US News Global University Ranking: North America in the Top 100

[dimondpark]

This was for something else, but I decided to share it here for whomever is interested, Merci.

US News' global ranking is much more reputation and peer review based then their domestic undergrad ranking, which adds an emphasis on class size, alumni giving and other peripheral criteria.

FYI The Overall Top 10 is as follows:
#1 Harvard University(USA)
#2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology(USA)
#3 Stanford University(USA)
#4 University of California-Berkeley(USA)
#5 Oxford University(UK)
#6 Columbia University(USA)
#7 California Institute of Technology(USA)
#8 University of Washington(USA)
#9 Cambridge University(UK)
#10 Johns Hopkins University(USA)

To be clear, for any school to make the top 100 in the world is very impressive, these are all respected institutions.

2021 US News and World Report Best Global Universities Ranking

Top 100 BY COMBINED STATISTICAL AREA
by highest ranking school per CSA

Boston-Worcester-Providence
#1 Harvard University
#2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
#57 Boston University

San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland
#3 Stanford University
#4 University of California-Berkeley
#15 University of California-San Francisco
#81 University of California-Santa Cruz

New York-Newark
#6 Columbia University
#11 Princeton University
#11 Yale University
#29 New York University
#62 Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
#76 Rockefeller University

Los Angeles-Long Beach
#7 California Institute of Technology
#13 University of California-Los Angeles
#70 University of Southern California
#78 University of California-Irvine

Seattle-Tacoma
#8 University of Washington

Washington-Baltimore-Arlington
#10 Johns Hopkins University
#60 University of Maryland-College Park

Philadelphia-Reading-Camden
#14 University of Pennsylvania

Chicago-Naperville:
#15 University of Chicago
#24 Northwestern University

Detroit-Warren-Ann Arbor
#17 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Toronto, Ontario
#17 University of Toronto

San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad
#21 University of California-San Diego

Ithaca, New York
#22 Cornell University

Raleigh-Durham-Cary
#23 Duke University
#36 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Vancouver, British Columbia
#31 University of British Columbia

St Louis-St Charles-Farmington
#33 Washington University in St Louis

Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown
#38 University of Texas-Austin

Madison-Janesville-Beloit
#41 University of Wisconsin-Madison

Pittsburgh-New Castle-Weirton
#43 University of Pittsburgh
#94 Carnegie Mellon University

Columbus-Marion-Zanesville
#41 Ohio State University-Columbus

Minneapolis-St Paul
#47 University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Montreal, Quebec
#51 McGill University

Santa Maria-Santa Barbara
#56 University of California-Santa Barbara

Denver-Aurora
#59 University of Colorado-Boulder

Champaign-Urbana
#60 University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

Atlanta-Athens-Clarke County-Sandy Springs
#66 Georgia Institute of Technology
#71 Emory University

Sacramento-Roseville
#66 University of California-Davis

Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Bristol
#72 Vanderbilt University

State College-DuBois
#75 Pennsylvania State University-University Park

Tucson-Nogales
#97 University of Arizona

Lansing-East Lansing
#100 Michigan State University

https://www.usnews.com/education/bes...ities/rankings

EDIT: I have to point out this observation, American public universities shine on the world stage at graduate level-just look at this ranking! WOW.

[muppet]

Aren't these lists mainly based on funding and budgets, rather than academic quality/ excellence? Not the latter because it's impossible to measure.

[dimondpark]

Originally Posted by muppet

Aren't these lis
ts mainly based on funding and budgets, rather than academic quality/ excellence? Not the latter because it's impossible to measure.

Well, the methodology in this case is pretty solid imo, because it focuses on peer based reputation, citations, publications, and collaboration, which are quantifiable factors.

RANKING INDICATOR WEIGHT
Global research reputation 12.5%
Regional research reputation 12.5%
Publications 10%
Books 2.5%
Conferences 2.5%
Normalized citation impact 10%
Total citations 7.5%
Number of publications that are among the 10% most cited 12.5%
Percentage of total publications that are among the 10%
most cited 10%
International collaboration – relative to country 5%
International collaboration 5%

https://www.usnews.com/education/bes...es/methodology

That said, no ranking is 100% perfect, this is US News' take.

[dimondpark]

The US News domestic undergrad ranking focuses much more on things like student/teacher ratio, alumni giving, whereas the global rankings tend to be much more in line with this:

Rank University No. of Nobel Laureates
Boston:
#1 Harvard 161
#5 MIT 97

New York:
#6 Columbia 96
#10 Princeton 69
#11 Yale 65
#19 NYU 38
#19 Rockefeller 38

Bay Area:
#3 UC Berkeley 110
#7 Stanford 84

Chicago:
#4 University of Chicago 100

Los Angeles:
#8 CalTech 76
#30 UCLA 25

Washington:
#17 Johns Hopkins 39

Philadelphia:
#21 Pennsyvlvania 36

Other US Universities in Top 30:
#12 Cornell 61
#24 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 30
#24 University of Minnesota 30
#26 UC San Diego 27
#28 University of Michigan 26
#28 University of Wisconsin-Madison 26
#30 Washington University in St Louis 25


[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation

[Razor]

Interesting list, and the top 10 makes sense to me..All well known reputed universities..I'm just a little surprised that Montreal's McGill didn't rank higher then 51 on that list..At least top 25-30..I just thought that it had more pedigree..In Canada only I suppose.

[iheartthed]

University of Washington in the top 10 seems like a bit of a surprise to me. Particularly because other more reputable schools are ranked below it.

[Northern Light]

Originally Posted by Razor

Interesting list, and the top 10 makes sense to me..All well known reputed universities..I'm just a little surprised that Montreal's McGill didn't rank higher then 51 on that list..At least top 25-30..I just thought that it had more pedigree..In Canada only I suppose.

There are other well reputed rankings:

Times Higher Education:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com...sc/cols/scores

McGill gets #42 on their list.

QS:

https://www.topuniversities.com/univ...-rankings/2020

Here McGill gets #35

*****

It shows that there's a fair bit of range.

Most surveys will have near identical lists for the Top 5, maybe one different or two contiguous spots swapped.

Once you get outside the top 10, things start to vary more and more.

None of these surveys have objective truth in them really.

That's not a knock.

There's utility in some of the benchmarks.

But, for instance, # of citations will favour large universities with a wide breadth of programs; but doesn't really speak to a University with a clear niche strength that's smaller.

A university that might be excellent for undergraduate may have relatively few graduate programs, and fewer citations accordingly.

Broad reputation in which you take a poll (perhaps targeted to faculties around the world) and ask people to name the top universities will naturally favour those with the most graduates/alumni.

Nothing wrong with that; but it certainly doesn't speak to an objective truth about quality.

[Northern Light]

This survey is interesting as it ranks countries by # of universities in the Top 100; but then shows you the totals out to the top 10000

http://www.webometrics.info/en/distribution_by_country

Its as subjective as the rest of course.

Something that strikes me though, with all these surveys is the huge bias towards ango-countries.

The U.S., U.K, and Canada show as 1, 2 and 3 in this page, but the numbers are similar elsewhere.

This makes me wonder if:

a) Surveys are sent out/taken in English
b) Citations are only/disproportionately counted from English Language Papers

It seems a bit skewed.

[Steely Dan]

the university of california system really shines here.

9 campuses in the global top 100 all within one US state's public university system.

that's extremely impressive.

[dimondpark]

Some of US News' 2021 Graduate School Rankings:

2021 Business:
#1 Stanford University
#2 University of Pennyslvania(Wharton)
#3 Northwestern University(Kellogg)
#3 University of Chicago(Booth)
#5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology(Sloan)
#6 Harvard University
#7 University of California-Berkeley(Haas)
#8 Columbia University
#9 Yale University
#10 New York University(Stern)

2021 Law:
#1 Yale University
#2 Stanford University
#3 Harvard University
#4 Columbia University
#4 University of Chicago
#6 New York University
#7 University of Pennsylvania(Carey)
#8 University of Virginia
# Northwestern University(Pritzker)
#9 University of California-Berkeley
#9 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

2021 Primary Care Medicine:
#1 Unversity of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
#2 University of California-San Francisco
#2 University of Washington
#4 Baylor School of Medicine
#5 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
#6 University of Virginia
#7 Oregon Health & Safety University
#7 University of California-Davis
#9 University of Colorado
#10 Harvard Unversity

2021 Internal Medicine:
#1 Johns Hopkins University
#2 University of California-San Francisco
#3 Harvard University
#4 Unversity of Pennsylvania
#5 Duke University
#6 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
#7 Columbia University
#8 Stanford University
#9 Washington University in St Louis
#10 University of Washington

2021 Engineering:
#1 Massachusetts Insititute of Technology
#2 Stanford University
#3 University of California-Berkeley
#4 California Institute of Technology
#4 Carnegie Mellon University
#4 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
#7 Purdue University-West Lafayette
#8 Georgia Institute of Technology
#9 University of California-San Diego
#10 University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

[mhays]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

University of Washington in the top 10 seems like a bit of a surprise to me. Particularly because other more reputable schools are ranked below it.

It's a research juggernaut, in addition to being a great school in a lot of fields like medicine. Any ranking of public universities in the US will typically have it in the top tier.

But the rankings are half-assed.

First, what they count might have little to do with what you or I consider important. Pick any aspect and you can slice it apart. Even something like "quality of education in biology fields" (not a criteria here) has many factors. Do grads have the basic skills/knowledge to be immediately employable? Have they learned to think around corners or come up with new ideas? Do they have grounding beyond their specialties? Can they write decent memos? And so on.

Much of the problem is the same one we see on SSP constantly...many people like "quantifiable" things, but reality isn't always quantifiable. So magazines, academic studies, and bankers do the quantifiable stuff and gloss over the rest. Others, like entrepreneurs and real estate developers, often succeed by going with non-quantifiables -- trends they think are coming, qualitative ideas -- along with enough pro forma data to make their partners and lenders happy.

[MolsonExport]

The validity of this list, along with any others, can be ascertained to the extent to which there is convergence along the various lists. The top 10-15 universities worldwide are very likely to appear in the top 20 on the different lists, with slightly different rankings, but then things start to fall apart. Things like satellite campuses, presence/absence of a medical school, and STEM vs. comprehensive focus can further muddy the waters.

US- (UK-) based rankings systems will inevitably be biased towards US- (UK)-based universities. They pick the criteria and the importance rated (weightings) to each criteria.

[ocman]

The whole University of California system dominates the public uni sphere. There’s a number of private British schools that I’d consider more prestigious than a lot of the ranking, but a big influence of world reputation is whether they admit a large number of foreign students, so that these universities are even talk about in some countries. American universities tend to be a more realistic option for foreign students than a lot of other unis. A lot of these schools, I’d consider just average national universities that aren’t difficult to get into, but they admit a large number of foreign students and that makes the name more desirable.

[MolsonExport]

The proportion of foreign students is highest in the UK, Australia, and Canada.

By 2017, the U.S, U.K., Canada and Australia received 40% of international students. The U.S. counted 1.2 million in 2018. Australia had nearly 1.3 million in 2017. There were 642,480 in Canada in 2019 and there were 458,520 during the 2017/18 academic year in the United Kingdom.

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/educat...sh_4bcf6fc3-en

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by ocman

The whole University of California system dominates the public uni sphere.

the big 10 is also well represented as far as public universities go, with 8 on the list.

northwestern makes it 9 for the big 10, but it's the lone private school in the conference.

[sentinel]

There is some merit and I highly doubt many of these placements would change, but the magazine's ranking system has been criticized before, for their methodologies, bias towards bi-coastal schools, ignoring critical factors that other ranking global ranking systems use, etc.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/educa...ll-ridiculous/

[ocman]

International students in the US tend to be highly concentrated to specific areas in the US, with the universities on the coasts taking the bulk of the country’s international students. Not coincidentally in every country where specific areas/universities take the bulk of foreign students, these are the universities that rise above the rest of their country in these world lists. There’s a few European Union universities that are highly regarded in their country, but due to their low volume of foreign applicants for whatever reason, handicap their standings on these lists.

[iheartthed]

I don't think these lists are biased to the coasts. They're biased to the Ivy League.

[jg6544]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

University of Washington in the top 10 seems like a bit of a surprise to me. Particularly because other more reputable schools are ranked below it.

Same here.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by jg6544

Same here.

Washington is a good school, but not THAT good. I visited there for grad school because it was the first place that I got an acceptance notice from. It's nice, but it's not even the best school with that name, nor is it the third best school in the PAC-12 (that would be UCLA).