2013 Academic Ranking of World Universities (aka "Shanghai Rankings")

[Lodestone]

These World Universities Rankings just came out in the last few days. I didn't see a Thai university in the top 500. The top Asian one was the University of Tokyo (21).

Top 20:

1 Harvard University
2 Stanford University
3 University of California, Berkeley
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
5 University of Cambridge
6 California Institute of Technology
7 Princeton University
8 Columbia University
9 University of Chicago
10 University of Oxford
11 Yale University
12 University of California, Los Angeles
13 Cornell University
14 University of California, San Diego
15 University of Pennsylvania
16 University of Washington
17 The Johns Hopkins University
18 University of California, San Francisco
19 University of Wisconsin - Madison
20 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

Full list: http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2013.html

[isanbirder]

I could find no indication of origin except the name.... no institution or whatever. Most rankings put Cambridge, Oxford, and Imperial College in the top six.

I checked Hong Kong, as I know a bit about the Universities there. The highest, Chinese U., is in the 150-200 bracket, while the two best, Hong Kong U, and the HK U of Science and Technology are ranked 201-250.

Not convincing. (but I wouldn't argue about the Thai Universities!)

[CWMcMurray]

Did you read their methodology?

10% based on number of alumni with Nobel prizes

20% based upon number of alumni with Nobel prizes

20% based upon having highly cited researchers in broad subject categories

20% based upon number of papers published in nature and science

20% based upon number of papers indexed in Science Citation Index-expanded and Social Science Citation Index

10% based upon Per capita academic performance of an institution

[CWMcMurray]

Compare that with another agency... Like QS..

http://www.iu.qs.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/

40% based upon academic reputation

10% based upon Employer Reputation

20% based upon faculty to student ratio

20% based upon citations per faculty

5% based upon proportion of international students

5% based upon proportion of international instructors

Which system do you think is more based upon the creation of the most well rounded and employable graduates (in general)?

Should a a university ranking in 2013 really be based upon the fact that an Alumni of the University received a Nobel prize in 1901 ?

If you look at the first ranking by OP.... 30% of the ranking is based upon Nobel Prize? And another 60% based upon research and articles published.

[yourauntbob]

I dont expect any ranking to have any university in Thailand anywhere near the top. If they did it would lose all credibility.

[StreetCowboy]

I could find no indication of origin except the name.... no institution or whatever. Most rankings put Cambridge, Oxford, and Imperial College in the top six.

I checked Hong Kong, as I know a bit about the Universities there. The highest, Chinese U., is in the 150-200 bracket, while the two best, Hong Kong U, and the HK U of Science and Technology are ranked 201-250.

Not convincing. (but I wouldn't argue about the Thai Universities!)

I noticed the Watt was not ranked up there, but those buggers could drink like fishes

[StreetCowboy]

To the best of my knowledge, I've never met a Harvard Graduate. I've met a few from Cambridge and one or two from Imperial; The Cambridge chap I know best, in my opinion, would have been just as successful had he gone to Teesside Poly. Notwithstanding that, I'll be sending my bairns to the best university that I can afford. It is sad that matters have descended to that.

SC

[Forethat]

To the best of my knowledge, I've never met a Harvard Graduate.

I know several, one of them moved to Bangkok a couple of years ago.

[Forethat]

On a more serious note, I'd like to point out that they have listed only two of the great universities, Oxford, Cambridge and Hull.

[chonabot]

I was pleased, if a little surprsied that the Open University is listed in the 500

The amount of times I had to hold my temper when various Thai teachers, and a few Ghanaian ones told me it was a fake one.

I did point out to one director that it was higher placed than any Thai university, but that was a bluff at the time.

[Lodestone]

I could find no indication of origin except the name.... no institution or whatever.

The ranking has been produced for the past 10 years by the Center for World-Class Universities:

http://gse.sjtu.edu.cn/EN/centers.htm

which is a part of

Shanghai Jiao Tong University:

http://en.sjtu.edu.cn/about-sjtu/overview

hence the informal name Shanghai Rankings.

[Berkshire]

Since university rankings are almost always dominated by universities in the USA, is it safe to say that America has by far the best educational system in the world? There is not even a close second. So by extension, Americans are the best educated peoples in the world and American society is, therefore, the most advanced and intelligent in the world.

Thank you for the accolades.

[yourauntbob]

Since university rankings are almost always dominated by universities in the USA, is it safe to say that America has by far the best educational system in the world? There is not even a close second. So by extension, Americans are the best educated peoples in the world and American society is, therefore, the most advanced and intelligent in the world.

Thank you for the accolades.

Not a valid or sound argument even if sarcastic. It is very possible to have a great institution surrounded by idiots.

[Lodestone]

Compare that with another agency... Like QS..

http://www.iu.qs.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/

40% based upon academic reputation

10% based upon Employer Reputation

20% based upon faculty to student ratio

20% based upon citations per faculty

5% based upon proportion of international students

5% based upon proportion of international instructors

In an article titled The Globalisation of College and University Rankings and appearing in the January/February 2012 issue of Change magazine, Philip Altbach, professor of higher education at Boston College and also a member of the THE editorial board, said: “The QS World University Rankings are the most problematical. From the beginning, the QS has relied on reputational indicators for half of its analysis … it probably accounts for the significant variability in the QS rankings over the years. In addition, QS queries employers, introducing even more variability and unreliability into the mix. Whether the QS rankings should be taken seriously by the higher education community is questionable."

The QS World University Rankings have been criticised by many for placing too much emphasis on peer review, which receives 40 percent of the overall score. Some people have expressed concern about the manner in which the peer review has been carried out. In a report, Peter Wills from the University of Auckland, New Zealand wrote of the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings:

But we note also that this survey establishes its rankings by appealing to university staff, even offering financial enticements to participate (see Appendix II). Staff are likely to feel it is in their greatest interest to rank their own institution more highly than others. This means the results of the survey and any apparent change in ranking are highly questionable, and that a high ranking has no real intrinsic value in any case. We are vehemently opposed to the evaluation of the University according to the outcome of such PR competitions.

QS points out that no survey participant, academic or employer, has been offered a financial incentive to respondents. And academics cannot vote for their own institution.

THES-QS introduced several changes in methodology in 2007 which were aimed at addressing these criticisms, the ranking has continued to attract criticisms. In an article in the peer-reviewed BMC Medicine authored by several scientists from the US and Greece, it was pointed out:

If properly performed, most scientists would consider peer review to have very good construct validity; many may even consider it the gold standard for appraising excellence. However, even peers need some standardized input data to peer review. The Times simply asks each expert to list the 30 universities they regard as top institutions of their area without offering input data on any performance indicators. Research products may occasionally be more visible to outsiders, but it is unlikely that any expert possesses a global view of the inner workings of teaching at institutions worldwide. Moreover, the expert selection process of The Times is entirely unclear. The survey response rate among the selected experts was only <1% in 2006 (1,600 of 190,000 contacted). In the absence of any guarantee for protection from selection biases, measurement validity can be very problematic.

Alex Usher, vice president of Higher Education Strategy Associates in Canada, commented:

Most people in the rankings business think that the main problem with The Times is the opaque way it constructs its sample for its reputational rankings - a not-unimportant question given that reputation makes up 50% of the sample. Moreover, this year's switch from using raw reputation scores to using normalized Z-scores has really shaken things up at the top-end of the rankings by reducing the advantage held by really top universities - University of British Columbia (UBC) for instance, is now functionally equivalent to Harvard in the Peer Review score, which, no disrespect to UBC, is ludicrous. I'll be honest and say that at the moment the THES Rankings are an inferior product to the Shanghai Jiao Tong’s Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Academicians have also been critical of the use of the citation database, arguing that it undervalues institutions which excel in the social sciences. Ian Diamond, former chief executive of the Economic and Social Research Council and now vice-chancellor of the University of Aberdeen and a member of the THE editorial board, wrote to Times Higher Education in 2007, saying:

The use of a citation database must have an impact because such databases do not have as wide a cover of the social sciences (or arts and humanities) as the natural sciences. Hence the low position of the London School of Economics, caused primarily by its citations score, is a result not of the output of an outstanding institution but the database and the fact that the LSE does not have the counterweight of a large natural science base.

The most recent criticism of the old system came from Fred L. Bookstein, Horst Seidler, Martin Fieder and Georg Winckler in the journal Scientomentrics for the unreliability of QS's methods:

Several individual indicators from the Times Higher Education Survey (THES) data base the overall score, the reported staff-to-student ratio, and the peer ratings—demonstrate unacceptably high fluctuation from year to year. The inappropriateness of the summary tabulations for assessing the majority of the “top 200” universities would be apparent purely for reason of this obvious statistical instability regardless of other grounds of criticism. There are far too many anomalies in the change scores of the various indices for them to be of use in the course of university management.

Subject rankings reliability

The QS subject rankings have been dismissed as unreliable by some critics, including most notably Brian Leiter, who points out that programmes which are known to be high quality, and which rank highly in the Blackwell rankings (e.g., the University of Pittsburgh) fare poorly in the QS ranking for reasons that are not at all clear.

In other areas, QS has highly ranked programmes which do not exist, as in Geography, in which 5 of the top 10 did not actually have graduate programmes in geography. In Linguistics, the QS rankings are entirely out of step with the most recent NRC rankings; NRC ranks the doctoral programmes of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Maryland at College Park among the very best in the U.S.A. (tied for #3 in S-Rank), while QS ranks them 29th and 49th in the world, respectively.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QS_World_University_Rankings#General_criticisms

[johnlandy]

Regardless of the source (QS or ARWU) or the methodology employed it is a known fact that Thailand's education system is woefully lacking.

Even when comparing the realm with the majority of other SE Asian countries they perform dismally 'but what can one expect'

I am on record as having said that Thailand will (in a hundred years) be where the west was 150 years ago.

When a country has the collective belief that they are 'the master (or supreme) race' of people in the world why should they try to prove otherwise.

"the pursuit of mediocrity is always successful" (just imagine if they really tried, just how mediocre they might become)

Edited August 26, 2013 by johnlandy