Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are the runaway winners in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2014, published on 25 February.
Between them, the two institutions, both based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, account for 14 out of 16 top spots in science disciplines and 20 of the 30 top spots in all subjects.
Although Harvard comes out first in all life sciences and mathematics, MIT takes top spots in engineering, physics and chemistry. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley, tops the table in environmental sciences, and Stanford University, in California, leads the field in statistics.
The top ten for most subjects in the rankings are populated by the usual suspects in the United States and the United Kingdom. Outside these regions, the most successful institution is the National University of Singapore, which clocks up eight top ten positions. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich); the University of Melbourne, Australia; and the University of Tokyo all make top tens four times.
QS, a London-based higher-education media company, compiles the rankings on the basis of a survey — aggregated over three years — of 62,000 academics and 27,000 employers, and of a measure of citations per paper, sourced from the database Scopus. They also include a score based on the h-index of faculty — a measure of both productivity and citation. The components are combined with weightings adapted by discipline to reflect employer preferences and citation patterns.
Rankings such as these have come in for criticism in recent years (see ‘University rankings ranked’) because of their methodologies and data sourcing. Despite this, they remain influential, particularly among prospective students and policy-makers.
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Sincerely speaking, I consider the statement “Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are the runaway winners in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2014…” like a trivial mockery to the suffering humanity. There is a general agreement that CVD, T2DM, and Cancer are today’s growing epidemics. Neither Harvard University nor Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) proved unable to halt these epidemics. In my opinion, what accounts for this immense tragedy is that the best scientific insitutte around the world, including the two runaway winners in the QS World University Rankings, continue to overlook QBS Constitution-Dependent, Inherited Real Risks, bedside recognized from individual’s birth, i.e., with a common stethoscope, and removed by Quantum Therapy (References on request).
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The main difference between a university and a scientific research institute is that the former has graduates students and often post-doctoral researchers as well as laboratory and field technicians. Grads and post-docs arrive with a reasonable assumption that earning a graduate degree or completing a post-doc sill lead to career advancement. For over 20 years, there has been no guarantee of such for even well-performing (and lucky) grads and post-docs.
A truer measure of a successful graduate program would be measurement of student outcomes, as the U.S. National Research council did a few years ago. Some programs with many published research articles have low outcomes, because students from those programs are lucky even to get interviews. Since there is no consequence for the grad program if students go nowhere, such programs have no pragmatic incentive to change.
I recommend that all surveys, if they are to be taken more seriously, include the results of student outcomes. Also, the surveyors should check with the students. Just because a graduate is employed does not mean that graduate is employed at the level of his/her degree or even in the field. I recommend as well that countries that are enacting austerity measures cut the money pipe to those programs whose students are thrown out like yesterday’s newspaper.