<p>This is the sort of shallow tabloid journalism you expect from England. Maybe they just hacked into the voicemail of 18,000 people to determine the rankings. Few major problems:</p>
<p>1) As much as I dislike U.S. News, at least they are upfront about their methodology. As ridiculous as it might be, if they survey high school guidance counselors, they tell you they surveyed high school guidance counselors. If they surveyed college presidents or admissions deans, they tell you. The Times survey just says it surveyed people chosen at random with some sort of geographic concern.</p>
<p>2) This is an apples to oranges comparison. If you want an apples to apples comparison, subtract the engineering rankings, which skew the rankings in favor of schools that have those programs and against those who don’t.</p>
<p>3) An anti-intellectual ranking which assumes the arts and humanities are of little importance compared with engineering and science. But then America is an anti-intellectual society that assumes that if you can’t make a buck with it, it can’t be worth anything.</p>
<p>4) An unusually high, skewed ranking for some Japanese universities. No university outside of North America or England has ever made the top 20 list in other world university rankings in recent times.:</p>
<p>[Academic</a> Ranking of World Universities - 2011| Top 500 universities | Shanghai Ranking - 2011 | World University Ranking - 2011](<a href=“http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2011.html]Academic”>http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2011.html)
[QS</a> World University Rankings - Topuniversities](<a href=“http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011]QS”>http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011)</p>
<p>The good news: From a practical point of view, this survey doesn’t mean much since U.S. News has the lock on the American market. U.S.News was smart to adopt a pseudo-scientific, transparent methodology that gives it the appearance of greater plausibility.</p>
<p>My advice: Learn to think for yourself and don’t just eat up everything the news media hands you. There are many ranking based on many criteria. Consider them all and decided for yourself what seems reasonable.</p>