Comparing Engineering Rankings

Times Higher Education (THE) have just come out with another subject ranking, this time for Engineering and Technology. Here are the top five.

1.   Stanford
2.   Caltech
3.   MIT
4.   Cambridge
5.   Berkeley

Nanyang Technological University is 20th, Tsinghua University 26th, and Zhejiang University 47th.

These rankings are very different from the US News ranking for Engineering.

There the top five are:

1.   Tsinghua
2.   MIT
3.   Berkeley
4.   Zhejiang
5.   Nanyang Technological University.

Stanford is 8th, Cambridge 35th and Caltech 62nd.

So what could possibly explain such a huge difference?

Basically, the two rankings are measuring rather different things. THE give a third of their weighting to reputation. Supposedly there are two indicators -- postgraduate teaching reputation and research reputation -- but it is likely that they are so closely correlated that they are really measuring the same thing. Another chunk goes to income in three flavors, institutional, research, and industry. Another 30% goes to citations normalised by field and year.

The US News ranking puts more emphasis on measures of quantity rather quality and output rather than input, and ignores teaching reputation, international faculty and  students and faculty student ratio. In these rankings Tsinghua is first for publications and Caltech 165th while Caltech is 46th for normalised citation impact and Tsinghua 186th.

On balance, I suspect that it is more likely that there will be a transition from quantity to quality than the other way round so we can expect Tsinghua and Zhejiang to close the gap in the THE rankings if they continue in their present form.