But I know a significant amount of scientific papers are published in other languages than English, e.g. in Chinese language on Wanfang Data (www.wanfangdata.com - affiliate of Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology). This is probably the case in many other non-English languages.
Except that it's comparing a capital sum with an annual expenditure, which is rather misleading. A capital sum will ordinarily be around 20x as big as the annual income it generates (though no doubt Harvard gets better returns than the average nonprofit).
This will merely reflect reputation. How many people in academia have been at Harvard long enough to have an actual opinion?
Question: if China built the best university in the world today, how long would it take to reach number 1 on the list? I think decades. So much for having a yearly list.
"Our rankings contain two strands of peer review. The more important is academic opinion, worth 40 per cent of the total score available in the rankings. The opinions are gathered, like the rest of the rankings data, by our partners QS Quacquarelli Symonds (www.topuniversities.com) which has built up a database of e-mail addresses of active academics across the world. They are invited to tell QS what area of academic life they come from, choosing from science, biomedicine, technology, social science or the arts and humanities. They are then asked to list up to 30 universities that they regard as the leaders in the academic field they know about, and in 2007 we have strengthened our measures to prevent anyone voting for his or her own institution.
This year we have the opinions of 5,101 experts, of whom 41 per cent are in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 30 per cent in the Americas, and 29 per cent in the Asia-Pacific region."
The rest of the score is split:
-10% which university do recruiters favor
-20% publication count
-20% student stuff, like teacher-to-student ratio (the only example they give)
-10% I couldn't find.
So there's definitely two selection effects: how did they collect their addresses, and who decided to answer a Times Online survey. I'm pretty sure my advisor wouldn't do it. Too busy.
Furthermore, they don't give the detailed methodology, and they admit to changing it since the first published results.
Overall, it seems like an honest effort, but what's the point? Would you advise a young person to make a decision based on this ranking?
And we Brazilians are just happy to see that USP and Unicamp got into the list (175 and 177). I do believe, however, that Unicamp got really impressive scores for quality of faculty.
Wow... not one mention of the Indian Institutes of Technology which may just be the toughest engineering schools on the planet. Just have a look at their entrance exams...
High entrance requirements are only one of the factors which define a good university. I'd say that the quality of teaching and the quality of research performed are more important than the quality of incoming students.
The IITs have a good undergraduate program, one of the best in the world. The graduate and research output of the IITs is nowhere as good. In fact , the research in particular is fairly mediocre, compared to say Stanford or MIT.
I went to #70, Nottingham. At the time, it had a reputation for being insanely difficult to get in to study mathematics there, which is why I applied ;-)
In some countries this is the result of a deliberate policy. The German and Dutch governments, perhaps from fear of elitism, try to ensure that all universities are roughly equal in quality.
