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World University Rankings 2018

S

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Cocaloch said:
As I said above I think the placement of MIT, Stanford, and Caltech speaks to a bias that would work against both LSE and Michigan. It also would explain Yale's relatively low ranking.
Click to expand...

Michigan is great on STEM and you would figure any criterion that drags up MIT and Caltech up would do the same for CMU and NUS, who seem conspicuously low to me. Just as a five second reaction. I'm not invested enough to do much more work on it
and frankly my school is correctly ranked higher than its immediate rival school so I'm satisfied at the outcome.
 
C

Cocaloch

Member
Stumpokapow said:
Michigan is great on STEM and you would figure any criterion that drags up MIT and Caltech up would do the same for CMU and NUS, who seem conspicuously low to me. Just as a five second reaction. I'm not invested enough to do much more work on it
and frankly my school is correctly ranked higher than its immediate rival school so I'm satisfied at the outcome.
Click to expand...

My understanding is that it also quite good for the Humanities and I know it's up there for at least History and Economics in the social sciences. I've always thought of it as a quite well rounded school. In contrast to MIT and Caltech which are almost certainly the least well rounded of the top tier American schools.

I'm probably not going to dig into their current methodology, though I think I have for the Times in the past, but those were some very noticeable eyebrow raisers. This also seems to be worse than some of the other lists on state schools which might explain Michigan, Berkeley, and Madison's relatively low ranks though I'm puzzled by UCLA being higher than Berkeley.
 
H

hockeypuck

Member
Maybe Michigan is ranked relatively low because their med school is so lazy in setting up prospective med student interviews? Back when I applied, UMich literally sent out interview requests based on your MCAT score. This was well known. Nothing else on the $100 application mattered. Lazy, lazy, lazy. It was my first interview, of course I was nervous, and I bombed the interview. Curse you, Professor of Family Medicine. I do not have fond memories of Michigan.

And yes, I am bragging about my MCAT score.

One other funny memory of UMich Med: In the morning they divided us interviewees into two groups, Group A and Group 1. LOL. They were so sensitive in not wanting to imply any inferiority that they labeled the groups "A" and "1". This is something a Berkeley would've done. Hahaha, UMich you funny you.
 
B

boredandlazy

Member
Heh, I went to Edith Cowan Uni in Western Australia. Apparently one of the worst in the country.
Doesn't bother me though, got a degree which got me a job.
 
Lamel

Lamel

Banned
The top 20 or so are all so close in quality it's ridiculous to squabble about it. America, as ignorant as it is in terms of populace, stays winning though.
 
M

Miletius

Member
Pandacon said:
Hmmm, I've been thinking about going to San Francisco State, but I don't even see it on this list....
Click to expand...

SF state is part of the 2nd Tier within the University System in California, which probably automatically puts it below all of the UC schools. Which is a shame, because it actually does a lot of work in conjunction with UCSF, which makes it quite attractive for undergraduate research opportunities. At the very least, it's gotta be better than Merced, which AFAIK is only half completed.

Just started a program at Cal, so, uh, go Bears. Berkeley will almost always lose out to it's Stanford rival, but eh, top 20 isn't bad.
 
N

nephilimdj

Member
boredandlazy said:
Heh, I went to Edith Cowan Uni in Western Australia. Apparently one of the worst in the country.
Doesn't bother me though, got a degree which got me a job.
Click to expand...

If makes u feel better, look at international student numbers for group of 8
Super TAFE meme, thats a lot of bachelor of accounting students
 
T

The Albatross

Member
Hm... slightly dubious of some of their choices. I searched 3 local schools, three of which are comparable, and two of them are not on there while one was 251-300. The other 2 are regularly ranked by most American rankings to either be better or comparable to the one that did appear, so it's a little odd that the other two are at least 749 schools worse than this one.

Yes there's something odd about the rankings.

The college that I searched is listed at #271 for US colleges, yet it appears in the list 251-300th for World. Two other colleges I searched appear at #79 and #85 US respectively, and yet they're not listed in the top 1000 world rankings... So, considered better colleges in the US, but worse colleges in .. the world.
 
F

FuriousOne

Member
U of I in at #37. Not bad, but lower than previous years. How does a school rank higher in the world rank and lower in the US rank(45)?
 
T

The Albatross

Member
FuriousOne said:
U of I in at #37. Not bad, but lower than previous years. How does a school rank higher in the world rank and lower in the US rank(45)?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I found the same results with my search, with colleges that appeared in the top 100 for US colleges, yet didn't make the top 1000 for world rank; and yet, a college that was 270 for US, made the world rank.
 
M

Miletius

Member
The Albatross said:
Yeah, I found the same results with my search, with colleges that appeared in the top 100 for US colleges, yet didn't make the top 1000 for world rank; and yet, a college that was 270 for US, made the world rank.
Click to expand...

It's almost as though these lists are all fairly subjective and you should therefore take them with an appropriately sized grain of salt...
 
C

Cocaloch

Member
The Albatross said:
Yeah, I found the same results with my search, with colleges that appeared in the top 100 for US colleges, yet didn't make the top 1000 for world rank; and yet, a college that was 270 for US, made the world rank.
Click to expand...

They use different methodologies. The national one is better.
 
L

Lunaray

Member
Cocaloch said:
I mean there is a pretty clear set of tiers for university and the difference do matter at the general education, cultural, and pedagogic level. The difference within that tier isn't necessarily very meaningful though. So while its fine to ask what's the difference between rank 40 and 45 there is clearly a massive difference between 1 and 99, even though Oxford absolutely shouldn't be number one.

I'd actually argue department rankings aren't that relevant to undergrads in general with the exceptions of instances where there is a massive disparity between the quality of the university in general and department in particular.
Click to expand...

True, there are tiers of university, but once you get down to the granular levels, the signal-to-noise is pretty low. Besides that, I honestly don't think they metrics are that useful because they are really broad. THE in particular is biased towards reputation surveys, which are useful on a broad scale but doesn't really say much about what the student experience will be like (which is what I think is most important for undergraduate education).

The other problem is that as you've mentioned, departmental rankings aren't that important to undergrads because they mostly rank research output. If you were to get, say, a physics education, (using that as an example because that's what I'm familiar with), the undergraduate physics curriculum is pretty standardized and I'd argue quality of teaching is much more important in that case (and its hard to rank quality of teaching).

But to be perfectly frank, the biggest anecdotal "smell" test I think these rankings fail in my opinion is that Oxbridge ranks as the top two universities. As someone who has attended both an Ivy in the US and an Oxbridge college, I much prefer the liberal arts system when it comes to undergraduate education. At Oxbridge, you're pretty much paying lots of money to go to school for barely more than 24 weeks in a year.
 
A

Akuun

Looking for meaning in GAF
I'm surprised Waterloo isn't ranked higher. Tech companies seem to absolutely love hiring Waterloo graduates.
 
Chinbo37

Chinbo37

Member
UC Irvine at 99! Not bad that was a good school.

Also Leiden University, Netherlands at 67!

I went to both schools.
 
D

Dreams-Visions

Member
Realeza said:
Here's another list that was published just a couple months ago:

The Center for World University Rankings, or CWUR, claims to publish "the only global university ranking that measures the quality of education and training of students as well as the prestige of the faculty members and the quality of their research without relying on surveys and university data submissions."
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/l...143080554.html

1. Harvard University

2. University of Toronto

3. University of Michigan

4. University of Pennsylvania

5. Johns Hopkins University

6. University of California, Berkeley

7. Stanford University

8. University of Oxford

9. University of Washington

10. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Click to expand...

Someone put us at #3?

:3333333333333333333333
 
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