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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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.
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