News & Views item - November 2004 |
The Times Higher Education Supplement Ranks Six Australian Universities in World's Top 50. (November 5, 2004)
The sixteen page supplement lists what it considers to be the world's 200 best institutions of higher education and while many of those appearing appear in Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Institute of Higher Education ranking of the world's top 500 universities the order is very different. The is not surprising, the criteria used and the weighting are very different.
Editor of THES, John O'Leary says, "By taking account of the views of academics from across five continents and using the most up-to-date statistics, our ranking gives an informed picture of the world's top universities." Jiao Tong University's Institute of Higher Education use the criteria set out in the table below:
A complete explanation of the criteria and weightings is given at
http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/Methodology.htm
The Times Higher Education Supplement's Table of the top 50 (below) uses the criteria and weighting of:
Peer Review Score (50%)
International Faculty Score (5%)
International Students Score (5%)
Faculty/Student Score (20%)
Citations/Faculty Score (20%)
It is immediately apparent that much more weighting is given to a university's research prowess by the Shanghai university's ranking system then that of The Time's where for example peer review assessment counts for half of the score. So it oughtn't to come as a surprise that relative rankings show differences. This increased as one drops down through the table.
Details of the definitions of the terms are found in the sixteen page supplement available as a pdf file.
Singling out the Australia group in the top THES 50:
University |
THES Ranking |
Jiao Tong University Ranking |
ANU |
16 |
53 |
Melbourne |
23 |
83 |
Monash |
33 |
between 202-301 |
New South Wales |
36 |
between 153-203 |
Sydney |
40 |
between 101-149 |
Queensland |
49 |
between 101-149 |
Comparison of the two ranking systems yields the following data for the THES top 25. The top 9 THES universities are all within the top 11 of the Jiao Tong rankings, after that the spread increases sometimes markedly.
University |
THES Ranking |
Jiao Tong University Ranking |
Harvard | 1 | 1 |
Uni. California, Berkeley | 2 | 4 |
MIT | 3 | 5 |
Cal Tech | 4 | 6 |
Oxford | 5 | 8 |
Cambridge | 6 | 3 |
Stanford | 7 | 2 |
Yale | 8 | 11 |
Princeton | 9 | 7 |
ETH Zurich | 10 | 27 |
London School of Economics | 11 | not in top 100 |
Tokyo | 12 | 14 |
Chicago | 13 | 10 |
Imperial College London | 14 | 23 |
Texas, Austin | 15 | 40 |
Australian National University | 16 | 53 |
Beijing | 17 | not in top 100 |
National University of Singapore | 18 | not in top 100 |
Columbia University | 19 | 9 |
Uni. of California, S.F. | 20 | 17 |
McGill | 21 | 61 |
Melbourne | 22 | 82 |
Uni. of California, San Diego | 24 | 13 |
Johns Hopkins | 25 | 22 |
A fuller rundown of Australia's top 14 universities as assessed by The Times Higher Education Supplement is given below.