This article is more than 9 years old

Another wonderful ranking

Yet another fabulous international university ranking.
This article is more than 9 years old

Paul Greatrix is Registrar at The University of Nottingham, author and creator of Registrarism and a Contributing Editor of Wonkhe.

More ranktastic fun

This international ranking has been around for a while (I posted first about it in 2012) but doesn’t seem to have established itself against the big names in the field yet. It has a slightly different approach and claims to be the only global 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

Not sure how much of a selling point that is in reality. The methodology is as follows:

CWUR uses eight objective and robust indicators to rank the world’s top 1000 universities:

1) Quality of Education, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have won major international awards, prizes, and medals relative to the university’s size [25%]
2) Alumni Employment, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have held CEO positions at the world’s top companies relative to the university’s size [25%]
3) Quality of Faculty, measured by the number of academics who have won major international awards, prizes, and medals [25%]
4) Publications, measured by the number of research papers appearing in reputable journals [5%]
5) Influence, measured by the number of research papers appearing in highly-influential journals [5%]
6) Citations, measured by the number of highly-cited research papers [5%]
7) Broad Impact, measured by the university’s h-index [5%]
8) Patents, measured by the number of international patent filings [5%]

“Objective and robust” is possibly overstating things. And the scaling in the ranking is a bit strange too with a wide range of 50 points between places 1 and 100 but barely 5 points between the 100th and 500th university.

The world Top 10 is as follows:

1 Harvard University
2 Stanford University
3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4 University of Cambridge
5 University of Oxford
6 Columbia University
7 University of California, Berkeley
8 University of Chicago
9 Princeton University
10 Cornell University

This is the UK top 20. Some interesting variations from the norm in here. (NB the links in the table take you to the CWUR summary of scores for that university.)

 World  Rank   Institution   National  Rank 
4 University of Cambridge 1
5 University of Oxford 2
27 University College London 3
35 Imperial College London 4
55 University of Edinburgh 5
67 University of Manchester 6
94 King’s College London 7
123 University of Bristol 8
128 University of Glasgow 9
140 University of Nottingham 10
148 University of Southampton 11
152 University of Birmingham 12
161 University of Leeds 13
173 University of Sheffield 14
199 University of Liverpool 15
201 Cardiff University 16
209 Queen Mary University of London 17
212 Newcastle University 18
240 University of Leicester 19
242 University of Dundee 20

 

Are these rankings “trusted by students, academics, university administrators, and government officials from around the world”? I think it is possibly too early to tell.

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