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.
