October 23, 2005

World's Top 200 Universities

According to the (UK) Times Higher Education Supplement, Harvard comes in at #1, followed by Berkeley, MIT and CalTech.

Dartmouth (which is a College, not a University) is #138 after such notable competitors as Penn State, Michigan State, UNC, Brandeis, University of Glasgow (where I'm currently studying), Texas A&M, Georgia Tech, Alabama, and Tufts.

The data is clearly skewed toward research--a large number of points are awarded for faculty citations (i.e. the number of times a paper is cited in other works). Another questionable emphasis is counting international students and faculty (defined simply as someone teaching or attending outside of their home country)--which skews again toward big universities (as it seems to be a straight count, not per capita), especially non-US schools. Weighting a category that helps the rest of the world disproportionately, though, is not surprising given that this is a British paper, and their mission is likely to make UK universities appear to be on an almost even footing with American institutions.

We are the last of the Ivies, but the first American institution labelled a "college" on the list. But Dartmouth really has no excuse--its peer review score was an 18.

You have to register to see the list here or a (very ugly) copy of them is here.

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