So what can you read into such results? While many students will aspire to attend a top ten university, there are a multitude of other factors, including cost, location, size, academic focus, sports and extra-curricular activities, class size, and maybe just the personality of the institution. The culture of the surrounding community, security, opportunities to access museums or businesses, all could matter in one way or another to different applicants. And with a changing job market, the target schools for a career in IT or aviation could be very different to those in education or industry.
Forbes produces an annual ranking of the top US colleges according to student satisfaction and return on investment. They figure that students care more about their experience while at university, and their parents are looking at the financial side and trying to avoid having their children saddled with enormous debt at the beginning of their careers. They look at things like Student Satisfaction (22.5%), Post-graduate success (37.5%), Student Debt (17.5%), Graduation Rate (11.25%) and Nationally Competitive Awards (11.25%).
But the four other international university rankings are intended as much for the academic community as for high school seniors and their parents, and place considerable weight on research and ties to industry as well as teaching quality and employability. These results could sway a generous benefactor, influence government policy for visas, attract commercial investment for research, and of course give bragging rights at dinner parties.
But what are they actually measuring? Let’s take a look at the methodology of each of the four major university rankings, and see what happens when you take the combined results of the last 12 months to create the Ranking of the University Rankings 2013.
Each ranking uses a different methodology and weights the use of different data to produce their league tables, so it is important for candidates to understand what is being measured. In overly simple terms:
The Times Higher Education gives equal weight to teaching, research and citations, with a look at industry income and international outlook.
Academic Ranking of World Universities puts a larger focus on research, accounting for 40% of the weighting.
QS focuses on academic reputation 40%, employer reputation, student to faculty ratio, citations per faculty and international factors.
US News looks at the core missions of universities and groups them according to mission. They then look at employability, research, academic teaching quality, and they “test” the universities using academic polls and surveys.
By relying on data points like subjective surveys and self-reported data, we are clearly not in the realms of hard science. And there is no measure of the social impact of a university and its graduates.
What stands out in the 2013 results is the consistently strong performance of Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Princeton among the leading US universities. With only a couple of exceptions, these schools feature in the top five in every ranking. However, technology focused institutions such as MIT and Caltech place considerably higher in the rankings of Times Higher Ed and QS compared to US News, given the emphasis on research versus academic polls.
Should we care? Critics of the university rankings, and there are many of them, point out that they typically only measure what is easy to count. The over-reliance on self-reported data is also called into question, along with the absence of any meaningful indicators for teaching quality, personal development, or the impact of research. And how can you possibly compare a small liberal arts college with 750 students to a state university whose football stadium alone accommodates 80,000?
But let’s face it, many of us are instinctively drawn towards lists, whether for the best hospitals or the best places to live. And when it comes to universities, there are plenty of stakeholders – students & alumni, staff, applicants and even recruiters – who care enough to pore over the results each year to assess the reputation of their school in the global market.
Rankings at least have the merit of providing potential applicants with certain data that would otherwise be unavailable, and the chance for universities themselves to measure their research output and reach of citations against the market. Given, though, that the methodology of each ranking is subjective in its choice of criteria, and that the difference between a school ranked 25th or 35th is probably not that great, the results should never be the most influential factor when identifying the right school for you.
The rankings all measure different things – but what measures of a university matter to you?
At the Harvard Commencement in May 2013, Oprah Winfrey told the graduating class that the single most important lesson she had learned in 25 years was that there is a common denominator in our human experience: “We want to be validated.” From President Bush to Beyoncé, Oprah says that we all want to know “Was that okay? Did you hear me? Did you see me?”
What is true for the individual is most likely true for the institution, and in 2013 Harvard University received its own form of validation, as the results of the Ranking of University Rankings 2013 reveal. Compiled by theunipod, an online guide to life and courses at university, the Ranking of University Rankings aggregates the results from the four major international university rankings published each year. Despite room for improvement, Harvard had a good year, as the table of the top 10 US universities shows: