Preview of the 2006 THES World University Rankings

THES has just released a preview of its 2006 university ranking exercise. See The Times Online. This includes the top 100 universities with their positions in 2005. Here are some initial observations.

• There are, like last year, some dramatic changes. I counted over twenty universities that went up or down twenty places. That does not include any university that slipped out of the top 100 altogether. This is a bad sign. If the rankings were accurate in both 2005 and in 2006 there would be very little change from one year to another. Changes like this are only likely to occur if there has been a change in the scoring method, data collection or entry errors, corrections of errors or variations in survey bias.
• The Ecole Polytechnique in Paris has fallen from tenth place to 37th. Very probably, this is because QS has corrected an error in the counting of faculty in 2005, but we will have to wait until October 13th to be sure.
• Two Indian institutions or groups of institutions are in the top 100. The Times Online list refers to "Indian Inst of Tech" and "Indian Inst of Management", obscuring whether this refers to Institutes as in 2005 or Institute as in 2004. Whether singular or plural, a bit of digging needs to be done.
• A number of Eastern US universities have done dramatically well. For example, Vanderbilt has risen from 114th to 53rd, Emory from 141st to 56th, Pittsburgh from 193rd to 86th and Dartmouth from 117th to 61st. Does this represent a genuine improvement or is it an artifact of the distribution of the peer review survey, with QS trying to rectify an earlier bias to the West coast?
• There are a couple of cases of pairs of universities in the same city where one goes up and one goes down. See Munich University and the Technical University of Munich and the University of Lausanne and EPF Lausanne. Is it possible that in previous years these institutions got mixed up and have now been disentangled?
• There are dramatic rises by a couple of New Zealand universities, Auckland and Otago, and some Asian universities, Tsing Hua, Osaka and Seoul National. Again, this is probably a result of the way the peer review was conducted.
• Duke falls a little bit, suggesting that the errors in its 2005 score have not been corrected.
• Overall, it looks like the rankings have changed largely because of the peer review. It is hard to see how an increase in the number of international students or faculty or citations of research papers that were started several years ago could produce such remarkable changes in a matter of months. This time the review, and perhaps the recruiter ratings also, seems to have worked to the advantage of British and Eastern US universities and a few select East Asian, Swiss and New Zealand institutions.