What is the main criteria for a University to be considered “good” or “top”?

Question

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

In: Other

Answer 1

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.