The Times Higher Education Supplement (from the United Kingdom) has just posted its 2005 rankings of what it considers the best universities in the world. (One needs a subscription or a 14-day free trial to see this link.) Some of the entries make sense ---you'll notice plenty of the usual suspects---and others bring out the big WTF.
I found this via a press release from Cornell, which is 14th this year and 23rd last year. Caltech is #8 this year and was #4 last year. (#1 is Haaaaavaaaad, #2 is TOIT, #3 is Cambridge, #4 is Oxford, and then we go back to the US for a few rankings.) There are also some exceptionally strange choices. According to these guys, UCSF is 17th in the world (tied with U of Chicago). WTF? Isn't UCSF practically 17th in the state? Well, it's probably a little higher than that (maybe 11th or 12th?), but how did this happen? (Last year it was 20th.) Not that the specific numbers actually mean much of anything, but this entry is really absurd. Also, U Mass Amherst (#68, down from #45) shows up just ahead of Brown (#71) and U of Rochester shows up decently ahead of Dartmouth. Among the more precipitous drops was experienced by Georgia Tech, which went from #65 to #147. (Maybe word of the decimation of its math department has already gotten around?)
Now, rankings only give leading-order information, but how does UCSF get to #17? I know it has some good medical stuff and bio stuff and I certainly don't mean to suggest it doesn't have anything else that's good, but Chicago is an absolute powerhouse and so are practically all the other schools that are up there.
The title is a reference to a particular Budweiser commercial, by the way.
4 days ago
3 comments:
UCSF is phenomenal in biophysics and chemistry. All that California biotech money? That's going to UCSF.
Yes, but the other schools up there are all top in just about everything.
I admit I should have used stronger positive adjectives for such programs in the entry because I don't want to minimize how good those programs are, but even one phenomenal strength can't compete with schools with tons of phenomenal strengths when one is speaking in generalities. (Naturally, when deciding on a graduate program, one doesn't care about the generalities.) It still seems like UCSF is out of place up there.
Actually, I think a good deal of that money may be going to UC Davis and UCSD as well.
Brian Leiter blogged extensively on this here. He agrees that the results are skewed towards biology/medicine. Also, apparently they claim only to be counting schools with an undergraduate program so UCSF shouldn't have been included at all.
I don't pay much attention to these things but it was nice to see UCB score highly.
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