World University Rankings 2017

85bears46
Thu, 09 Mar 2017 17:04:20 +0000

Pardon me for being a patriotic American but I find all the British rankings highly suspicious since they invariably include 4 to 5 British universities in the top 10. I have major problem accepting any ranking that places UCL and Imperial College over the likes of Columbia, Yale, Princeton and UPenn. And any ranking that put UC Berkeley at 28th in the world below Kings College of London and University of Hong Kong is simply a joke.

Here is an excerpt of the criticism leveled by David Blanchflower, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth and himself a graduate of UCL:

This ranking is complete rubbish and nobody should place any credence in it. The results are based on an entirely flawed methodology that underweights the quality of research and overweights fluff:

40 per cent – academic reputation from a global survey
10 per cent – from employer reputation
20 per cent – from citations by faculty
20 per cent – from student faculty ratio
5 per cent – proportion of foreign students
5 per cent – proportion of foreign faculty

The methodology is designed to underweight the performance of US universities that tend not to have a high proportion of foreign students or foreign faculty members – but who cares about that? It is unclear whether having more foreign students and faculty should even have a positive rank; less is probably better. So, the UK faculty all say they are wonderful, but that isn’t a plausible measure of quality. Another way to improve the rankings of UK universities would be to replace the 20 per cent for citations with a 20 per cent weight to any university whose name started with the letters CAM or OXF; the ranking is that absurd. Or they could weight by the proportion of buildings on the campuses built before 1500.