Cambridge Beats Harvard -- Sort of

The big news from the QS World University Rankings today is that Cambridge is finally top after trailing Harvard for six years.

This seems a little odd since Cambridge is way behind Harvard, and a few other places, on all the indicators in the Shanghai rankings. So what happened? Looking at the indicator scores we find that on the "Academic Peer Review" -- more accurately called an Academic Reputation Index elsewhere on the site -- Cambridge is first and Harvard second. For the Employer Review Cambridge is third and Harvard first, reversing their places last year. For citations per faculty Harvard was third and Cambridge 36th, behind Tufts, Emory and UC Santa Cruz among others. For student faculty ratio, Cambridge was 18th and Harvard 40th. At the time of writing data was not available for International Faculty and Students.

It seems that the main factor in Cambridge's success was the academic survey. QS indicates the sources of the survey.

• 1,648 previous respondents who returned. If QS have continued the practice of previous years , they also counted respondents from 2009 and 2008 even if they did not submit a form.
• 180,00 out of 300,000 persons on the mailing list of World Scientific, a Singapore-based publishing company with links to Imperial College London. World Scientific, by the way, claim to have 400,000 subscribers.
• 48,125 records from Mardev-DM2
• 2,000 academics who signed up at the QS site
• Lists provided by institutions. In 2010 160 universities provided more than 40,000 names.

I will let readers decide how representative or accurate such a survey can be.

Incidentally, QS should be given credit for the detailed description of the methodology of this criterion.