Or in other words, what makes a college “good”? I’m aware it may change according to the discipline, and that a college with an excellent law or business school might be lacking in the engineering part, but still…
Is it the number of papers published per year? Or the amount of ground-breaking discoveries made in there (perhaps that would be why the highest ranked colleges are quite old), or something else?
It just seem a bit odd to me that over the years, the top 10, 20 universities worldwide seem to be the same ones
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Great question! The answer is… It depends on who is ranking. Some folks rank based on stuff like public perception polling, entrance exam performance (e.g. SAT, ACT, MKAT, LSAT, etc…) and number of applicants, but if you are wondering what really matters, look at the rubric for regional accreditation.
Graduation rate, employment rate, salary once employed, career advancement, funding, research programs, affiliations like health systems, and a lot more go into it! There are usually also rankings for individual programs like Engineering, Nursing, Law, etc… as well since they usually operate as their own academic unit and can get endorsements and accreditation on a college/program level.
The vast majority of most university ratings relate to research rather than education. Quantity of research, prestige of research, research funding, faculty with research awards and so on.
Teaching, especially at the undergraduate level, is a secondary consideration.
But, although teaching and education are low priority in these rankings employers still typically give these rankings high consideration.
When a magazine, website or organization publishes a ranking, they usually provide the criteria that set the said ranking.
One of the most influential ranking is the so called “Shanghai ranking” and their criteria are extremely clear :
– Number of alumni with Nobel prizes.
-Nobel prizes laureates or highly cited researchers
-Number of papers published in high quality research journals.
Other rankings have some other different methodologies.
I will now deviate a bit from the original question but regarding the Shanghai ranking, lots of people (myself included) find this ranking extremely… dubious to say the least. For a lots of different reasons :
– The ranking does not take into account of the size of the university. The bigger the university the higher your paper outputs and the chances of having a Novel Laureate compared to a university of the exact same level but 5 times smaller. If you educational system prefers small universities to gigantic ones, you will have no chance in this ranking. French politicians (among others I am sure) are actually very busy merging some of their universities for the sole sake of improving their ranking, even though those mergings have no effect on the quality of the research are usually detrimental for the administration.
– The quality of education is only measured by the number of Nobel prizes that the university produced (so a few people per year for the whole world), and the number of Nobel prizes laureates in the staff. However, being a good teacher has nothing to do with having a Nobel prize.
I actually spent a year as an Erasmus student in one of the top 20 universities in the world and I was not very impressed by the level of the education to say the least.
So if you are willing to look at rankings to choose a university for you or your kids, have a good look at what they are actually ranking.
Each ranking system has its own criteria. [Often they publish the formula](https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/articles/methodology). It takes into account things like funding, number of publications, graduation/acceptance rate, SAT/GPA from incoming freshmen, etc.
>It just seem a bit odd to me that over the years, the top 10, 20 universities worldwide seem to be the same ones
This should make perfect sense!
1. Most universities are not changing that fast. Even if you got $1B+ to steal professors from MIT, fund their lab, and advertise to the top 0.1% of students, it would still take 4-7 years for the first batch of students to start graduating and entering the workforce (I say 4-7 because grad students are the ones doing most of the publishing).
2. Most of the top students are concerned about going to the top schools. So this year they will all go to whichever school was ranked the best last year. Which means that school stays #1 this year, and the same thing happens next year. In mid-level universities this isn’t necessarily the case–unveil a new football field and you might get more applicants and a lower acceptance rate, which increases your rankings. But the top students are mostly going to be focused on academics, so the cycle is self-perpetuating.
3. Any ranking that doesn’t put MIT as #1 for engineering will not be trusted as valid. Everyone expects certain universities to be at the top, so if a ranking system doesn’t do that, people will just say it’s not valid. So rankings systems will also adjust their formula to maintain the status quo.
For example, I like US World and News reports, because it always has the ranking order I expect (and in the US, it’s the main one people use). My wife (not American) likes QS rankings. As I recall, QS rankings has several metrics around “international citations.” Like if your papers have a professor from France working with one from Switzerland, that’s a plus.
You can easily see how this system increases European rankings compared to American ones, because the USA is so big that it’s much easier to find a collaborator within the US, rather than dealing with customs and timezones and . In Europe, another country is a short drive away.
TL;DR rankings are mostly formulated to keep the universities perceived as top-tier near the top. This does lead to real differences regarding the quality of student who wants to attend.
P.S. Regardless of rankings, what qualifies as “good” depends on the student needs. Having attended both a mid-level state school and world-class school, for most students I’d recommend the mid-level school. The professors there were much more engaged in the material and wanted to students learn. The professors at the the top school were all hyperfocused on research (which I appreciated as a PhD student), but the mentality was mostly that teaching is an annoying side-quest from their main endeavor. I heard one professor scold his students for getting A’s, because they should have only studied to get a B and spent the extra time in the research lab.
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
This adage extends to elite universities, which are hubs for the rich and powerful.
It all comes down to money in the US. Don’t kid yourself – look at the recent scandals at Harvard, for example. Don’t go to school in the US.
It’s all marketing and no amount of prestige guarantees career success. They’re all just trying to get you to pay their ridiculous tuition.
If you can’t research this on your own and make your own assessment, you shouldn’t go to college at all. Not being snarky. It’s truth.
Perceived value, will pretty much answer of those questions. By creating the perception that a university is a cut above the rest through getting grants for research that isn’t even relevant to the education they are providing. In laymen terms it really comes down to how manipulative the board of the school is.
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