Published by the Times of London in collaboration with Quacquarelli Symonds, the THES global rankings attempts to assess the quality of all of the world’s top universities.
Last published: November 2007
Scope: Global
Focus: Overall institutional quality
On the web: http://www.topuniversities.com/
Transparency: Moderate, because 40% of the overall score is derived from a single measure, a peer review by over 5,000 academics worldwide. Neither the survey instrument nor the statistics underlying the selection of the peer reviewers themselves appears to be public. The overall rankings are probably very sensitive to the way in which this review is carried out, as borne out by the observed volatility in some of the rankings from year to year. If you’re a university president, and a member of your governing board asks what you’re doing to improve your school’s standing in the THES scoreboard, what can you say? Improve your reputation? Operationally, how do you do that?
Top Tier placement: Harvard (1), Yale (T-2), Princeton (6), Chicago (T-7), Columbia (11), Pennsylvania (14), Stanford (19), Cornell (T-20), Brown (32), Dartmouth (T-71).
Probable impact: Significant. There are more than 12,000 web sites currently linked to this survey, so it clearly has global attention.
Analysis: The ranking methodology behind THES rankings illustrates the difficulty of attempting to rank universities in so many different countries with such wildly different levels of resources and expectations. Of the many objections that have been raised to this scorecard, probably the most problematic are associated with its heavy dependence upon the reputation survey. Absent a full disclosure of the methodology behind that survey, these rankings will always be subject to broad skepticism.
Summary: Any attempt to create a global scoreboard of university quality is going to be subject to intense scrutiny. The THES world ranking is probably as good as we’ve got right now, but the Insider questions whether such a broad ranking system that depends so heavily on perceived quality makes any sense.
