The Geography of Excellence: the Importance of Weighting

So finally, the 2015 QS subject rankings were published. It seems that the first attempt was postponed when the original methodology produced implausible fluctuations, probably resulting from the volatility that is inevitable when there are a small number of data points -- citations and survey responses -- outside the top 50 for certain subjects.

QS have done some tweaking, some of it aimed at smoothing out the fluctuations in the responses to their academic and employer surveys.

These rankings look at bit different from the World University Rankings. Cambridge has the most top ten placings (31), followed by Oxford and Stanford (29 each), Harvard (28), Berkeley (26) and MIT (16).

But in the world rankings MIT is in first place, Cambridge second, Imperial College London third, Harvard fourth and Oxford and University College London joint fifth.

The subject rankings use two indicators from the world, the academic survey and the employer survey but not internationalisation, student faculty ratio and citations per faculty. They add two indicators, citations per paper and h-index.

The result is that the London colleges do less well in the subject rankings since they do not benefit from their large numbers of international students and faculty. Caltech, Princeton and Yale also do relatively badly probably because the new rankings do not take account of their low faculty student faculty ratios.

The lesson of this is that if weighting is not everything, it is definitely very important.

Below is a list of universities ordered by the number of top five placings. There are signs of the Asian advance --  Peking, Hong Kong and the National University of Singapore -- but it is an East Asian advance.

Europe is there too but it is Cold Europe -- Switzerland, Netherlands and Sweden -- not the Mediterranean.

Rank	University	Country	Number of Top Five Places
1	Harvard	USA	26
2	Cambridge	UK	20
3	Oxford	UK	18
4	Stanford	USA	17
5=	MIT	USA	16
5=	UC Berkeley	USA	16
7	London School of Economics	UK	7
8=	University College London	UK	3
8=	ETH Zurich	Switzerland	3
10=	New York University	USA	2
10=	Yale	USA	2
10=	Delft University of Technology	Netherlands	2
10=	National University of Singapore	Singapore	2
10=	UC Los Angeles	USA	2
10=	UC Davis	USA	2
10=	Cornell	USA	2
10=	Wisconsin - Madison	USA	2
10-	Michigan	USA	2
10=	Imperial College London	UK	2
20=	Wagenginen	Netherlands	1
20=	University of Southern California	USA	1
20=	Pratt Institute, New York	USA	1
20=	Rhode Island School of Design	USA	1
20=	Parsons: the New School for Design	USA	1
20=	Royal College of Arts London	UK	1
20=	Melbourne	Australia	1
20=	Texas-Austin	USA	1
20=	Sciences Po	France	1
20=	Princeton	USA	1
20=	Yale	USA	1
20=	Chicago	USA	1
20=	Manchester	UK	1
20=	University of Pennsylvania	USA	1
20=	Durham	UK	1
20=	INSEAD	France	1
20=	London Business School	UK	1
20=	Northwestern	USA	1
20=	Utrecht	Netherlands	1
20=	Guelph	Canada	1
20=	Royal Veterinary College London	UK	1
20=	UC San Francisco	USA	1
20=	Johns  Hopkins	USA	1
20=	KU Leuven	USA	1
20=	Gothenburg	Sweden	1
20=	Hong Kong	Hong Kong	1
20=	Karolinska Institute	Sweden	1
20=	Sussex	UK	1
20=	Carnegie Mellon University	USA	1
20=	Rutgers	USA	1
20=	Pittsburgh	USA	1
20=	Peking	China	1
20=	Purdue	USA	1
20=	Georgia Institute ofTechnology	USA	1
20=	Edinburgh	UK	1