top 15 most prestigious universities

IBclass06 · March 26, 2009, 2:08pm

<ol>
<li>Jesse Douglas- Columbia PhD, taught at CCNY (DECEASED)</li>
<li>John Milnor- Princeton PhD, teaches at SUNY Stony Brook </li>
<li>Paul Cohen- Chicago PhD, taught at Stanford (DECEASED)</li>
<li>Stephen Smale- Michigan PhD, mostly taught at Berkeley (RETIRED FROM UCB)</li>
<li>John Thompson- Chicago PhD, teaches at Cambridge and UF </li>
<li>Charles Fefferman- Princeton PhD, teaches at Princeton</li>
<li>Daniel Quillen- Harvard PhD, taught at MIT and Oxford (RETIRED)</li>
<li>William Thurston- Berkeley PhD, teaches at Cornell </li>
<li>Shing Tung Yao- Berkeley PhD, teaches at Harvard</li>
<li>Michael Freedman- Princeton PhD, taught at UCSD (CURRENTLY DOESN’T TEACH)</li>
<li>Edward Witten- Princeton PhD, taught at Princeton (AT IAP, DOESN’T TEACH)</li>
<li>Curtis McMullen- Harvard PhD, teaches at Harvard</li>
</ol>

Of the 12…2 are dead, 2 have research positions, and 2 are retired. That leaves:

2 Harvard
1 Cornell
1 Florida (graduate research professor)
1 Princeton
1 SUNY Stony Brook (retired from teaching, research professor)

That leaves only 4 Fields medalists who actually teach: 2 at Harvard, 1 at Cornell, and 1 at Princeton. See what I mean about a small pool?

UCBChemEGrad · March 26, 2009, 2:22pm

Why do only American medalists count?

Terence Tao is a Fields Medal winner and teaches at UCLA.
[Terence</a> Tao’s home page](<a href=“http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/]Terence”>http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/)

Vaughan Jones is a Fields Medal winner and teaches at Berkeley.
[Vaughan</a> F.R. Jones’s Home Page](<a href=“http://math.berkeley.edu/~vfr/]Vaughan”>Vaughan F.R. Jones's Home Page)

Efim Zelmanov teaches at UCSD.
[University</a> of California, San Diego: External Relations: News & Information: News Releases : Science](<a href=“http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mczelmanov.htm]University”>http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mczelmanov.htm)

tk21769 · March 26, 2009, 2:29pm

Yep, I already had noticed that one. The site has 2 different figures on 2 different pages, and I went with the higher one.

DunninLA · March 26, 2009, 2:32pm

tk – the endownment issue doesn’t work for Publics. Perhaps there could be a way of combining endownment spend + Gov;t funding for research, or something like that.

There is NO WAY UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, UVA or UNC (the five publics currently in the USNWR top 30) would have a privately funded endowment that would be remotely close to those of Privates. But the intent of your metric, I believe, is to measure the dollars spent on students, a big chunk of which would involve research spending.

jdjaguar · March 26, 2009, 2:40pm

“Only 12 Americans have ever won the Fields, so it’s not a large enough pool from which to draw conclusions.”

does that include the dude from “Good Will Hunting”?

or was he European…he did have an accent!

tk21769 · March 26, 2009, 2:51pm

I tried using two different sets of numbers, both a straight listing of Nobel laureates, and the AWRU numbers (which include both Nobel and other prizes). To get the list I reported above, I used the AWRU numbers. One of the reasons I prefer the AWRU set is precisely because it excludes the Peace prizes and focuses on “academic” ones.

Chicago’s list of Nobel “affiliations” includes 28 graduates. So even if you discount the more tenuous connections, you still wind up with a pretty big number. You can see a detailed break-out of affiliations on Wikipedia ([List</a> of Nobel laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_laureates_by_university_affiliation]List”>List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia)).

But if you don’t like Nobel or AWRU numbers as markers of the faculty’s contribution to “prestige”, then what might be a better metric? It occurred to me to use faculty salaries, but then to be fair, you’d have to adjust for cost-of-living.

Remember, we are trying to list the most “prestigious” universities, not necessarily the “best” ones.

tk21769 · March 26, 2009, 3:02pm

Right, excellent points. The intent of my “money” (EPS) metric is 2-fold. First, I want a marker for the institutional wealth available to build, maintain, and operate infrastructure. I’m assuming that part of the “wow” factor that goes into a school’s “prestige” is an imposing physical plant. “Money” is a crude proxy for measuring all that.

Second, I want a marker for the institution’s attractiveness not just to bright incoming students, and not just to distinguished faculty, but also to donors who will pony up funds to maintain all the operations of the institution.

Berkeley and other great public universities may not have huge EPS numbers, but you’re right, many of them do a great job of attracting US government and private research funding. However, I do not have a single source to cite, one that will factor those numbers in.

One thing I’d like to try is to use a harmonic mean, rather than the arithmetic mean, to average the 3 components of my score. That will give less of a penalty for large negative “outliers” such as Berkeley’s low EPS number. After all, prestige can come from more than one source.

IBclass06 · March 26, 2009, 3:21pm

Good point.

Sergei Novikov- Moscow State PhD, teaches at UMD-CP (part-time)
David Mumford- Harvard PhD, teaches at Brown
Gregory Margulis- Moscow State PhD, teaches at Yale
Vladimir Drinfeld- Steklov Institute PhD, teaches at Chicago (teaches the same graduate seminar each term)
Vaughan Jones- Geneva PhD, teaches at Berkeley
Efim Zelmanov- Novosibirsk State PhD, teaches at UCSD
Richard Borcherds- Cambridge PhD, teaches at Berkeley
Maxim Kontsevich- Bonn PhD, teaches at Miami (part-time)
Andrei Okounkov- Moscow State PhD, teaches at Princeton
Terence Tao- Princeton PhD, teaches at UCLA

That brings the totals up to:
2 Berkeley
2 Harvard
2 Princeton
1 Brown
1 Cornell
1 UCSD
1 UCLA
1 Yale
0.5 Maryland (part-time)
0.5 Miami (part-time)
0.25 Chicago (only teaches one grad seminar)

It’s still a very small selection. Less than a dozen universities.

UCBChemEGrad · March 26, 2009, 3:28pm

But now if a lot more universities had Fields Medal winners, it would defeat the prestige component, wouldn’t it?

IBclass06 · March 26, 2009, 3:35pm

Look at it a different way. UCLA has over 4000 faculty members. Should its prestige be impacted if its sole Fields medalist decides to go elsewhere? Terence Tao makes up 0.025% of the teaching faculty at UCLA.

MacArthur Fellows would be a place to start.

UCBChemEGrad · March 26, 2009, 3:44pm

Sure, but UCLA’s math department is much smaller. UCLA has many majors…its medical school and humanities faculty don’t win Fields medals.

I don’t want to turn this into a debate over public vs. private.

I’m willing to bet the math faculty at UCLA is about the same size as Harvard. The statistic for Fields medals only tells you about the caliber and achievement of a university’s math faculty. All prestigious universities have a math faculty…only a dozen or so have Fields medal winners.

Phead128 · March 26, 2009, 3:49pm

Where does attracting money come into play?

Consider total dollars won in terms of competitive grants from the federal government for research or how they rank annually fund raising wise (yes, kinda a private school bias right there lol)

Endowment per students… Much of the endowment is tied up for restricted uses as specified by the donors. Maybe looking into unrestricted use endowment like deanships that can applied freely at the Dean’s discretion will be a more helpful indicator. I know some endowments contain millions of dollars but can only be spent on brick and pavement modeling and fixtures…

It says a lot about the potential for spending money on students… but then again, Michael Bloomberg specified those $X million dollars can only be spent on brick pavement work or $X amount can only go towards increasing graduate stipends in the philosophy department… What can you do?

tk21769 · March 26, 2009, 7:05pm

Phead, when I refer to “Endowment”, I’m talking about the total value of a school’s investments. I adjust for the size of the school by using Endowment Per Student (EPS). I am not referring only to endowed scholarship funds.

Again, what I’m after is some balanced measure of a school’s ability to bring together bright students, distinguished faculty, and “money”. Money is the oil of the whole machine. UPenn is an example of an old Ivy League university that continues to bring very bright students together with distinguished faculty. However, compared to its peers, it has a relatively low EPS. This, I think, will tend to detract from its prestige.

Below is a re-calculated list, this time using the 75th percentile SAT scores from stateuniversity.com. So a premium is placed on the very highest-scoring students’ impact on “prestige”. I continue to average these with EPS, and with the composite “awards” ranking by Jiaotong University (rather than Nobel Prizes or MacArthurs alone.) I also once again use the arithmetic mean of my 3 sub-scores to calculate the final ranking. The resulting list is the one that best agrees with my own intuitions, of all the methods I’ve tried:

1 Harvard University
2 Princeton University
3 Stanford, Yale
5 California Institute of Technology, MIT
7 University of Chicago
8 Columbia University
9 Cornell University
10 Duke, Washington University in St. Louis
12 Northwestern University
13 University of Pennsylvania
14 UC Berkeley
15 Johns Hopkins University

Now, if you take the harmonic mean of the same 3 sub-scores, here’s what you get:

1 Harvard University
2 Princeton University
3 Yale , Stanford
5 California Institute of Technology
6 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7 Rice University, UC Berkeley
9 Columbia University, University of Chicago
11 Dartmouth
12 Duke University
13 Cornell University, Washington University- St. Lois
15 Northwestern University

See the difference? The first list is more in keeping with my own “old school” snobby northeastern biases. In the second one, the western parvenus are coming on strong, with their oil money and defense procurement dollars. Frightening. Well, at least I’ve managed to keep Vanderbilt at bay.

theendusputrid · May 4, 2009, 10:14pm

“Now, if you take the harmonic mean of the same 3 sub-scores, here’s what you get:”

This is bs rice and duke reject HALF of people with over twenty 300 sats, PLUS have race-based affirmative action, PLUS have d one sport admits.

Caltech has NONE of these things and it basically cheats in order to make itself appear really selective.

It really annoys me Caltech plays the college admissions game to lower its ccceptance rate it ****ed me off.

pieisthebest · May 11, 2009, 5:49pm

Thats better for us with high SAT scores.

helpwithresearch · June 6, 2009, 4:21am

hi. i’m new to these forums. i’m from indiana university (bloomington) and doing a research on top schools of the world (basically collecting info and ranking them) for a project. till now- this is my list and ranking. (these include LACs and full time colleges). also- these rankings are solely based on name recognition, employer reviews, faculty fame, overall prestige and on a slightly peculiar factor- the colleges people turn down to go to X college. so, if X college ranks high- and someone who did my survey rejected X for Y, it gives Y points in the rankings. so i’m arranging them according to prestige.

my list so far (top 30) is:

<ol>
<li> Harvard University (USA)</li>
<li> Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)</li>
<li> Princeton University (USA)</li>
<li> University of Oxford (UK)</li>
<li> Stanford University (USA)</li>
<li> University of California, Berkeley (USA)</li>
<li> University of Cambridge (UK)</li>
<li> Yale University (USA)</li>
<li> University of California, Los Angeles (USA)</li>
<li>ETH Zurich (Switzerland)</li>
<li>Indian Institute of Technology (India)</li>
<li>University of Pennsylvania (USA)</li>
<li>London School of Economics (UK)</li>
<li>Amherst College (LAC) (USA)</li>
<li>Williams College (LAC) (USA)</li>
<li>University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong)</li>
<li>Duke University (USA)</li>
<li>Carnegie Mellon University (USA)</li>
<li>Columbia University (USA)</li>
<li>National University of Singapore (Singapore)</li>
<li>University of Chicago (USA)</li>
<li>Ecole Normale Sup</li>
</ol>

rjkofnovi · June 6, 2009, 6:33am

^^^^^ I dismiss your list until you spell “Johns(s) Hopkins” correctly. Then I dismiss it anyway. UCLA is ranked WAY too high. C’mon now.

helpwithresearch · June 6, 2009, 6:51am

ok. where do you think UCLA should be then? from what people tell me it’s considered highly prestigious in the west coast. right below berkeley and stanford.

and yeah. my mistake with johnS hopkins.

and UCLA was quite popular with regular street people and parents. not so much with students and placed around 14-15th for employers.
your take? and thx for replying.

Alexandre · June 6, 2009, 6:55am

IIT, CMU, the LAcs (Amherst and Williams) and Dartmouth are ranked a little too high for a global ranking such as yours. Although UCLA is excellent, I agree that #9 is probably a little too high. I would place it probably between #15 and #30 globally. I would place Cal highest among US public universities, followed by Michigan. I am not familiar with Singapore and Hong Kong, so I cannot judge. The European universities mentioned are all excellent. At any rate, if I were to create such a list, I would have a couple of ground rules:

1) The lists would have to be based on overall academic impact on the global stage since it is a rating of global universities.

2) I would probably separate universities by continent since each continent has a different approach to higher education, which makes it very difficult to compare universities from different contents.

EUROPE:
Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyons
Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris
Ecole Polytechnique
ETH Zurich
Heidelberg University
Imperial College
London School of Economics
Technical University of Munich
University College of London
University of Amsterdam
University of Bristol
University of Cambridge
University of Edinburgh
University of Geneva
University of Grenoble
University of Hamburg
University of Kiel
University of Koeln
University of Manchester
University of Milan
University of Munich
University of Oxford
University of Paris (several campuses)
University of Pisa
University of Rome
University of Strasbourg
University of Turin
University of Zurich
Warwick University

NORTH AMERICA:
Brown University
California Institute of Technology
Carnegie Mellon University
Columbia University
Cornell University
Duke University
Harvard University
Johns Hopkins University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
McGill University
New York University
Northwestern University
Princeton University
Stanford University
University of California-Berkeley
University of California-Los Angeles
University of California-San Diego
University of Chicago
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
University of Pennsylvania
University of Southern California
University of Texas-Austin
University of Washington
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Washington University-St Louis
Yale University

ASIA/PAC:
I am not familiar with Asian universities. However, from what I have heard and seen, I would definitely have the following universities near the top:

Australian National University
Kyoto University
National University of Singapore
Tokyo University
University of Melbourne
University of Sydney

Please note that the lists above are based on overall global impact, NOT on undergraduate academic quality.

tk21769 · June 6, 2009, 8:16am

What is “overall global impact”, and how do we measure it?

Some schools have very high research output, which has been measured according to the number of times faculty-produced articles are cited in academic journals (“citation-density” studies).

Some schools tend to graduate a disproportionate number of future world leaders. These would include Saint-Cyr (the French military academy) or the US service academies, all missing from Alexandre’s list.

top 15 most prestigious universities

CONNECT WITH US