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.