THE World University Rankings 2016-17: The results, and what they mean
The results of the 2016-2017 Times Higher Education World University Rankings are out, and a UK institution tops the list for the first time in their 12-year history.
The University of Oxford claims the number one spot, swapping places with the California Institute of Technology which had held the top spot for the last five years.
The rankings, published annually since 2004, tell the story of higher education's fascinating development in recent years - from the dominance of a seemingly untouchable group of elite institutions, to the growing visibility of institutions from the east.
But before we look at that, you probably want to know who made the top 10.
You can access the rankings in full (all 980 institutions) here.
So, with the exception of the change in the number one institution, it's all pretty similar to last year. In fact, the top 10 is the same as it was in last year's rankings, with the addition of UC Berkeley, which joins the University of Chicago at number 10.
The stability is also fairly evident in the top 200. The US has by far the most institutions in this "best of the best" category (universities in the top 200 can claim to be in the top 1% of universities worldwide), with the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada not far behind.
But the top 200 is just a small part of what these rankings can tell us. Look at the top 980 in full, and you will see a very different picture. The US and the UK are still the most represented nations, but in third it's Japan, fourth is China.
If you were to add Hong Kong's institutions to the China total, it would overtake Japan.
China's rise has been documented before in world university rankings analysis, and it is significant. Yes, there is investment in higher education, and that brings success (you can attract top scholars, after all). Undoubtedly this can boost institutions' performance in the rankings.
But we also carry out the world's largest invitation only survey of academics worldwide, to find out who they think are the best universities in their field. About 20,000 scholars' opinions were included this year, and more and more of them are picking out Chinese institutions.
Despite these rumblings, however, we have yet to see an Asian university break into the top 10. If investment rates rise, and reputations continue to grow, is it only a matter of time?
We will see. But in the meantime, it is the UK's University of Oxford that is celebrating top spot, ahead of a familiar group of elite Western institutions.
You can read the full methodology of the World University Rankings here.
Professor at The Ohio State University, CSO of Protein Capture Science, LLC.
8 年It's been said that if Universities were ranked by their impact on their students' lives, the the top 20 would all be community colleges and trade schools. It has also been said that most people would place Princeton Law School in the top 20, despite the fact that Princeton does not have a law school. My point is that if you base rankings on specific things that specific universities do well, and then have more than a third of the ranking based on "reputation", which most often is simply a carryover from previous rankings, then the results are highly predictable. Large land grant universities have a very different mission than ultra-selective private schools, and having them ranked on the same list is like trying to determine whether a Ferrari is better than a Ford F350. It all depends on the mission. I say this having taught at Princeton, and at Ohio State University, and having attended Caltech as an undergrad. Rankings should all depend on the mission of the University.
Code Monkey. Bringing about the AI doom. Also, Cognitive Science.
8 年Does this ranking serve any other purpose than to evaluate the quality of higher education at a very general level?
Teacher
8 年As far as UK and US universities go, I do not think that high tuition fees mean high quality; a good indicator of quality is a low client drop-out rate.
joserailway
8 年Dromen is geen realiteit !