THES World University Ranking - 2010

kwaldner
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 23:38:03 +0000

^With all due respect to KCL, why can’t UMass and Yeshiva be ranked higher? Remember that two-thirds of each school’s rating is based on its research output: the impact of academic research as measured by citations, and its reputation for research as measured by peers. In 2009, UMass Amherst had research expenditures of $130 million, which is already more than the entire endowment of KCL. Yeshiva is a private research university and has an endowment of US$979 million, eight times that of KCL, and is able to invest heavily into its Albert Einstein College of Medicine. UK unis are simpy not allocating enough resources for research and that’s why they are lagging behind. UMass is a public research university and I’m not surprised that other research universities like Caltech, John Hopkins and MIT have also done well in this ranking.

How can you say that the THE rankings are a joke? I would say that QS rankings are more of a joke since QS bases its rankings more on the “reputation” of the university. So universities that have less history and smaller student bodies (less alumni = less publicity) will lose out in the QS rankings, which isn’t fair at all. Let’s not just focus too much on past heritage and reputation of the university and instead focus on what the university is doing now in building its future. One great way it can do so is by investing in its research capabilities, and I think that this is the message that the THE is trying to bring across.