Guide to the World’s Top Universities

Guide to the World’s Top Universities: Exclusively Featuring the Official Times Higher Education Supplement QS World University Rankings. John O’Leary, Nunzio Quacquarelli and Martin Ince (QS Quacquarelli Symonds Limited/Blackwell Publishing 2006)

Here are some preliminary comments on the THES-QS guide. A full review will follow in a few days.

The Times Higher Education Supplement and QS Quacquarelli Symonds have now produced a book, published in association with Blackwell’s. The book incorporates the 2006 world university rankings of 200 universities and the rankings by peer review of the top 100 universities in disciplinary areas. It also contains chapters on topics such as choosing a university, the benefits of studying abroad and tips for applying to university. There are profiles of the top 100 universities in the THES-QS rankings and a directory containing data about over 500 universities

The book is attractively produced and contains a large amount of information. A superficial glance would suggest that it would be a very valuable resource for anybody thinking about applying to university or anybody comparing universities for any reason. Unfortunately, this would be a mistake.

There are far too many basic errors. Here is a list, almost certainly incomplete. Taken individually they may be trivial but collectively they create a strong impression of general sloppiness.

“University of Gadjah Mada” (p91). Gadjah Mada was a person not a place.

In the factfile for Harvard (p119) the section Research Impact by Subject repeats information given in the previous section on Overall Research Performance.

The factfile for Yale (p 127) reports a Student Faculty Ratio of 34.3 , probably ten times too high.

The directory (p 483) provides data about something called the “Official University of Califormia, Riverside”. No doubt someone was cutting and pasting from the official university website.

Zurich, Geneva, St Gallen and Lausanne are listed as being in Sweden (p 462-3)

Kyungpook National University, Korea, has a Student faculty Ratio of 0:1. (p 452)

New Zealand is spelt New Zeland (p441)

There is a profile for the Indian Institutes of Technology [plural] (p 231) but the directory refers to only one in New Delhi (p 416).

Similarly, there is a profile for the Indian Institutes of Management [plural] (p 253) but the directory refers to one in Lucknow (p416)

On p 115 we find the “University of Melbourneersity”

On p 103 there is a reference to “SUNY” (State University of new York” that does not specifiy which of the four university centres of the SUNY system is referred to.

Malaysian universities are given the bahasa rojak (salad language) treatment and are referred to as University Putra Malaysia and University Sains Malaysia. (p437-438)

UCLA has a student faculty ratio of 0.6:1 (p483)

There will be further comments later.