<p>How can those two institutions be compared to undergraduate schools? The criteria that you would use to evaluate a grad school, a med school, and an undergraduate school are completely different. These rankings are awful.</p>
<p>And University of Iowa and UC Irvine make the list, but Notre Dame, Georgetown, Emory, etc. dont?!? Insane.</p>
<p>One of the posters on the original thread said it best (paraphrased): All rankings are useful only in the context of the methodology used to rank them. </p>
<p>Take a look at this methodology and ask yourself whether it yields a ranking that is useful when choosing a college. If it does for you, then great. If it doesn’t (and it wouldn’t for me), then fine.</p>
<p>There are several reasons I find this ranking not very useful when making a decision about where to attend undergrad (or grad, for that matter). First off, it depends on Nobel and Fields connections and high cites almost entirely in the hard sciences. Naturally, there is a lot of double counting, since publishing in certain technical journals is counted and being published in those journals is likely to lead to high cites. Same with the Nobel/Fields people on the faculty. They tend to get more cites because they are so well known.</p>
<p>To give you an example of how this works, I was once quite curious about a school that was near the top because it doesn’t have that sort of repuation. I dug into the numbers, and found that it was highly ranked on the basis of only 11 faculty (out of over 2000) who worked in technical areas and had published a great deal that year.</p>
<p>That’s why I don’t find these rankings very useful, but others may if they feel the methodology suits them.</p>
<p>Nomination for most worthless thread of 2007!</p>
<p>SSobick, you do realize the basic, traditional distinction between a “university” and a “college”, right? I second bluebayou’s statement. Seems rather silly of you to trash LACs, when they have a completely separate educational goal - why do you think that even USNWR ranks them separately from research unis? Apples and oranges, my friend.</p>
<p>Look at how some of the US’s Top Private Universities stack up:</p>
<p>Princeton = 8 in the world, and 7 in the US
Vanderbilt = 41 in the world, and 31 in the US
Carnegie Mellon = 60 in the world, and 40 in the US
Brown = 70 in the world, and 43 in the US
Dartmouth = 102 -150 bracket, and 55 - 70 in the US bracket
Emory = 102 - 150 bracket, and 55 - 70 in the US bracket
Brandeis = 203 - 304 bracket, and 89 - 117 in the US bracket
Georgetown = 203 - 304 bracket, and 89 - 117 in the US bracket
Tulane = 305 - 401 bracket, and 118 - 140 in the US bracket</p>
<p>This ranking system strips away the frills and comforts that so many Americans feel are necessary for a college experience. What are left are academic strength and record of accomplishments. The Chinese are a no nonsense sort of people when it comes to academics and business. Less “show” and more “go”.</p>
<p>Their ranking system is not at all bogus. They carefully define their criteria for measurement and the weighting of each component factor. And again, they stick to objective, measurable academic criteria, which are mainly academic output and actual acomplishments. Contrast this with, for example, U.S. New & World Report, who uses quite a few non-academic criteria, such as peer assessment (elitist and self-serving IMHO) and alumni giving rates, and indirect academic criteria, such as class size, graduation rates.</p>
<p>As the world become more international in focus, the significance of the Liberal Arts College & Non-Research University will decline. Honestly Americans are the only people who care about curriculum, pedagogy, and all the other artsy fartsy stuff. Research will be the #1 determinant of which Universities are truly elite.</p>
<p>Schools like: Georgetown, Brown, Dartmouth, etc… better build up their infastructure and endowments quick, otherwise they will drop significantly. Asians & Europeans could care less that they are Ivy League, or the top Catholic.</p>
<p>Among the Ivies, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, and to a lesser extent Yale are the major research powerhouses. Throw in MIT and Stanford and you more or less have the 6-7 greatest research Universities in the world. I think in the long term, these universities in addition to Oxford, Cambridge will ascend the rankings while schools like Brown and Dartmouth, and even Princeton will begin suffering from their lack of research focus (it shud be noted that Princeton does have an extremely active physics department though)</p>
<p>As the world become more international in focus, the significance of the Liberal Arts College & Non-Research University will decline. Honestly Americans are the only people who care about curriculum, pedagogy, and all the other artsy fartsy stuff. Research will be the #1 determinant of which Universities are truly elite.</p>
<p>Among the Ivies, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, and to a lesser extent Yale are the major research powerhouses. Throw in MIT and Stanford and you more or less have the 6-7 greatest research Universities in the world. I think in the long term, these universities in addition to Oxford, Cambridge will ascend the rankings while schools like Brown and Dartmouth, and even Princeton will begin suffering from their lack of research focus.</p>
<p>Schools like: Georgetown, Brown, Dartmouth, etc… better build up their infastructure and endowments quick, otherwise they will drop significantly. Asians & Europeans could care less that they are Ivy League, or the top Catholic.</p>
<p>Considering this is based on graduate school production(which LAC’s get you into BTW), and largely hard sciences(which, while important, aren’t ‘that’ important), I think this is a pointless ranking.</p>