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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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.
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