THES World University Ranking - 2010

jr1038
Fri, 17 Sep 2010 11:40:05 +0000

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.



To bring up my point before–how is UT Austin, which had $640 million in research expenditures in 2009, has an endowment of around $6 billion (highest of any public university), has several top ten programs in science and engineering, is one of the most highly cited institutions in engineering, computer science, etc., not included in the top 200 (or, as pointed out, the top 400)? One could perhaps argue one way or the other for KCL, but there’s simply no solid argument for UMass or Yeshiva (or Utah, Drexel, etc., etc.) being ahead of UT.

You ask why these rankings are a joke? This is the shining example among many others (e.g., Texas A&M), at least beyond the top schools. Even if this was not a methodology issue (perhaps both UT and A&M were dropped from the list for some reason, or somehow did not participate if that’s possible), it’s still a shocking omission particularly as UT was in the top 50 according to this publication just a few years ago.