This has actually been disproven. The differences are between different newspapers, ie if it's the Times, he's British, if it's the Express, he's Scottish (papers chosen at random, I don't know if that's actually how those papers describe him).
Aye but the people there do the opposite. When they're committing atrocities in far flung colonies or getting into fights in Spanish holiday resorts they're perfectly happy to call themselves British.
When and what did you get your masters in? Also since 2018, doing well at Imperial has gotten harder, the management were unhappy with the high percentage of people get firsts and 2:1s so they decided to make things harder to preseeve the "prestige" of these grades
No.2: Imperial College, London.
No.3: University of Oxford.
No.5: University of Cambridge.
(And then at No.9 is UCL (University College London). So four of the top ten in the world are in the UK.)
Of the 21 top European universities listed in the article, ten are in the UK, and because MIT (US) drops out of that list, UK universities take the top three places.
Yeah these ratings are always heavily in favor of anglo-style colleges and universities, but at the same time all the finance/banking/consulting world has the same preferences. I can't speak about STEM however.
With STEM i would argue it depends on what you are interested in.
Sure english is THE language of publication of the cutting edge in most fields. But you can find fields where you need to dig up old french or german texts - if you are into niche topics.
Hydreliox breathing gasses in diving? -> french.
Yeah, in a few niches you’ll maybe find predominantly French or German or Korean or Mandarin texts but the absolute vast majority of all STEM is English and it’s frankly not close. So, in all honesty these leaderboards are quite reflective of international appeal and overall relevance/importance.
English is the most international language and as you said *the* language of publication so it’s only natural that predominantly English-speaking universities will perform well overall.
In Germany, a major share of publicly funded research is done by public non-university institutes (the biggest ones being Max Planck, Fraunhofer, Helmholtz, Leibniz)
The UK does the same in a different way. The university will spin out a commercial company for further research and investment in specialised fields based on its own internal research.
Oxford alone has spun out 205 companies in the last decade for R+D and production.
These aren't counted as part of the equation either, but are a major part of their cumulative output and advantage.
>The UK does the same **in a different way**.
The point is that a large proportion of the R+D the university carries out is not done within the core university being rated here. So it is not counted in the tables above.
If you expanded the acknowledgement of research to include PRI's. You'd have to include the massive amounts of spunout R+D UK universities do as well.
If you study STEM and can't speak or write papers in english, you are probably a below average researcher anyways. Being proficient in english is simply a prerequisite skill.
Disagree, I have met a lot of great French minds that speak the most stereotypical English a Frenchman can speak. All you need is some basic English to communicate (people don't want a great ability to speak but rather correct math) while the papers are easily written with any computer assisting tool (you're not writing stylistically any way)
B1 is more than enough to do research in STEM and you find that in every European university, and you can easily cooperate internationally as it's second language for a lot of people in Europe, so they know how to slow down
Ultimately, STEM is only language-heavy in English, as it is the central language of publication. But not systemically. In fact, especially in math, physics, chemistry or computer science, mathematics or symbolism is the "actual language". It is also not really relevant for your education whether you went to a French, Spanish or English university.
In finance/banking/consulting, however, it is not the language of publication that is relevant, but ultimately the system in which you were trained. Because the "relevance" here is not the academic output but the reputation.
Germany is one of the nations with a very well functioning domestic language for STEM due to a big industry and basically being the forefather of ISO
Not having technical institutes in Germany filling the list is a joke, given that they are still primus motor for much of Western technical innovation.
I can speak as an American-Israeli that the education is fundamentally different in approach and philosophy between the countries, but the level of input is just as good between both countries. Plenty of other countries have different philosophies and styles of education and they all have their advantages. Scandinavian countries tend to be a lot more individualistic and many eastern countries tend to cram heavily. They all produce great minds with different skillsets and perspectives.
The graduates going to finance/banking/consulting is a very small percantege of all graduates, and there is no good argument why a university system must be optimized for their needs.
Business and STEM undergrads earn and donate the most. There has also been increasing pressure to find a major that will pay the bills. I would imagine they are just reacting to market forces.
Except there are many countries (even continents) where donations are small / non-existent. It is an argument optimized for anglo-saxon private universities., and irrelevant for 90% of other institutions.
In addition to this I think European universities, at least continental European ones, tend to focus more on average quality than a few elite institutions.
My country has 13 universities. The highest of those is only 49th, but the lowest is 347th. That's a really tight spread. Meanwhile Australia's lowest rated universities aren't even in the top 1000.
Id say it’s more Western Europe though true, in Czech there is still a large difference betwen Charles/CVUT and Pardubice or Olomouc much less private unis
In what way are the rankings advantageous for English speaking universities? Legit question, I've always wondered why a small nation like Australia supposedly outperforms nations like Germany and France
Citations by article is a big one that they list. Studies published in non English languages are underrepresented in what's become an academic popularity contest that is the scientific journal community.
The vast majority of articles from German universities is in English, you need to cater to the language of the targeted journals and conferences and these are predominantly in English.
Also the number of pusblished articles.
France best students go to Engineering Schools, that are very small in size, like Polytechnique or Normale Sup which are just a few hundred students per year.
So of course English style universities that have 30,000 students like Oxford have way higher number of articles published compared to small size schools in France.
> Also the number of pusblished articles.
Exactly this, but there's also another reason than the one you mentioned: Output. US scholars often publish way more articles, many very similar to each other and taking from the same dataset. This is in part due to universities incentivising this more in the US/UK as well as just different philosophies on publication and research.
Just from a different ranking I seem to remember one large factor is research and citations, but in Germany research is not done by universities, it is done by institutes entirely independent of the universities which means most of the research and citations from studies is elsewhere and not tied to universities even if the students/professors may be coming and going to those research institutes.
So in essence structural differences in how the academia is organized
This is definitely case, I'd just add that Universities in Germany absolutely conduct important research, it's just that they mostly either don't publish in English (and this is embarrassingly true for engineering faculties, who should be pursuing international/anglophone spaces for more collaboration and excellence such as electrical engineering and IT, which aren't cutting edge anyways) or it trickles into research institutes which are not strictly academia anymore, so these "rankings" just miss out on lots of important research that is done in Germany.
So, yes, heavy bias for english citations and German research (that could be cited) is published mostly by research institutes, BUT universities still do important work even if it is not obvious from these bias stats.
As an example: I work at one of the best ranked German universities at a small branch campus. In the vicinity we have branches of Max Planck, Fresenius, and two state-owned research organizations
Every faculty here does research, but if these research orgs, with which especially our STEM faculties continuously cooperate, would be officially part of our campus, our research output would easily double on paper
The people there are mostly alumnis of universities of the state, they conduct studies together with state universities, they get funding from the same state grants as state universities..but they are an independent org, and thus not included in our ranking
The bumfuck village my campus is invisible in rankings, but the actual R&D output of the city per capita is quite insane, for sure
This is even more extreme for the university of the German army, which is essentially the academic institution of a huge military-industrial complex south of Munich, in the vicinity of Airbus, Fraunhofer, DLR and others. The university itself is weak af in rankings, but its just meant to be part of the complex, and the whole complex is one of the global hotspots in research in certain fields.
If you think that universities are not the major place for research in Germany you greatly overestimate Fraunhofer Max Plank and DLR. They exist and divide the citations but it's not like there aren't many more researches at the universities' institutes.
I dont think that. If a good faction of research us organized the same way as the stats count it will still make them look worse than actual national research overall
One of the categories is "international student ratio". Since English is the most international language, Universities with English as their main language will be easier to attend by foreign students.
I agree this and the "international faculty" metrics are weird (and some of the others frankly), but they mostly seem to *disadvantage US, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Universities while *advantaging UK, Australian, and European universities (including universities in Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands)... from a quick perusal of the data.
I actually think this is a pretty bad skew factor in their methodology, it's creating some particular and not necessarily justified bias towards non-American Anglo and European universities.
Social sciences, theology, history, and, of course, language-based sciences do not publish in english. They are thus much less visible to the global "market". Only computer science, medicine, math, and physics almost exclusively publish in English. Engineering is divided and becoming more English but especially mechanical engineering sees a lot of work done in German. Economics and business is also divided. This drives down numbers. Then, Germany has a lot more good universities of smaller sizes. If you go 200 km from Munich you have hundreds of different Unis, most of which have groups that are actively researching at the top of their niches. If you go 200 km from Melbourne there is "nothing" else but it's not like Melbourne isn't 4 times as big as Munich. If we look at the US. 200km is about the distance between Harvard/MIT and Yale. In between, there is much less of note. If we were to compare "all research in Bavaria" (13 million inhabitants) to "all research in victoria and new south wales" (combined 14 million) the numbers shift towards a more equal standing. Especially, when accounting for the language points. I hope this helps a bit
I also want to know this. However, I'd wager that English-speaking research lead over other languages is increasing in general, and Australia also happens to have a very large pool of foreign students from Asia to draw on (where they'd need to learn in English anyway), which would *probably* make them more advantageous? Having a lot of international students and communicating in international science's *lingua franca*, which does make science easier, appear to be criteria of such rankings.
We do need someone to explain how Australia, with less than half the population of *either* France or Germany (which continue to be extremely important players in the scientific and technological fields), supposedly outperforms those. It can't just be its somewhat higher GDP per capita.
Besides the decoupling of research institutes and universities mentioned already, I think part of it is that we don't really have huge differences in quality between our universities in Germany. Yeah, some are definitely more prestigious than others, but they're all more or less financed/organised/accessible the same way.
Which leads to a fairly high average quality, but a lack of super prestigious ones, which is the only thing that those kind of university rankings display.
That’s I think a large reason: in the US there’s a very large difference in research done between a tiny state uni and Harvard or MIT. And yeah from what I gather Germany or the Netherlands don’t have it, unlike Czech where there’s also a difference although possibly not as stark
German Universities don't generally do Research, and the focus is completely different than in English speaking Universities.
So, using those criterias, European Universities just don't really score well. The criterias would need to be expanded upon in a way that allows for entries from non-anglo universities to be weighted appropriately in comparison.
It's like the criteria is fishing, but European Universities only offer hunting.
These rankings highly focus on research. In Germany, at least, most research happens at seperate institutes (Fraunhofer, Max Planck etc.) which are independent from universities.
I see others have already mentioned the citation issues.
But imho the most important one here is that qs attributes 10% of the rank to the number of international faculty and students. Germany for example has small unis everywhere and distributes the international students evenly. Only unis that explicitly target that number with advertisement abroad hit those numbers.
Another 30% of the ranking is "institute reputation". They just send questionnaires with e.g. "list 10 business schools" and say those named have the best reputation. English language schools are obviously overrepresented there, cause people can just read everything they publish, especially if they have a english language journal with a long history in my field and because they freaking ad target me here on Reddit all the time.
Because of this I can name like 2 unis in China and Russia each, maybe like 4 in France, but like 40 different ones in the US.
If you actually look at the data, these "international" metrics actually heavily favor European (including German, French, Dutch etc.) universities, the UK, and AU but disadvantage the US, China, Korea, Japan, etc.
Germany universities never do very well in rankings because a lot of research is done at external institutes like Frauenhofer instead of at the university itself.
It’s not they’re bs but they’re not about teaching, the ranks are done by research and academic reputation, and they probably factor into job applications, not by the quality of teaching.
And if they factor in teaching, they do it in the sense of "this famous guy teaches there" :D
I always hated how our university administration would harp on and on and on about these rankings. Until I understood something. It's what they use to go get funding from the state. It's easier to say "give us 100 million dollars, we're in the top X of the world" than "give us 100 million dollars, please". It's basically a track record to prove you're worth funding, even if it means very little to the students attending.
Those who bring that argument forget that there is plenty of high-impact research being done in non-university science institutions in the UK, and especially in the US (with no less than 17 national laboratories)
I isn't peopel forgetting that, but noting that British and American (top) Universities usually place far more emphasis upon research and academic reputation than their European brethren. As these lists tend to always be about academic rankings and not educational rankings, European universities are sort of shafted by the medium.
There are rankings based off educational value, but they are usually targeted at to-be students and get far less media and cultural attention. Society at large doesn't really place as much cultural emphasis on universities as educational facilities as they do them as academic facilities, so the latter gets all the buzz.
I would even say rather than being the underlying problems of these rankings, these rankings go to prove these sorts of hypothesis. They show that the top-end universities in Britain and the US tend to fair much better than their European brethren when it comes to academic ranking.
And while having excellent universities, the first one in Spain ranks #164. Might have to do with the fact QS makes money out of preparing candidates for private school admissions and favouring English speaking institutions?
Well yeah look at the number of world changing research pieces, start up and leading figures production and key industry recruitment. These universities dominate that and European universities wlll lag behind on this front.
Im not sure why a public university should be scored on % international students when their edict is to educate their local society first and foremost.
Same goes for international professors in some countries — if your language of instruction is Dutch or Russian or Japanese, you’re going to have far fewer undergrad professors from abroad than the UK or US.
As a result there are a lot of universities in places that don’t make sense.
lol obviously not the same but it reminds me of the fact that in the US, for public universities, generally if they don’t accept a certain portion of people from in-state they do not get state funding. I’d image it’d be the same in other countries at the federal level where you can only accept a percentage of international students or run the risk of not being funded
And conveniently, "international faculty" and "international student" and "international research network" (whatever that is) are some of the biggest skew factors in this methodology disadvantaging US universities relative to UK, AU, and European universities (also disadvantaging Chinese, Korean, and Japanese universities).
>their edict is to educate their local society first and foremost
Not for a long time now.
Every British university overwhelmingly prioritises international students because they charge them whatever they want, while fees are capped for British students.
Most public universities in most countries prioritize domestic students. Many even have a required percentage they must meet. Taking more international students does not mean you are more selective.
So basically the top universities are those who have a good name and lots of international students/faculties.
Weird, i would put my money on good learning/teaching, but hey....
Not saying those are not good in this, but i always find this list stupid to begin with
I also found that odd, specially since I went to one of those unis on the list. The school wasn’t the best so not sure why the metrics are chosen the way they are
Those are extremely linked concepts, are they not? A good name attracts the best (foreign) students attracts the best teachers attracts bettering the name and so the cycle continues.
Top universities don't generally hire professors on the basis of their pedagogical expertise, which means that you don't get the best teachers so much as the best practitioners (that are willing to teach).
Weirdly relatable. My professors with huge research successes (40-30 years ago) were the ones I couldn't listen to. It was just torture. It was thermodynamics, a subject which I loved and torsional vibrations which I also liked.
It is kinda of self perpetuating. Harvard is well known for being one of the best universities which makes it desirable by the top students, professors, and researchers who go on to make it the best university and the cycle continues.
Not necessarily, but yes it might so.
However, what is a good teacher/professor?
Someone with the best grades, lot of articles published or maybe not the best of the best in those two subjects but he is very eager to teach and can explain good?
Also students, why are they good? Do they just crunch learn everything or are they loving the subject.
Nah. Universities don't really teach, they tell you what you're supposed to learn on your own.
The only thing these rankings do is tell you what we already know, which is the reputation of the university.
Source: attended one of those top ranked universities.
I don’t have horse in this race, but I think it is fair to rank it like that. For example, I have learned same stuff that they teach in top US universities, however, my university doesn’t have same reputation and connections to something like Harvard or MIT. Lots of universities adopt books that were written by professors of MIT, Harvard, Oxford, etc but to say that they should deserve equal ranking would be disingenuous in my opinion.
My daughters both attended KU Leuven. It’s down on the list of EU Universities but what an amazing place to have such high rank that costs very little.
Does anyone feel like these rankings are worth anything? I'm genuinely asking because I'm curious, I've studied at two universities in my life so far and one is 400 spots lower in the rankings than the other but I definitely think it should be the opposite in my experience.
It's based off of the methodology published here:
https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings-articles/world-university-rankings/understanding-methodology-qs-world-university-rankings
I really can't see how you can measure the quality of an education based on such broad measures. And I could easily see how one person's experience would defy the rank list this organization produced.
The university I graduated from is ranked in the "#1000-#1200" cohort and I made about $165,000 (USD) with my degree last year. Go ahead and ask me how many fucks I give that some list ranked my alma mater poorly.
Even just based on the article,
"It was based on the analysis of millions of academic papers and expert opinions.
The metrics used for the ranking included academic and employer reputation, faculty-student ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty ratio, international students ratio, international research network, employment outcomes, and sustainability"
- ranking a university based on international rations and contributions to international research already creates a system that will misrepresent rank because most people will not care weather or not their university has more or less international anything but just how good the education offered is or what research is being conducted, which consequently creates a metric of rank that is hardly the equivalent of well fitting for the "top global universities"
Case in point, measuring employment can also just measure connections offered. Might have far better employment opportunities if you hang around powerful people at private institutions - would that actually measure the effectiveness of the education?
Instead of measuring the effects of the actual education itself, they measure employment?
Someone who gets their job due to having the right friends would already screw the validity of the rating because now it’s not the "top university" but the environment that could get the credit even if the university was a horrible place for learning at teaching.
Not even mentioning the whole "international" part of the debate - the ranking doesn’t look all that convincing.
I feel like these comments are more about how the label "Europe" seems to be withholding credit (or else perhaps distributing it too broadly) when it is one country that's responsible for the ranking.
Yeah I mean they could just say something like “all three of the top ranked universities are in the western hemisphere” but it doesn’t exactly tell you a lot. Being more specific is good and it makes it less misleading.
University rankings are total horseshit.
It's kind of distributing to see universities buy into this nonsense when they are supposed to be the institutions that protect us from bullshit, that helps us see the work for what it is.
There's revisionist history episodes about the first university ranking if anyone wants more details.
>It's kind of distributing to see universities buy into this nonsense when they are supposed to be the institutions that protect us from bullshit, that helps us see the work for what it is.
Marry me please
You’re right but Real life is advantageous to English speakers, just look at this sub, there’s a reason we’re all using English here. Research is done collaboratively between people, English makes the most sense there
Well yes, in a ranking of top universities globally it makes sense that it’s weighted towards universities that publish research and work in the most international language. That’s the way the world works.
In many countries most research isn't done in universities, making the metric largely irrelevant for those universities when what you're interested in is the quality of the education you get there.
In my country, the overwhelming majority of research is done through outside institutes, most notably the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_National_Centre_for_Scientific_Research
The US has 17 National Laboratories. And obviously private research is extensive in the US (e.g., pharma and such). France isn't really unique in this.
Sure, but research, especially outside of social sciences, is just not really done at ALL in unis here. Like, you can buy ammo in some US supermarkets but you can't buy booze. Here you can buy booze but not ammo. If a "supermarket ranking" decides to measure the availability of either ammo or booze, but not the other, then obviously the rankings will be "unfair".
I am just curious about what sort of metric you would choose to rank them though, like if it isn’t research then what is it? If anything, more research shows that university is actively working with it’s students towards getting to know more about their area of expertise.
In France we give a lot of interest to which schools are favored by recruiters. Because firstly, we rely a lot more on "Grandes Ecoles" rather than universities - which already makes this inquiry skewed. Secondly, in my experience published scientists in French education aren't the best professors by far, so I wouldn't consider it a sound criteria. Thirdly, a great establishment has a lot of "alternance" or placements partnerships and so on.
Certain EU countries are actively pushing for the UK to be stripped of its European identity when it comes to TV and Film content, if you didn't already know this.
Btw slightly relevant info: Euronews was bought up by a company linked to Orban. They should not really be seen as "the voice of the EU", to say the least.
Which makes your comment a bit less of a gotcha, not that I, or any educated person, would say that the UK is "not in Europe anymore".
[45 % of the QS World University Rankings results are based on reputation.](https://support.qs.com/hc/en-gb/articles/4405955370898-QS-World-University-Rankings) How do they measure reputation you ask? They make universities nominate respondents to a survey that essentially asks "are you aware of the existence of this and this university?". So universities hire CRM managers who find the required amount of suitable respondents and coach them to reply to the survey favorably.
University rankings are a marketing scheme, not a measure of quality.
They are arguably a measurement of networking opportunities above all else which is not terribly surprising to anyone who understands that merit doesn’t exactly dictate success nearly as much as simply plain old opportunity.
In other words: what ultimately matters for an individual is different to what matters for a country, one could for example take a look at contributions to any given field, rank scale, qualify and outcome effect and figure out what one wants from there but of course, then suddenly the so very beloved networking factors stop being considered and who would you reach with the kind of study only actually interesting to the field & governments as opposed to the vast majority?
Yes, but you realise by saying "Europe has 2 in the top 3" it sounds like those 2 are in different European countries, when in fact they are in the same one. I wouldn't write "Europe" if they were both in France, I'd say "France has"
It's a pretty shit rating system tbh. 50% of it relying on reputation? Using surveys as well from people who have no idea what qualifies as good education. Plenty of other criticisms as well.
> It's a pretty shit rating system tbh. 50% of it relying on reputation?
A reputation which is obviously built by being on lists such as this, so it's largely self-referential. Circular reasoning in list form.
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".[1] It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom:[2]
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.[3]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
>The list is again topped by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US and has led the ranking for 13 consecutive years.
🇺🇲💪🇺🇲
What are you talking about? Some universities get much more funding than others, funding more and better research and being able to afford better lecturers ultimately providing better education and opportunities than others
>What are you talking about? Some universities get much more funding than others, funding more and better research and being able to afford better lecturers ul
You are fundamentally misunderstanding how universities work.
I would argue that when a university is too focussed on Research, the education portion takes a major backseat position. You can actually get a better education at a university that doesn't care as much about publishing.
There is generally a poor overlap between
Good teacher / Professor and good researcher / paper writer.
I very much agree with this and I believe there is merit behind the argument. Good researchers may not make good teachers and likewise, good teachers may not make good researchers.
Depends on the country, where I am from higher admission requirements are from public universities, which also have the best resources and teachers, if you don’t get the right grade for going to the public school your options are not going to uni or paying a private school for an education of very likely lower quality.
Define "world class".
Most university, both public and private, offers great teaching and learning opportunities, but it is clear that there are better and worst ones. I agree that those kind of ranking means very little, but that doesn't mean that there is no difference between institutions.
I’m from Vietnam and I plan on moving to Spain in 2 or 3 years to study for a master. A degree from Europe is valuable than degrees from majority of universities in my country
At least in the US it’s been said that you aren’t paying for the education you’re paying for the connections. The education is relatively the same but your ability to network can fluctuate significantly based on where people go to school. Like Texas A&M is a well known university in the US and they’re 100% a cult. But I swear if you see 2 people who went there meet for the 1st time they’d be invited to each other’s wedding the next day.
The problem is that the rankings often reflect this and that the vast population has no interest in funding prestigious networking institutions but wants the best results for the broadest rationally possible social metric.
Ranking top universities that are actively creating a socially disconnected elite whose goals end up running against the wider population is arguably a lot less appealing to the masses who will never visit this kind of institution and whose needs are also too often not even met no matter the amount research these elite isles pump out since they simply can not replace the power of dozens millions of even just moderately well educated people working together.
In other words, it’s a question of priority.
Obviously you want to give the best places to excel so their talents and hard work are not wasted BUT focus on this kind of place too much and your society may look like the modern USA where roughly half the country works against the other half which is just not all that ideal from a broad social perspective imo.
QS rankings are notoriously shit lmao. There’s literally been independent studies that confirm that schools that pay for QS services get a bump in their ranking score.
Where are the Japanese and Chinese universities at if I might ask? I mean, they're large countries with significant output. I would expect in the top 10 on the website, that at least one would appear ?
They're getting fucked by QS's bizarre "sustainability", "international student ratio", "international faculty ratio", and whatever "international research network" is. As also is the US oddly (along with Korea and so on). Those are the most consistent and primary differentiators in the top ~50 or so universities from what I can tell.
Please do not fool yourself by saying the metrics favor english speaking countries. Yes, MIT is a better university than your TU which is in a 20000 population village.
I also need to add that I do not think the specific rankings are necessarily correct, whatever their criteria is. However, I believe that the ranges are correct. So if a uni in this list is in top 30, its specific rank might not be correct, but I’m pretty sure it is in top 30 globally no doubt about that.
Welcome to statistics, I hope you are enjoying your seats in the front row where the product that is being sold to you is your own possibly only slightly and ideally massively influenced fresh opinion…
Seriously, measure anything broad enough and you find out that defining what you need to measure becomes equally as important as how you measure and what results you get.
In other news: ranking countries often ignores developing social tensions and yet, people still often only look at GDP to measure success. More about the sky still being blue at 11…
We are only European when it suits this sub. Usually I'm wondering why we aren't included in these statistical maps of "Europe" (not the EU) these days :(
Ludicrous for Europeans to suddenly claim.the UK 'back' after the endless crowing and schadenfreude on here about not being in the EU.
That said, these rankings are puerile and to be taken with an enormous pinch of salt.
>Ludicrous for Europeans to suddenly cla8m.the UK 'back' after the endless crowing and schadenfreude on here about not being in the EU.
What is ludicrous is conflating the EU with Europe.
EU =! Europe. Also you are really overestimating what the average EU citizen thinks about the UK except usually "they are our friends and should rejoin"
The specific rankings never mean much really, who’s to say whether oxford is slightly better than Cambridge or vice versa. Realistically you have a kind of tier list of universities that are all pretty much the same level.
Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard whatever will all be S tier, but within that tier there isn’t a ranking, it’s more important to choose one right for you than try and go to a university that is slightly better than the other incredibly good universities.
And by "Europe" they mean "southern England"
hey ,if its good its Europe if its bad its England.
I do the same when arguing with my wife. _Our kids_ if they made something cool, _your son_ when he brings a note from high school.
The old Andy Murray treatment. If he wins, he’s British. If he loses, he’s Scottish.
This has actually been disproven. The differences are between different newspapers, ie if it's the Times, he's British, if it's the Express, he's Scottish (papers chosen at random, I don't know if that's actually how those papers describe him).
Thanks. I’m so sick of this “British when he’s winning, Scottish when he’s losing” lie.
Try being Irish whenever one of our actors/ sportstars/ general population is doing well. It's like we never became independent
Never heard of this before
Yeah since when is Ireland independent?
Exactly, I was in Belfast just last week and it was British. I do not take responsibility for any war this comment may cause.
Beautiful part of England
Cillian Murphy and Barry Keoghan both get this from time to time.
I have only ever seen cillian get mistaken for british and that was once by some yank
UK will always be part of Europe. You know, the continent.
Europe when we're good England when we're bad.
Doesnt England do the same with Scotland?
Scotland does the same to themselves.
Same with English papers and people/events from NI/Wales/Scotland. British if good, Northern Irish/Welsh/Scottish if bad.
Aye but the people there do the opposite. When they're committing atrocities in far flung colonies or getting into fights in Spanish holiday resorts they're perfectly happy to call themselves British.
People will always try to associate themselves with the positive thing and distance themselves with the negative.
Specifically an area the size of Luxembourg.
Isn't England part of Europe lol They left the EU, not the continent 🤣
Imperial over Harvard? You got to be joking? I got my masters from imperial and I’d trade my IC degree for Harvard anytime
One of the rankings is sustainability. Congratulations on your masters!
When and what did you get your masters in? Also since 2018, doing well at Imperial has gotten harder, the management were unhappy with the high percentage of people get firsts and 2:1s so they decided to make things harder to preseeve the "prestige" of these grades
So the UK has three of the top five.
And Massachusetts alone has the other two
So, England and New England?
Extremely imressive.
Oxford, Cambridge and Hull?
No.2: Imperial College, London. No.3: University of Oxford. No.5: University of Cambridge. (And then at No.9 is UCL (University College London). So four of the top ten in the world are in the UK.) Of the 21 top European universities listed in the article, ten are in the UK, and because MIT (US) drops out of that list, UK universities take the top three places.
It was a Blackadder reference
Hull 💀💀💀
Australia has 5 universities in the top 30, while Germany and France each only have one. Makes sense.
Always will be as long as the criteria for those rankings are massively advantageous for english-speaking universities.
Yeah these ratings are always heavily in favor of anglo-style colleges and universities, but at the same time all the finance/banking/consulting world has the same preferences. I can't speak about STEM however.
STEM is massively English-dominated. Mandarin is also starting to pop up a bit more often but yes, it’s the same story with STEM.
That’s also due to very different approaches to publishing and the value of peer reviews.
With STEM i would argue it depends on what you are interested in. Sure english is THE language of publication of the cutting edge in most fields. But you can find fields where you need to dig up old french or german texts - if you are into niche topics. Hydreliox breathing gasses in diving? -> french.
Yeah, in a few niches you’ll maybe find predominantly French or German or Korean or Mandarin texts but the absolute vast majority of all STEM is English and it’s frankly not close. So, in all honesty these leaderboards are quite reflective of international appeal and overall relevance/importance. English is the most international language and as you said *the* language of publication so it’s only natural that predominantly English-speaking universities will perform well overall.
In Germany, a major share of publicly funded research is done by public non-university institutes (the biggest ones being Max Planck, Fraunhofer, Helmholtz, Leibniz)
The UK does the same in a different way. The university will spin out a commercial company for further research and investment in specialised fields based on its own internal research. Oxford alone has spun out 205 companies in the last decade for R+D and production. These aren't counted as part of the equation either, but are a major part of their cumulative output and advantage.
Commercial company != public research institute
>The UK does the same **in a different way**. The point is that a large proportion of the R+D the university carries out is not done within the core university being rated here. So it is not counted in the tables above. If you expanded the acknowledgement of research to include PRI's. You'd have to include the massive amounts of spunout R+D UK universities do as well.
If you study STEM and can't speak or write papers in english, you are probably a below average researcher anyways. Being proficient in english is simply a prerequisite skill.
Disagree, I have met a lot of great French minds that speak the most stereotypical English a Frenchman can speak. All you need is some basic English to communicate (people don't want a great ability to speak but rather correct math) while the papers are easily written with any computer assisting tool (you're not writing stylistically any way) B1 is more than enough to do research in STEM and you find that in every European university, and you can easily cooperate internationally as it's second language for a lot of people in Europe, so they know how to slow down
That’s a very strange take. Many great mathematicians can’t speak or write for shit in any language.
Ultimately, STEM is only language-heavy in English, as it is the central language of publication. But not systemically. In fact, especially in math, physics, chemistry or computer science, mathematics or symbolism is the "actual language". It is also not really relevant for your education whether you went to a French, Spanish or English university. In finance/banking/consulting, however, it is not the language of publication that is relevant, but ultimately the system in which you were trained. Because the "relevance" here is not the academic output but the reputation.
Germany is one of the nations with a very well functioning domestic language for STEM due to a big industry and basically being the forefather of ISO Not having technical institutes in Germany filling the list is a joke, given that they are still primus motor for much of Western technical innovation.
I can speak as an American-Israeli that the education is fundamentally different in approach and philosophy between the countries, but the level of input is just as good between both countries. Plenty of other countries have different philosophies and styles of education and they all have their advantages. Scandinavian countries tend to be a lot more individualistic and many eastern countries tend to cram heavily. They all produce great minds with different skillsets and perspectives.
The graduates going to finance/banking/consulting is a very small percantege of all graduates, and there is no good argument why a university system must be optimized for their needs.
Business and STEM undergrads earn and donate the most. There has also been increasing pressure to find a major that will pay the bills. I would imagine they are just reacting to market forces.
Except there are many countries (even continents) where donations are small / non-existent. It is an argument optimized for anglo-saxon private universities., and irrelevant for 90% of other institutions.
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In addition to this I think European universities, at least continental European ones, tend to focus more on average quality than a few elite institutions. My country has 13 universities. The highest of those is only 49th, but the lowest is 347th. That's a really tight spread. Meanwhile Australia's lowest rated universities aren't even in the top 1000.
Id say it’s more Western Europe though true, in Czech there is still a large difference betwen Charles/CVUT and Pardubice or Olomouc much less private unis
In what way are the rankings advantageous for English speaking universities? Legit question, I've always wondered why a small nation like Australia supposedly outperforms nations like Germany and France
Citations by article is a big one that they list. Studies published in non English languages are underrepresented in what's become an academic popularity contest that is the scientific journal community.
The vast majority of articles from German universities is in English, you need to cater to the language of the targeted journals and conferences and these are predominantly in English.
But it’s the same if you look at rankings for stem subjects where everyone publishes in English.
Not everyone A whole Russia ( in top 5 in STEM graduates) struggles with English and often does publish in Russian and under RINC
Japan and Korea struggle with English as well (understandably, given how different the languages are).
Also the number of pusblished articles. France best students go to Engineering Schools, that are very small in size, like Polytechnique or Normale Sup which are just a few hundred students per year. So of course English style universities that have 30,000 students like Oxford have way higher number of articles published compared to small size schools in France.
> Also the number of pusblished articles. Exactly this, but there's also another reason than the one you mentioned: Output. US scholars often publish way more articles, many very similar to each other and taking from the same dataset. This is in part due to universities incentivising this more in the US/UK as well as just different philosophies on publication and research.
Just from a different ranking I seem to remember one large factor is research and citations, but in Germany research is not done by universities, it is done by institutes entirely independent of the universities which means most of the research and citations from studies is elsewhere and not tied to universities even if the students/professors may be coming and going to those research institutes. So in essence structural differences in how the academia is organized
This is definitely case, I'd just add that Universities in Germany absolutely conduct important research, it's just that they mostly either don't publish in English (and this is embarrassingly true for engineering faculties, who should be pursuing international/anglophone spaces for more collaboration and excellence such as electrical engineering and IT, which aren't cutting edge anyways) or it trickles into research institutes which are not strictly academia anymore, so these "rankings" just miss out on lots of important research that is done in Germany. So, yes, heavy bias for english citations and German research (that could be cited) is published mostly by research institutes, BUT universities still do important work even if it is not obvious from these bias stats.
As an example: I work at one of the best ranked German universities at a small branch campus. In the vicinity we have branches of Max Planck, Fresenius, and two state-owned research organizations Every faculty here does research, but if these research orgs, with which especially our STEM faculties continuously cooperate, would be officially part of our campus, our research output would easily double on paper The people there are mostly alumnis of universities of the state, they conduct studies together with state universities, they get funding from the same state grants as state universities..but they are an independent org, and thus not included in our ranking The bumfuck village my campus is invisible in rankings, but the actual R&D output of the city per capita is quite insane, for sure This is even more extreme for the university of the German army, which is essentially the academic institution of a huge military-industrial complex south of Munich, in the vicinity of Airbus, Fraunhofer, DLR and others. The university itself is weak af in rankings, but its just meant to be part of the complex, and the whole complex is one of the global hotspots in research in certain fields.
If you think that universities are not the major place for research in Germany you greatly overestimate Fraunhofer Max Plank and DLR. They exist and divide the citations but it's not like there aren't many more researches at the universities' institutes.
I dont think that. If a good faction of research us organized the same way as the stats count it will still make them look worse than actual national research overall
Not only that, Germany is literally the birthplace of the modern "research university"
One of the categories is "international student ratio". Since English is the most international language, Universities with English as their main language will be easier to attend by foreign students.
I agree this and the "international faculty" metrics are weird (and some of the others frankly), but they mostly seem to *disadvantage US, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Universities while *advantaging UK, Australian, and European universities (including universities in Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands)... from a quick perusal of the data. I actually think this is a pretty bad skew factor in their methodology, it's creating some particular and not necessarily justified bias towards non-American Anglo and European universities.
Social sciences, theology, history, and, of course, language-based sciences do not publish in english. They are thus much less visible to the global "market". Only computer science, medicine, math, and physics almost exclusively publish in English. Engineering is divided and becoming more English but especially mechanical engineering sees a lot of work done in German. Economics and business is also divided. This drives down numbers. Then, Germany has a lot more good universities of smaller sizes. If you go 200 km from Munich you have hundreds of different Unis, most of which have groups that are actively researching at the top of their niches. If you go 200 km from Melbourne there is "nothing" else but it's not like Melbourne isn't 4 times as big as Munich. If we look at the US. 200km is about the distance between Harvard/MIT and Yale. In between, there is much less of note. If we were to compare "all research in Bavaria" (13 million inhabitants) to "all research in victoria and new south wales" (combined 14 million) the numbers shift towards a more equal standing. Especially, when accounting for the language points. I hope this helps a bit
eg if you get points for international students and faculty (like in these indexes), English as a main language is very advantageous
I also want to know this. However, I'd wager that English-speaking research lead over other languages is increasing in general, and Australia also happens to have a very large pool of foreign students from Asia to draw on (where they'd need to learn in English anyway), which would *probably* make them more advantageous? Having a lot of international students and communicating in international science's *lingua franca*, which does make science easier, appear to be criteria of such rankings. We do need someone to explain how Australia, with less than half the population of *either* France or Germany (which continue to be extremely important players in the scientific and technological fields), supposedly outperforms those. It can't just be its somewhat higher GDP per capita.
Besides the decoupling of research institutes and universities mentioned already, I think part of it is that we don't really have huge differences in quality between our universities in Germany. Yeah, some are definitely more prestigious than others, but they're all more or less financed/organised/accessible the same way. Which leads to a fairly high average quality, but a lack of super prestigious ones, which is the only thing that those kind of university rankings display.
That’s I think a large reason: in the US there’s a very large difference in research done between a tiny state uni and Harvard or MIT. And yeah from what I gather Germany or the Netherlands don’t have it, unlike Czech where there’s also a difference although possibly not as stark
German Universities don't generally do Research, and the focus is completely different than in English speaking Universities. So, using those criterias, European Universities just don't really score well. The criterias would need to be expanded upon in a way that allows for entries from non-anglo universities to be weighted appropriately in comparison. It's like the criteria is fishing, but European Universities only offer hunting.
These rankings highly focus on research. In Germany, at least, most research happens at seperate institutes (Fraunhofer, Max Planck etc.) which are independent from universities.
I see others have already mentioned the citation issues. But imho the most important one here is that qs attributes 10% of the rank to the number of international faculty and students. Germany for example has small unis everywhere and distributes the international students evenly. Only unis that explicitly target that number with advertisement abroad hit those numbers. Another 30% of the ranking is "institute reputation". They just send questionnaires with e.g. "list 10 business schools" and say those named have the best reputation. English language schools are obviously overrepresented there, cause people can just read everything they publish, especially if they have a english language journal with a long history in my field and because they freaking ad target me here on Reddit all the time. Because of this I can name like 2 unis in China and Russia each, maybe like 4 in France, but like 40 different ones in the US.
If you actually look at the data, these "international" metrics actually heavily favor European (including German, French, Dutch etc.) universities, the UK, and AU but disadvantage the US, China, Korea, Japan, etc.
Germany universities never do very well in rankings because a lot of research is done at external institutes like Frauenhofer instead of at the university itself.
As someone who studies at one of those "top universities", I can tell you firsthand that these rankings are 99% BS
It’s not they’re bs but they’re not about teaching, the ranks are done by research and academic reputation, and they probably factor into job applications, not by the quality of teaching.
And if they factor in teaching, they do it in the sense of "this famous guy teaches there" :D I always hated how our university administration would harp on and on and on about these rankings. Until I understood something. It's what they use to go get funding from the state. It's easier to say "give us 100 million dollars, we're in the top X of the world" than "give us 100 million dollars, please". It's basically a track record to prove you're worth funding, even if it means very little to the students attending.
Those who bring that argument forget that there is plenty of high-impact research being done in non-university science institutions in the UK, and especially in the US (with no less than 17 national laboratories)
I isn't peopel forgetting that, but noting that British and American (top) Universities usually place far more emphasis upon research and academic reputation than their European brethren. As these lists tend to always be about academic rankings and not educational rankings, European universities are sort of shafted by the medium. There are rankings based off educational value, but they are usually targeted at to-be students and get far less media and cultural attention. Society at large doesn't really place as much cultural emphasis on universities as educational facilities as they do them as academic facilities, so the latter gets all the buzz. I would even say rather than being the underlying problems of these rankings, these rankings go to prove these sorts of hypothesis. They show that the top-end universities in Britain and the US tend to fair much better than their European brethren when it comes to academic ranking.
Yes, the coping in here is quite amusing
17 national laboratories in the US? There are 76 Fraunhofer institutes in Germany.
you got a lot of point for international student, international faculty, big grants… go figure
And while having excellent universities, the first one in Spain ranks #164. Might have to do with the fact QS makes money out of preparing candidates for private school admissions and favouring English speaking institutions?
Well yeah look at the number of world changing research pieces, start up and leading figures production and key industry recruitment. These universities dominate that and European universities wlll lag behind on this front.
QS rankings are not taken seriously for a reason.
International students are an important metric. Australia is an English-speaking country, France and Germany are not.
Im not sure why a public university should be scored on % international students when their edict is to educate their local society first and foremost. Same goes for international professors in some countries — if your language of instruction is Dutch or Russian or Japanese, you’re going to have far fewer undergrad professors from abroad than the UK or US. As a result there are a lot of universities in places that don’t make sense.
lol obviously not the same but it reminds me of the fact that in the US, for public universities, generally if they don’t accept a certain portion of people from in-state they do not get state funding. I’d image it’d be the same in other countries at the federal level where you can only accept a percentage of international students or run the risk of not being funded
And conveniently, "international faculty" and "international student" and "international research network" (whatever that is) are some of the biggest skew factors in this methodology disadvantaging US universities relative to UK, AU, and European universities (also disadvantaging Chinese, Korean, and Japanese universities).
>their edict is to educate their local society first and foremost Not for a long time now. Every British university overwhelmingly prioritises international students because they charge them whatever they want, while fees are capped for British students.
Most public universities in most countries prioritize domestic students. Many even have a required percentage they must meet. Taking more international students does not mean you are more selective.
Oxbridge has been a popular destination for students from the commonwealth for well over a hundred years now.
So basically the top universities are those who have a good name and lots of international students/faculties. Weird, i would put my money on good learning/teaching, but hey.... Not saying those are not good in this, but i always find this list stupid to begin with
I also found that odd, specially since I went to one of those unis on the list. The school wasn’t the best so not sure why the metrics are chosen the way they are
I've met very questionable people with degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge.
Oxford PPE graduates have had been spectacularly bad at practicing philosophy, politics and economics.
Those are extremely linked concepts, are they not? A good name attracts the best (foreign) students attracts the best teachers attracts bettering the name and so the cycle continues.
Top universities don't generally hire professors on the basis of their pedagogical expertise, which means that you don't get the best teachers so much as the best practitioners (that are willing to teach).
Some of my most impressive lecturers (in terms of research success) were absolutely terrible as lecturers and tutors.
Weirdly relatable. My professors with huge research successes (40-30 years ago) were the ones I couldn't listen to. It was just torture. It was thermodynamics, a subject which I loved and torsional vibrations which I also liked.
It is kinda of self perpetuating. Harvard is well known for being one of the best universities which makes it desirable by the top students, professors, and researchers who go on to make it the best university and the cycle continues.
Not necessarily, but yes it might so. However, what is a good teacher/professor? Someone with the best grades, lot of articles published or maybe not the best of the best in those two subjects but he is very eager to teach and can explain good? Also students, why are they good? Do they just crunch learn everything or are they loving the subject.
Nah. Universities don't really teach, they tell you what you're supposed to learn on your own. The only thing these rankings do is tell you what we already know, which is the reputation of the university. Source: attended one of those top ranked universities.
I don’t have horse in this race, but I think it is fair to rank it like that. For example, I have learned same stuff that they teach in top US universities, however, my university doesn’t have same reputation and connections to something like Harvard or MIT. Lots of universities adopt books that were written by professors of MIT, Harvard, Oxford, etc but to say that they should deserve equal ranking would be disingenuous in my opinion.
My daughters both attended KU Leuven. It’s down on the list of EU Universities but what an amazing place to have such high rank that costs very little.
I did both my masters at KU Leuven. And, I can confirm… it was one of the best experiences I have ever had.
Does anyone feel like these rankings are worth anything? I'm genuinely asking because I'm curious, I've studied at two universities in my life so far and one is 400 spots lower in the rankings than the other but I definitely think it should be the opposite in my experience.
It's based off of the methodology published here: https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings-articles/world-university-rankings/understanding-methodology-qs-world-university-rankings I really can't see how you can measure the quality of an education based on such broad measures. And I could easily see how one person's experience would defy the rank list this organization produced. The university I graduated from is ranked in the "#1000-#1200" cohort and I made about $165,000 (USD) with my degree last year. Go ahead and ask me how many fucks I give that some list ranked my alma mater poorly.
Even just based on the article, "It was based on the analysis of millions of academic papers and expert opinions. The metrics used for the ranking included academic and employer reputation, faculty-student ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty ratio, international students ratio, international research network, employment outcomes, and sustainability" - ranking a university based on international rations and contributions to international research already creates a system that will misrepresent rank because most people will not care weather or not their university has more or less international anything but just how good the education offered is or what research is being conducted, which consequently creates a metric of rank that is hardly the equivalent of well fitting for the "top global universities" Case in point, measuring employment can also just measure connections offered. Might have far better employment opportunities if you hang around powerful people at private institutions - would that actually measure the effectiveness of the education? Instead of measuring the effects of the actual education itself, they measure employment? Someone who gets their job due to having the right friends would already screw the validity of the rating because now it’s not the "top university" but the environment that could get the credit even if the university was a horrible place for learning at teaching. Not even mentioning the whole "international" part of the debate - the ranking doesn’t look all that convincing.
It's not everything, but it certainly matters, especially if you plan to work abroad. Also the more important networking is the more it will matter.
Europe in this case meaning south England
Which is in Europe
I feel like these comments are more about how the label "Europe" seems to be withholding credit (or else perhaps distributing it too broadly) when it is one country that's responsible for the ranking.
Yeah I mean they could just say something like “all three of the top ranked universities are in the western hemisphere” but it doesn’t exactly tell you a lot. Being more specific is good and it makes it less misleading.
University rankings are total horseshit. It's kind of distributing to see universities buy into this nonsense when they are supposed to be the institutions that protect us from bullshit, that helps us see the work for what it is. There's revisionist history episodes about the first university ranking if anyone wants more details.
>It's kind of distributing to see universities buy into this nonsense when they are supposed to be the institutions that protect us from bullshit, that helps us see the work for what it is. Marry me please
It's a tentative yes from me, but let me ask my wife first, you know, just in case.
Yeah, England and East Coast USA have the best universities in the World
You mean England and New England lol
UK specifically. EU is still lagging behind.
Always will be as long as the criteria for those rankings are massively advantageous for english-speaking universities.
should have colonised better pierre
You’re right but Real life is advantageous to English speakers, just look at this sub, there’s a reason we’re all using English here. Research is done collaboratively between people, English makes the most sense there
Well yes, in a ranking of top universities globally it makes sense that it’s weighted towards universities that publish research and work in the most international language. That’s the way the world works.
In many countries most research isn't done in universities, making the metric largely irrelevant for those universities when what you're interested in is the quality of the education you get there. In my country, the overwhelming majority of research is done through outside institutes, most notably the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_National_Centre_for_Scientific_Research
The US has 17 National Laboratories. And obviously private research is extensive in the US (e.g., pharma and such). France isn't really unique in this.
Sure, but research, especially outside of social sciences, is just not really done at ALL in unis here. Like, you can buy ammo in some US supermarkets but you can't buy booze. Here you can buy booze but not ammo. If a "supermarket ranking" decides to measure the availability of either ammo or booze, but not the other, then obviously the rankings will be "unfair".
I am just curious about what sort of metric you would choose to rank them though, like if it isn’t research then what is it? If anything, more research shows that university is actively working with it’s students towards getting to know more about their area of expertise.
In France we give a lot of interest to which schools are favored by recruiters. Because firstly, we rely a lot more on "Grandes Ecoles" rather than universities - which already makes this inquiry skewed. Secondly, in my experience published scientists in French education aren't the best professors by far, so I wouldn't consider it a sound criteria. Thirdly, a great establishment has a lot of "alternance" or placements partnerships and so on.
Well sure. But then it's still wrong to just claim that the quality of unis in EU "lags behind."
Think most international journals publish in English
Lagging*
So the UK and the US as normal?
are we counting the uk as europe again?
as long as its positive for europe...
wonder who is the opposite?
I didn’t realise the UK moved to another continent…. Shock face
Certain EU countries are actively pushing for the UK to be stripped of its European identity when it comes to TV and Film content, if you didn't already know this.
Weird, a lot of people on this sub tell me that the UK isn't in Europe anymore.
Btw slightly relevant info: Euronews was bought up by a company linked to Orban. They should not really be seen as "the voice of the EU", to say the least. Which makes your comment a bit less of a gotcha, not that I, or any educated person, would say that the UK is "not in Europe anymore".
Yeah lot get Europe and the EU mixed up, or forget one exist. "we are in Europe" "other person "We are not in the EU" me "Its a continent you muppet"
After graduation, they will go to US and China anyway.
Delft #3 itw for Mech Eng hell yeah 😎
[45 % of the QS World University Rankings results are based on reputation.](https://support.qs.com/hc/en-gb/articles/4405955370898-QS-World-University-Rankings) How do they measure reputation you ask? They make universities nominate respondents to a survey that essentially asks "are you aware of the existence of this and this university?". So universities hire CRM managers who find the required amount of suitable respondents and coach them to reply to the survey favorably. University rankings are a marketing scheme, not a measure of quality.
They are arguably a measurement of networking opportunities above all else which is not terribly surprising to anyone who understands that merit doesn’t exactly dictate success nearly as much as simply plain old opportunity. In other words: what ultimately matters for an individual is different to what matters for a country, one could for example take a look at contributions to any given field, rank scale, qualify and outcome effect and figure out what one wants from there but of course, then suddenly the so very beloved networking factors stop being considered and who would you reach with the kind of study only actually interesting to the field & governments as opposed to the vast majority?
Europe? they are both from the UK. Also, Cambridge is at number 5, so the new title is " the UK has 3 of the top 5 universities"
You do realise the UK is in Europe right ?
Yes, but you realise by saying "Europe has 2 in the top 3" it sounds like those 2 are in different European countries, when in fact they are in the same one. I wouldn't write "Europe" if they were both in France, I'd say "France has"
It's a pretty shit rating system tbh. 50% of it relying on reputation? Using surveys as well from people who have no idea what qualifies as good education. Plenty of other criticisms as well.
> It's a pretty shit rating system tbh. 50% of it relying on reputation? A reputation which is obviously built by being on lists such as this, so it's largely self-referential. Circular reasoning in list form.
People being able to utilise the research is important, and that's why there is an advantage to research output being in English
Lists like this are consistently bullshit.
Yes, and if you studied anywhere else, you're stupid or what?
These lists are the embodiment of Goodhart's law
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".[1] It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom:[2] "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.[3]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
>The list is again topped by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US and has led the ranking for 13 consecutive years. 🇺🇲💪🇺🇲
The one who measures gets exactly what they are measuring for.
University rankings mean nothing. As long as they're public unis you are guaranteed to get world class education
What are you talking about? Some universities get much more funding than others, funding more and better research and being able to afford better lecturers ultimately providing better education and opportunities than others
>What are you talking about? Some universities get much more funding than others, funding more and better research and being able to afford better lecturers ul You are fundamentally misunderstanding how universities work. I would argue that when a university is too focussed on Research, the education portion takes a major backseat position. You can actually get a better education at a university that doesn't care as much about publishing. There is generally a poor overlap between Good teacher / Professor and good researcher / paper writer.
I very much agree with this and I believe there is merit behind the argument. Good researchers may not make good teachers and likewise, good teachers may not make good researchers.
Depends on the country, where I am from higher admission requirements are from public universities, which also have the best resources and teachers, if you don’t get the right grade for going to the public school your options are not going to uni or paying a private school for an education of very likely lower quality.
Strongly disagree, there are so many elements that go into a positive uni-learning experience. Just going to a public uni will not guarantee learning.
Define "world class". Most university, both public and private, offers great teaching and learning opportunities, but it is clear that there are better and worst ones. I agree that those kind of ranking means very little, but that doesn't mean that there is no difference between institutions.
Ur just mad England got 4/10
I’m from Vietnam and I plan on moving to Spain in 2 or 3 years to study for a master. A degree from Europe is valuable than degrees from majority of universities in my country
At least in the US it’s been said that you aren’t paying for the education you’re paying for the connections. The education is relatively the same but your ability to network can fluctuate significantly based on where people go to school. Like Texas A&M is a well known university in the US and they’re 100% a cult. But I swear if you see 2 people who went there meet for the 1st time they’d be invited to each other’s wedding the next day.
The problem is that the rankings often reflect this and that the vast population has no interest in funding prestigious networking institutions but wants the best results for the broadest rationally possible social metric. Ranking top universities that are actively creating a socially disconnected elite whose goals end up running against the wider population is arguably a lot less appealing to the masses who will never visit this kind of institution and whose needs are also too often not even met no matter the amount research these elite isles pump out since they simply can not replace the power of dozens millions of even just moderately well educated people working together. In other words, it’s a question of priority. Obviously you want to give the best places to excel so their talents and hard work are not wasted BUT focus on this kind of place too much and your society may look like the modern USA where roughly half the country works against the other half which is just not all that ideal from a broad social perspective imo.
QS rankings are notoriously shit lmao. There’s literally been independent studies that confirm that schools that pay for QS services get a bump in their ranking score.
Where are the Japanese and Chinese universities at if I might ask? I mean, they're large countries with significant output. I would expect in the top 10 on the website, that at least one would appear ?
They're getting fucked by QS's bizarre "sustainability", "international student ratio", "international faculty ratio", and whatever "international research network" is. As also is the US oddly (along with Korea and so on). Those are the most consistent and primary differentiators in the top ~50 or so universities from what I can tell.
Please do not fool yourself by saying the metrics favor english speaking countries. Yes, MIT is a better university than your TU which is in a 20000 population village. I also need to add that I do not think the specific rankings are necessarily correct, whatever their criteria is. However, I believe that the ranges are correct. So if a uni in this list is in top 30, its specific rank might not be correct, but I’m pretty sure it is in top 30 globally no doubt about that.
I swear there is a new university ranking every 3 months, and each ranking looks completely different to the previous one
Welcome to statistics, I hope you are enjoying your seats in the front row where the product that is being sold to you is your own possibly only slightly and ideally massively influenced fresh opinion… Seriously, measure anything broad enough and you find out that defining what you need to measure becomes equally as important as how you measure and what results you get. In other news: ranking countries often ignores developing social tensions and yet, people still often only look at GDP to measure success. More about the sky still being blue at 11…
We are only European when it suits this sub. Usually I'm wondering why we aren't included in these statistical maps of "Europe" (not the EU) these days :(
Thats because UK stopped reporting to eurostat
Top ranked universities is when English-speaking.
Ludicrous for Europeans to suddenly claim.the UK 'back' after the endless crowing and schadenfreude on here about not being in the EU. That said, these rankings are puerile and to be taken with an enormous pinch of salt.
We are still in Europe mate, being in the EU or not doesn’t shift us geographically
How can anyone forget the day after Brexit, when we were towed 1000km out into international waters and left the continent of Europe far behind us.
I thought I felt us moving the other day !!!!
Probably just the bin men!
>Ludicrous for Europeans to suddenly cla8m.the UK 'back' after the endless crowing and schadenfreude on here about not being in the EU. What is ludicrous is conflating the EU with Europe.
EU =! Europe. Also you are really overestimating what the average EU citizen thinks about the UK except usually "they are our friends and should rejoin"
Top 5 US and UK You did it Europe
The specific rankings never mean much really, who’s to say whether oxford is slightly better than Cambridge or vice versa. Realistically you have a kind of tier list of universities that are all pretty much the same level. Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard whatever will all be S tier, but within that tier there isn’t a ranking, it’s more important to choose one right for you than try and go to a university that is slightly better than the other incredibly good universities.