The Decline of Harvard

 

Published in Substack 08 April 2025

Quite a few stories have come out of the Ivy League about how standards are collapsing. I used to think that this was just the perennial lament of teachers everywhere that today’s students are inferior to those of my day. But the stories are coming faster these days, and they seem to be consonant with declining cognitive skills throughout the West, a general disengagement by students, increasing rates of plagiarism, rejection of science and liberal values, and the ardent embrace of extremist ideologies.

Perhaps the most striking story was when Harvard introduced remedial math courses for some of its students. This resulted from the suspension of requiring the submission of SAT and ACT scores following the COVID-19 outbreak.

I suspect that the problem may go deeper than that, and remedial courses at Harvard and other elite schools may become permanent, although probably presented as enrichment programs or something like that.

But this is all anecdotal. Evidence from global rankings can provide more systematic data, which shows that Harvard is steadily declining relative to international universities and even to its peers in the USA.

Here is a prediction. This year, next year, or maybe the year after, Harvard will cede its position as the top university in the world in the publications metric in the Shanghai Rankings to Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

The Shanghai Rankings, officially known as the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), have six indicators: Nobel prizes and Fields Medals for alumni, and faculty, papers in Nature and Science, Highly Cited Researchers, publications in the Science Citation Index Extended and the Social Science Citation Index, and Productivity per Capita, which is the sum of those five scores divided by the number of faculty.

When they began, the Shanghai Rankings placed Harvard in first place overall and for all the indicators except for productivity, where Caltech has always held the lead. However, in 2022, Harvard lost its lead to Princeton for faculty winning the Nobel and Fields awards. The coming loss of supremacy for publications will mean that Harvard will lead in just half of the six indicators.

This is only one sign of Harvard’s decline. Looking at some other rankings, we find a similar story. Back in 2010, when QS started producing independent rankings, Harvard was replaced by Cambridge, which in turn was superseded by MIT, which has held first place ever since. In the THE rankings, Caltech deposed Harvard in 2013 and was overtaken by Oxford in 2017.

I have no great faith in THE or QS, but this is suggestive. Then, we have the more rigorous research-based rankings. In the 2024 Leiden Ranking, published by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, Zhejiang University took over first place from Harvard for publications, although not – not yet anyway – for publications in the top 10% or 1% of journals. In the SCImago Institutions Ranking, published in Spain, Harvard is now fourth overall, although still the leading university.

But when we look at computer science and engineering rankings, it is clear that Harvard has fallen dramatically in areas crucial to economic growth and scientific research over the last few decades.

Shanghai has Harvard in 10th place for computer science, the National Taiwan University Rankings put it in 11^th behind Wisconsin, Georgia Institute of Technology, Texas at Austin, and Carnegie Mellon, SCImago Institutions Rankings 61^st, and University Ranking by Academic Performance, published by the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, 35^th.

For engineering, the prospect is just as grim. The Taiwan rankings have Harvard 31^st, Scimago 42^nd, and URAP 71^st.

Fine, you might say, but the bottom line is jobs and salaries. Let’s look at the latest Financial Times MBA rankings, where Harvard has plunged to 13^th place. A major reason for that was that nearly a quarter of the class of 2024 could not find jobs after graduating. According to Poets & Quants, Harvard’s “placement numbers are below every M7 peer, including Stanford, Wharton, Columbia, Kellogg, and Booth, with only one exception: MIT Sloan which is equal to HBS.”

It seems that Harvard’s problems are entrenched and pervasive. They may have been exacerbated by the pandemic, but their roots go back and go deeper. So what is the cause of this decline? I doubt that the usual villain, underfunding by vicious governments or offended donors, has anything to do with it. However, the announced Trumpian cuts may have an effect in the future.

A plausible hypothesis is that Harvard has drifted away from meritocracy in student admissions and assessment and, more significantly, faculty appointments and promotion.

Perhaps the concept of Harvard’s meritocracy has always been overblown. A few years ago, I was researching early American history and came across a reference to a prominent Massachusetts landowner who had graduated first in his class at Harvard. I was baffled because I thought I should have heard of somebody that brilliant. But it turned out that Harvard before the Revolution ranked students according to their perceived social status, a practice that ended with Independence, after which they were ranked alphabetically. The idea of sorting students academically seems to have become widespread only in the twentieth century.

Even after Harvard supposedly embraced meritocracy by introducing the SAT, the GRE, and other tests and linking tenure to publications and citations, it still included large numbers of legacies, athletes, persons of interest to the dean, and affirmative action.

It seems that Harvard is returning to its earlier model of subordinating academic performance to character, athletic ability, conformism, and membership of favored groups. It has appointed a president who is almost certainly the only Harvard professor in the humanities and social sciences not to have written a book. It has admitted students who are incapable or unwilling to do the academic work that elite universities used to require. And its global reputation is slowly eroding.

The Decline of American Universities: The View From Leiden, Ankara and Madrid

There has been a lot of talk recently about the crisis or crises of American universities. Certainly, if we look at the deteriorating financial situation, the thuggish behavior of demonstrators at Ivy League schools or big state universities, scandals about admissions, or fraudulent research then, yes, American universities do seem to be in a very bad way.

However, financial problems, violent extremism, corruption, and research fraud can be found almost everywhere. Is there a way to compare large numbers of institutions across international frontiers? There is no perfect mode of assessment, but global rankings can tell us quite a bit about the health or sickness of higher education and research.

When Americans think about university rankings, it is usually America’s Best Colleges published for more than four decades by US News (USN) that comes to mind. In the rest of the world, global rankings are more significant. The leader in public approval, if we mean governments, university leaders, and the media, is clearly the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. These rankings are characterised by bizarrely implausible results, sometimes dismissed as outliers or quirky statistics. In the last few years – sorry to keep repeating this -- we have seen Anglia Ruskin University and Babol Noshirvani University of Technology leading the world for research impact, Macau University of Science and Technology and the University of Macau superstars for internationalisation, Anadolu University and Makerere University in the global top ten for knowledge transfer. No matter, as long as the composite top fifty scores look reasonable from a traditional perspective and the usual heroes, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, are at the top or not too far away.

QS, another British company, was once THE’s data supplier but has pursued an independent path since 2010. Its rankings are more sensible than THE's, but it also seems to have an undue regard for the old Western elite. In its recent world subject rankings, Harvard was first in the world for all five broad subjects except Engineering and Technology, where the crown went to MIT, and Oxford was second in all but one.

These two, along with the Shanghai Rankings by virtue of their age, and occasionally the US News Best Global Universities, because of the fame of their national rankings, constitute the NBA of the ranking world. They are cited endlessly by the global media and provide lists for the appointment of external examiners and editorial boards and for recruitment, promotion, and admissions and even data for the immigration policies of the UK, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands.

However, there are other rankings based on publicly accessible data, transparent methodologies, and consistent procedures. They are largely ignored by those with power and influence, but they tell a coherent and factual story. They are published by universities or research centers with limited budgets and small but well-qualified research teams.

I will take three: Leiden Ranking, produced by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, the Netherlands, University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) by the Informatics Institute at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, and the SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) published by the SCImago Lab in Spain, which has links with the Spanish National Research Council and Spanish universities.

Leiden Ranking

Let’s start by taking a look at Leiden Ranking. The publishers decline to construct any composite or combined ranking, which limits its popular appeal. The default metric, which appears when you land on the list page, is just the number of articles and reviews in core journals in the Web of Science database. Back in 2006-2009, Harvard was in first place here, and other US universities filled up the upper levels of the ranking. The University of Michigan was third, and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) was fifth. Chinese universities were lagging behind. Zhejiang University in Hangzhou was 16^th, and Tsinghua University in Beijing 32^nd.

Fast forward to publications between 2019 and 2022, and Zhejiang has overtaken Harvard and pushed it into second place. The top twenty now includes several Chinese universities, some now world-famous, but others, such as Central South University or Jilin University, scarcely known in the West.

Much of this decline is due to China's advance at the expense of US schools, but that is not the whole story. UCLA has now fallen behind Toronto, São Paulo, Seoul National University, Oxford, University College London, Melbourne, Tokyo, and Copenhagen.

You could say that is just quantity, not quality, and maybe we should be looking at high-impact publications. In that case, we should look at publications in the top 10% of journals, where Zhejiang is still ahead of Harvard. It is only when we reach the top 1% of journals that Harvard still has a lead, and one wonders how long that will last.

That is just the number of publications. Academics tend to judge scientific quality by the number of citations that a work receives. Leiden Ranking no longer ranks universities by citations, perhaps with good reason, but does provide data in the individual profiles. Here we see Harvard’s citations per paper score rising from 13.31 in 2006-2009 to 15.71 in 2019-2022, while Zhejiang’s rises from 3.38 to 11.43. So, Harvard is still ahead for citations, but the gap is closing rapidly and will probably be gone in three or four years.

 

URAP

Turning to the URAP, which is based on a bundle of research metrics, Harvard was first in the combined rankings back in 2013-2014, and the best-performing Chinese institution was Peking University, in 51st place. Now, in the recently published 2024-2025 rankings, Harvard is still first, but Peking is now tenth, and Zhejiang and Tsinghua have also entered the top ten.

Other elite American universities have fallen: Berkeley from 5^th to 54^th, Yale from 18^th to 38^th, Boston University from 58^th to 151^st, Dartmouth from 333^rd to 481^st.

The relative and absolute decline of the American elite is even clearer if we look at certain key areas. In the ranking for Information and Computing Sciences, the top ten are all located in Mainland China and Singapore, with Tsinghua at the top. Harvard is 35^th.

Some American universities are doing much better here than Harvard. MIT, which I suppose will soon be known as the Tsinghua of the West, is 12^th, and Carnegie Mellon is 15^th.

In Engineering the top 25 universities are all located in Mainland China, Hong Kong, or Singapore. The best American school is again MIT in 37^th place, while Harvard languishes in 71^st.

 

SCImago

These rankings are quite distinctive in that they have a section for Innovation, which comprises metrics related to patents, and for Societal Factors, which is a mixed bag containing data about altmetrics, gender, impact on policy, web presence, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It also includes non-university organisations such as hospitals, companies, non-profits, and government agencies.

When these rankings started in 2009, and before societal factors were included, Harvard was in second place after France's National Scientific Research Center (CNRS). MIT and UCLA were both in the top ten, and the best-performing Chinese university was Tsinghua, in 80th place, while Zhejiang and Peking lagged way behind at 124th and 176th, respectively.

In the latest 2025 rankings, Harvard has slipped to fourth place behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Ministry of Education, and CNRS. Tsinghua, Zhejiang, and Peking are all in the top twenty, and MIT, UCLA, and the North Carolina schools have all fallen.

Looking at Computer Science, the world leader is the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The best university is Tsinghua, in fourth place. Then there are some multinational and American companies and more Chinese universities before arriving at Stanford in the 24^th slot. Harvard is 64^th. 

In the next post, we will look at the causes of all this.

China, AI, and Rankings

Recently we have seen the crumbling of many illusions. It now seems hard to believe but only a few weeks ago we were assured that President Biden was as sharp as a fiddle or as fit as a tack or something. Also, the Russian economy was collapsing under the weight of Western sanctions. Or again, the presidential race was running neck and neck, and probably heading for a decisive Democrat vote, foretold by that state-of-the-art poll from Iowa.

An equally significant illusion was the supremacy of Western, especially Anglophone, science and scholarship. The remarkable growth of Asian research has often been dismissed as imitative and uncreative and anyway much less important than the amazing things Western universities are doing for sustainability and diversity.

The two big UK rankings, THE and QS, highly regarded by governments and media, have been instrumental in the underestimation of Chinese science and the overestimation of that of the West. Oxford is in first place in the THE world rankings and no other, while MIT leads the QS world rankings and no other. Indeed, Leiden Ranking, probably the most respected ranking among actual researchers, has them in 25^th and 91^st place for publications. 

The myopia of the Western rankers has been revealed by recent events in the world of AI. The release of the large language model (LLM) DeepSeek has caused much soul searching among western academics and scientists. It looks as good as Chat GPT and the others, probably better, and, it seems, very much cheaper. There will likely be more to come in the near future. The researchers and developers were mainly “researchers and developers from China’s elite universities, with minimal overseas education,” according to DeepSeek itself, including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Beihang University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Nanjing University. There are some overseas links, Monash, Stanford, Texas, but these are less significant.

Some of the anguish or the excitement may be premature. DeepSeek may inspire another Sputnik moment, although that does seem rather unlikely at the moment, and Western companies and institutions may surge ahead again. Also, I suspect, the cheapness may have been exaggerated. Like its western counterparts, DeepSeek has places that it would prefer not to go to – Tiananmen Square and the Uighurs among others – and that could undermine its validity in the long run.

But it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless and it is yet another example of the emerging technological prowess of the Chinese economy. We have seen China build a network of high-speed railways. Compare that with the infamous Los Angeles to San Francisco railroad. Compare China’s military modernization with the state of European navies and armies.

We might add, compare the steady advance of Chinese universities in the output and quality of research and innovation compared to the stagnation and decline of western academia. The main western rankers, THE and QS, have consistently rated  American and British universities more favourably than those in Asia, especially China. Recently it seems that the two dominant rankers have been doing their best to lend a hand to western universities while holding back those in Asia. THE started their Impact rankings with the intention of allowing universities to show the wonderful things they are doing to promote sustainability, an opportunity that has been seized by some Canadian, Australian, and British universities but totally ignored by China. QS has introduced a new sustainability indicator into its world rankings, in which Chinese universities do not do well.

 

AI Rankings

QS and THE have been especially unobservant about the rise of China in computer science, and more specifically in the field of AI. This is in contrast to those rankings based largely on research and derived from public verifiable data.

There are currently four rankings that focus on AI. QS has a ranking for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and it is very much dominated by Western universities. The top 20 includes 10 US institutions and none from Mainland China, although it does include the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is in first place and the best Mainland university is Tongji in 36^th = place.

Now let’s look at EduRank, a rather obscure firm, probably located in California, whose methodology might be based on publications, citations and other metrics. Here the top 20 for AI has 15 US universities, with Stanford University in first place. The best performing Chinese university is Tsinghua at 9^th place.  

University Ranking of Academic Performance (URAP) is published by the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Their most recent  AI ranking has Tsinghua in first place with Carnegie Mellon in 10^th. The top 20 has 12 Mainland universities and only three American.

The US News Best Global Universities ranking for AI is even more emphatic in its assertion of Chinese superiority. Twelve out of the top 20 universities for AI are Mainland Chinese, with Tsinghua at number one. The best US university was Carnegie Mellon University in 29^th  place, well behind a few universities from Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

 

Computer Science Rankings

Turning to the broader field of Computer Science, the THE Computer Science rankings have Oxford in first place, MIT in third, and Peking University in twelfth. Similarly, QS has a Computer Science and Information Systems subject ranking, the most recent edition of which shows MIT first, Oxford fourth, and Tsinghua eleventh.

In contrast, in the National Taiwan University Computer Science Rankings Tsinghua is first, Stanford seventh, and Oxford 171^st (!). According to the Scimago Institutions Rankings for universities, Tsinghua is first for Computer Science,  MIT 9^th,  Oxford 22^nd.  The Iran-based ISC World University Rankings for Computer and Information Sciences place Tsinghua first, MIT 11^th, and Oxford 18^th. In the US News Best Global Universities Computer Science and Engineering ranking Tsinghua is first, MIT fifth, and Oxford 18^th.

In the Shanghai subject rankings MIT is still just ahead of Tsinghua, mainly because of the World Class Output metric which includes international academic awards since 1991.

It seems then that QS, THE, and EduRank have significantly exaggerated the capabilities of elite Western universities in AI and Computer Science generally and underestimated those of Chinese and other Asian schools. It seems ironic that THE and, to a lesser extent, QS are regarded as arbiters of excellence while URAP, Scimago, the National Taiwan University rankings, and even US News are largely ignored.

 

 

Comments on the New Edition of the THE Reputation Rankings

Times Higher Education (THE) have just published the latest edition of their World Reputation Rankings. At the top, it is business as usual. We have the big six super brands, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Stanford, Cambridge, and Berkeley. After that, there are no real surprises. The top fifty includes  Ivy League schools like Princeton and Yale, rising Asian giants like Tsinghua, Tokyo and the National University of Singapore, established European institutions like LMU Munich and KU Leuven, and well-known London colleges, LSE and UCL.

But then things start to get interesting. THE has introduced some drastic methodological changes, and these have led to a significant amount of churning.   

A bit of context, last year, the reputation rankings recorded an apparently remarkable achievement by nine Arab universities that came into the top 200 from nowhere. Later, THE announced that they had discovered a "syndicate" that was trading votes in the reputation surveys and that measures would be taken to stop that and penalise the universities involved.

But THE was not satisfied with that, and they have revamped its methodology to include two new metrics in addition to the simple counting of votes for best universities for teaching and research.

The first of these is pairwise comparison. This means, according to THE, that universities are preselected "informed from their publication history," and respondents then place them in order from 1 to 5, thus encouraging them to consider places other than the super brands. Exactly how that preselection works is not clear.

The second is voter diversity, which rewards universities if they have more countries and more subjects in their respondent base, which, THE claims, indicates a strong reputation. 

Whatever THE's intentions, the overall result of these changes is clear. The USA, UK, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland have all increased the number of universities in the top 200. 

The biggest gainers are the UK, which has increased its representation in the top 200 from 20 to 24; Switzerland, which has gone from 4 to 7; and the Netherlands, which has also added another three universities.

Of the twenty British universities in the top 200, eleven have risen, seven are in the same rank or band, and only two, Birmingham and Sheffield, have fallen. It is hard to believe that there has been such a widespread improvement in the international reputation of British universities. 

In contrast, the new methodology has been disastrous for universities in China, Russia, the Arab region, India, Israel, Japan, and South Korea. 

The number of Chinese universities in the top 200 has fallen from 15 to 8. While Tsinghua and Peking Universities have retained their places, others have fallen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 43rd  place to 58th, the University of Science and Technology China from 61-70 to 101-150, and Harbin Institute of Technology from 101-125 to  201-300.

Russia has fared even worse. There were six greyed-out Russian universities in the 2023 rankings. Now, there are just two, Lomonosov Moscow State University, in 83rd place, down from 34th, and Bauman Moscow State Technical University, down from 60-70 to 201-300. The latter gets 1.7 points in the pairwise comparison. All of the others are gone.

In 2023, there were four Indian universities in the rankings, the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institutes of Technology Bombay, Delhi, and Madras. Now, IIT Bombay has been removed altogether, and the Indian Institute of Science and the IITs Delhi and Madras have been demoted to the 201-300 band. They are joined by Siksha 'O' Anuhandsan, which has a global research rank of 1900 in the US News Best Global Universities. 

The worst-hit area is the Arab Region. Universities in Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have left. The only Arab university now is King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which does not teach undergraduates.

A glimpse of the impact of the new metrics can be seen by looking at the universities that come at the bottom for each metric. 

For voter counts, the ten worst universities are all European, followed by a handful of Australian and Canadian universities and Siksha 'O' Anuhandsan, suggesting that it is the new indicators that keep them in the ranking.

For pairwise comparison, the bottom is quite diverse; there is Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Liverpool University, the University of Buenos Aires, Beijing Normal Univerity, Universite Paris Cite, and the University of Cape Town.

The universities that do worst for voter diversity are mainly South Korean, Indian, Turkish, and Japanese. 

It seems then that one function of the new methodology is to slow down the advance of Asian universities and maintain the status of the Western elite. 

Forget about the Euros, this is really serious

We are told that the failure at the UEFA final was a tragedy for England. Perhaps, but something else happened early in July that should have caused some debate but passed almost unnoticed, namely the publication of the latest edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking.

The release of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University rankings and, to a lesser extent, the global rankings from Shanghai, QS, and US News (USN) are often met with fulsome praise from the media and government officials when national favourites rise in the rankings and lamentations when they fall, but other rankings, often much more reliable and rigorous, are largely ignored.

This is partly because the THE and QS rankings are dominated by American and British universities. Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial College London are in the top ten in the overall tables in these three rankings. This year there was a lot of media talk about Imperial moving ahead of Cambridge and Oxford into second place in the QS rankings, just behind MIT. According to these rankings, British universities are on top of the world and criticism from journalists or politicians would surely be churlish in the extreme. 

It would, however, be a mistake to assume that the big brand rankings are objective judges of academic merit or any other sort. They are biased towards UK universities in a variety of obvious and subtle ways. QS, THE, and USN all include surveys of established academics, and the Shanghai Rankings include Nobel and Fields award winners, some of whom are long gone or retired. THE has three metrics based on income. THE USN, and QS give more weight to citations rather than publications, loading the dice for older and better-funded researchers. 

It seems that British universities have complacently accepted the verdict of these rankings and appear unwilling to consider that they are doing anything less than perfect. When the Sunak government proposed some vague and  bland  changes, the Chief Executive of the London Higher Group of Institutions complained that it was "beyond belief" that the government should have the King speak negatively of the "world-leading higher education and research sector." 

It is perhaps time to look at another ranking, one produced by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University. This provides data on publications with various optional filters for subject group, country, period, and fractional counting. There are also rankings for international and industrial collaboration, open-access publications, and gender equity in research.

CWTS does not, however, publish overall rankings, sponsor spectacular events in prestigious settings, or offer consultations and benchmarking services for non-trivial sums. Consequently, it is usually neglected by the media, university heads, or the grandees of the world economy gathered at WEF forums and the like.

Turning to the latest edition,  starting with the default metric, publications in the Web of Science over the period 2019-2022, we see that Zhejiang University has now overtaken Harvard and moved into first place. In the next few years, it is likely that other Chinese universities like Fudan, Peking, and Tsinghua will join Zhejiang at the peak. 

But the most interesting part of Leiden Ranking is the steady decline of British universities. Oxford is now 25th  in the publications table, down from 14th in 2009-12. That's not too bad, but rather different from the latest QS world ranking, where it is third, US News Best Global Universities, where it is fourth, or THE, where it is first. Oxford is well behind several Chinese universities and also behind, among others, the University of Sao Paulo, Seoul National University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Of course, you could say that this is a crude measure of research activity and that if we look at other metrics, such as publications in the top 10% and the top 1% of journals, then, yes, Oxford does better. The problem is that the high-quality metrics are usually lagging indicators so we can expect Oxford to start declining there also before too long.

When we look at the broad subject tables for publications, there is further evidence of gradual decline.  For Mathematics and  Computer Science, Oxford is 63rd, behind Purdue University, Beijing University of Technology, and the University of New South Wales. In 2009-12 it was 50th. 

For Physical Sciences and Engineering, it is 72nd behind the  University of Tehran, Texas A & M, and Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 2009-12 it was 29th.

It is 64th in Life and Earth Sciences, behind Lanzhou University, the Swedish University of Agricultural Science, and Colorado State University. In 2009-2012 it was 42nd. 

For Biomedical and Health Sciences, it is 39th, behind Duke, University of British Columbia, and Karolinska Institutet; in 2009-2012, it was 27th.

Finally, when it comes to the Humanities and Social Scientists, Oxford remains at the top. It is fourth in the world, just as it was in 2009-2012. 

A glance at some middling British institutions shows the same picture of steady relative decline. Between 2009-2012 and 2019-2022 Reading went from 489th to 719th, Liverpool from 233rd to 302nd, and Cardiff from 190th to 328th. 

It is perhaps unfair to judge complex institutions based on a single metric. Unfortunately, most science, scholarship, and everyday life are based on assigning numbers that may ignore the fine details of indispensable complex phenomena. 

Also, such data does not tell us the full story about teaching and learning, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that British universities are not doing so great there either. 

It seems that the big rankings are exaggerating the merits of British higher education. It is time to take a look at some of the global in  rankings produced in places like the Netherlands (Leiden Ranking), Spain (SCImago), Turkiye (URAP), Georgia (RUR), and Taiwan (NTU rankings).

Comments on the THE Reputation Rankings

Times Higher Education (THE) has announced the latest edition of its reputation ranking. The scores for this ranking will be included in the forthcoming World University Ranking and THE's other tables, where they will have a significant or very significant effect. In the Japan University Ranking, they will get an 8% weighting, and in the Arab University Ranking, 41%. Why THE gives such a large weight to reputation in the Arab rankings seems a bit puzzling. 

The ranking is based on a survey of researchers "who have published in academic journals, have been cited by other researchers and who have been published within the last five years," presumably in journals indexed in  Scopus.

Until 2022 the survey was run by Elsevier but since then has been brought in-house. 

The top of the survey tells us little new. Harvard is first and is followed by the rest of the six big global brands: MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and Berkeley. Leading Chinese universities are edging closer to the top ten.

For most countries or regions, the rank order is uncontroversial: Melbourne is the most prestigious university in Australia, Toronto in Canada, Technical University of Munich in Germany, and a greyed-out Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia. However, there is one region where the results are a little eyebrow-raising. 

As THE has been keen to point out, there has been a remarkable improvement in the scores for some universities in the Arab region. This in itself is not surprising. Arab nations in recent years have invested massive amounts of money in education and research, recruited international researchers, and begun to rise in the research-based rankings such as Shanghai and Leiden. It is to be expected that some of these universities should start to do well in reputation surveys.

What is surprising is which Arab universities have now appeared in the THE reputation ranking. Cairo University, the American University in Beirut, Qatar University, United Emirates University, KAUST, and King Abdulaziz University have achieved some success in various rankings, but they do not make the top 200 here. 

Instead, we have nine universities: the American University in the Middle East, Prince Mohammed Bin Fahd University, Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud Islamic University, Qassim University, Abu Dhabi University,  Zayed University, Al Ain University, Lebanese University, and Beirut Arab University. These are all excellent and well-funded institutions by any standards, but it is hard to see why they should be considered to be among the world's top 200 research-orientated universities.

None of these universities makes it into the top 1,000 of the Webometrics ranking or the RUR reputation rankings. A few are found in the US News Best Global Universities, but none get anywhere near the top 200 for world or regional reputation. They do appear in the QS world rankings but always with a low score for the academic survey.

THE accepts that survey support for the universities comes disproportionately from within the region in marked contrast to US institutions and claim that Arab universities have established a regional reputation but have yet to sell themselves to the rest of the world.

That may be so, but again, there are several Arab universities that have established international reputations. Cairo University is in the top 200 in the QS academic survey, and the RUR reputation ranking, and the American University of Beirut is ranked 42nd for regional research reputation by USN. They are, however, absent from the THE reputation ranking. 

When a ranking produces results that are at odds with other rankings and with accessible bibliometric data, then a bit of explanation is needed.

  

Global Subject Rankings: The Case of Computer Science

Three ranking agencies have recently released the latest editions of their subject rankings: Times Higher Education, Shanghai Ranking, and Round University Rankings.  

QS, URAP, and National Taiwan University also published subject rankings earlier in the year. The US News global rankings announced last year can be filtered for subject. The methods are different and consequently the results are also rather different. It is instructive to focus on the results for a specific field, computer science and on two universities, Oxford and Tsinghua. Note that the scope of the rankings is sometimes different.

 

1.   Times Higher Education has published rankings of eleven broad subjects using the same indicators as in their world rankings, Teaching, Research Environment, Research Quality, International Outlook, and Industry: Income and Patents, but with different weightings. For example, Teaching has a weighting of 28% for the Engineering rankings and Industry: Income and Patents 8%, while for Arts and Humanities the weightings are 37.5% and 3% respectively.

These rankings continued to be led by the traditional Anglo-American elite. Harvard is in first place for three subjects, Stanford, MIT, and Oxford in two each and Berkeley and Caltech in one each.

The top five for Computer Science are:

1.    University of Oxford

2.    Stanford University

3.    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

4.    Carnegie Mellon University

5.    ETH Zurich.

Tsinghua is 13^th.

 

2.   The Shanghai subject rankings are based on these metrics: influential journal publications, category normalised citation impact, international collaboration, papers in Top Journals or Top Conferences, and faculty winning significant academic awards.

According to these rankings China is now dominant in Engineering subjects. Chinese universities lead in fifteen subjects although Harvard, MIT and Northwestern University lead for seven subjects. The Natural Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Social Sciences are still largely the preserve of American and European universities.

Excellence in the Life Sciences appears to be divided between the USA and China. The top positions in Biology, Human Biology, Agriculture, and Veterinary Science are held respectively by Harvard, University of California San Francisco, Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University, and Nanjing Agricultural University.

The top five for Computer Science and Engineering are:

1.    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2.    Stanford University

3.    Tsinghua University

4.    Carnegie Mellon University

5.    University of California Berkeley.

Oxford is 9^th.

 

3.  The Round University Rankings (RUR), now published from Tbilisi, Georgia, are derived from 20 metrics grouped in 5 clusters, Teaching, Research, International Diversity, and Financial Sustainability. The same methodology is used for rankings in six broad fields. Here, Harvard is in first place for Medical Sciences, Social Sciences, and Technical Sciences, Caltech for Life Sciences, and University of Pennsylvania for Humanities.

RUR’s narrow subject rankings, published for the first time, use different criteria related to publications and citations: Number of Papers, Number of Citations, Citations per Paper, Number of Citing Papers, and Number of Highly Cited Papers. In these rankings, first place goes to twelve universities in the USA, eight in Mainland China, three in Singapore, and one each in Hong Kong, France, and the UK.

 The top five for Computer Science are:

1.    National University of Singapore

2.    Nanyang Technological University

3.    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

4.    Huazhong University of Science and Technology

5.    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

Tsinghua is 10^th.  Oxford is 47^th.

 

4.   The QS World University Rankings by Subject are based on five indicators: Academic reputation, Employer reputation, Research citations per paper, H-index and International research network.  At the top they are mostly led by the usual suspects, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge.

The top five for Computer Science and Information Systems

1.    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2.    Carnegie Mellon University

3.    Stanford University

4.    University of California Berkeley

5.    University of Oxford.

Tsinghua is 15^th.

 

5.   University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) is produced by a research group at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and is based on publications, citations, and international collaboration. Last July it published rankings of 78 subjects.  

 The top five for Information and Computing Sciences were:

1.    Tsinghua University

2.    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

3.   Nanyang Technological University

4.   National University of Singapore

5.   Xidian University

Oxford is 19th

 

6.    The US News Best Global Universities can be filtered by subject. They are based on publications, citations and research reputation.

The top five for Computer Science in 2022 were:

1.   Tsinghua University

2.   Stanford University

3.    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

4.    Carnegie Mellon University

5.   University of California Berkeley

Oxford was 11^th.

 

7.    The National Taiwan University Rankings are based on articles, citations, highly cited papers, and H-index.

The top five for Computer Science are:

1.    Nanyang Technological University

2.    Tsinghua University

3.    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

4.   National University of Singapore

5.    Xidian University

Oxford is 111^th

 

So, Tsinghua is ahead of Oxford for computer science and related fields in the Shanghai Rankings, the Round University Rankings, URAP, the US News Best Global Universities, and the National Taiwan University Rankings. These rankings are entirely or mainly based on research publications and citations. Oxford is ahead of Tsinghua in both the QS and THE subject rankings. The contrast between the THE and the Taiwan rankings is especially striking.

 

 

 

 

 

SCImago Innovation Rankings: The East-West Gap Gets Wider

The decline of western academic research becomes more apparent every time a ranking with a stable and moderately accurate methodology is published. This will not be obvious if one just looks at the top ten, or even the top fifty, of the better known rankings. Harvard, Stanford, and MIT are usually still there at the top and Oxford and Cambridge are cruising along in the top twenty or the top thirty.

But take away the metrics that measure inherited intellectual capital such as the Nobel and Fields laureates in the Shanghai rankings or the reputation surveys in the QS, THE, and US world rankings, and the dominance of the West appears ever more precarious. This is confirmed if we turn from overall rankings to subject and field tables.

Take a look at the most recent edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking, which is highly reputed among researchers although much less so among the media. For sheer number of publications overall, Harvard still holds the lead although Zhejiang, Shanghai Jiao Tong and Tsinghua are closing in and there are more Chinese schools in the top 30.  Chinese dominance is reduced if we move to the top 10% of journals but it may be just a matter of time before China takes the lead there as well. 

But click to physical sciences and engineering. The top 19 places are held by Mainland Chinese universities with the University of Tokyo coming in at 20.  MIT is there at 33, Texas A & M at 55 and Purdue 62. Again the Chinese presence is diluted, probably just for the moment, if we switch to the top 10% or 1% of journals.  

Turning to developments in applied research, the shift to China and away from the West, appears even greater.

The SCImago Institutions rankings are rather distinctive. In addition to the standard measures of research activity, there are also metrics for innovation and societal impact. Also, they include the performance of government agencies, hospitals, research centres and companies.

The innovation rankings combine three measures of patent activity. Patents are problematic for comparing universities but they can establish broad long-term trends. 

Here are the top 10 for Innovation in 2009:

1.   Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique

2.   Harvard University 

3.   National Institutes of Health, USA

4.   Stanford University 

5.   Massachusetts Institute of Technology

6.   Institute National de las Sante et de la Recherche Medicale

7.   Johns Hopkins University 

8.   University of California Los Angeles

9.   Howard Hughes Medical Institute 

10.  University of Tokyo.

And here they are for 2023:

1.   Chinese Academy of Sciences 

2.   State Grid Corporation of China  

3.   Ministry of Education PRC

4.   DeepMind

5.   Ionis Pharmaceuticals

6.   Google Inc, USA

7.   Alphabet Inc 

8.  Tsinghua University

9.   Huawei Technologies Co Ltd

10.  Google International LLC.

What happened to the high flying universities of 2009?  Harvard is in 57th place, MIT in 60th, Stanford 127th, Johns Hopkins 365th, and Tokyo in 485th. 

it seems that the torch of innovation has left the hand of American, European, and Japanese universities and research centres and has been passed to Multinational, Chinese, and American companies and research bodies, plus a few Chinese universities. I am not sure where the loyalties of the multinational institutions lie, if indeed they have any at all.

Global Trends in Innovation: Evidence from SCImago

We are now approaching the third decade of global university rankings. They have had a mixed impact. The original Shanghai rankings published in 2003 were a salutary shock for universities in continental Europe and contributed to a wave of restructuring and excellence initiatives. On the other hand, rankings with unstable and unreliable methodologies are of little use to anyone except for the public relations departments of wealthy Western universities. 

In contrast, the SCImago Institutions Rankings, published by a Spanish research organisation, with thousands of universities, hospitals, research institutes, companies and other organisations, can be quite informative, especially the Innovation and Societal Rankings.

The Innovation Rankings, which are based on three measures of patent citations and applications, included 4019 organisations of various kinds in 2009. The top spot was held by the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in France, followed by Harvard, the National Institutes of Health in the USA, Stanford, and MIT.

Altogether the top 20 in 2009 consisted of  ten universities, nine American plus the University of Tokyo, and ten non-university organisations, three American, two German, two French, two multinational, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 14th place. 

Fast forward to 2022 and we now have 8084 institutions. First place now goes to CAS, followed by the State Grid Corporation of China, Deep Mind Technologies, a British AI firm, the Chinese Ministry of Education, and Samsung Corp.

Now, the top twenty includes exactly two universities, Tsinghua in 14th place and Harvard in 20th. The rest are companies, health organisations, and government agencies. The nationality assigned by Scimago for these eighteen is Multinational eight, USA six, China four, and UK and South Korea one each.

What about those high flying US universities of 2009? Stanford has fallen from 4th place to 67th, the University of Michigan from 13th to 249th, the University of Washington from 16th to 234th.

The relative -- and probably now absolute as well -- decline of American academic research has been well documented. It seems that the situation is even more dire for the innovative capability of US universities. But the technological torch is passing not only to Chinese universities and research centres but also to US and Multinational corporations.

Aggregate Ranking from BlueSky Thinking

 

In recent years there have been attempts to construct rankings that combine several global rankings. The University of New South Wales has produced an aggregate ranking based on the “Big Three” rankings, the Shanghai ARWU, Times Higher Education (THE), and QS. AppliedHE of Singapore has produced a ranking that combines these three plus Leiden Ranking and Webometrics.

The latest aggregate ranking is from BlueSky Thinking, a website devoted to research and insights in higher education. This aggregates the big three rankings plus the Best Global Universities published by US News.

There are some noticeable differences between the rankings. The University of California Berkeley is fourth in the US News rankings but 27^th in QS. The National University of Singapore is 11^th in QS but 71^st in ARWU.

The top of the aggregate ranking is unremarkable. Harvard leads followed by Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, and Oxford.

There have been some significant changes over the last five years, with universities in Mainland China, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Australia recording significant improvements, while a number of US institutions, including Ohio State University, Boston University and the University of Minnesota, have fallen.

 

What's the Matter with Harvard?

When the first global ranking was published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University back in 2003, the top place was taken by Harvard. It was the same for the rankings that followed in 2004, Webometrics and the THES - QS World University Rankings.  Indeed, at that time any international ranking that did not put Harvard at the top would have  been regarded as faulty.

Is Harvard Declining?

But since then Harvard has been dethroned by a few rankings. Now MIT leads in the QS world rankings, while Oxford is first in THE's  and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nature Index. Recently Caltech deposed Harvard at the top of the Round University Rankings, now published in Georgia.

It is difficult to get excited about Oxford leading Harvard in the THE rankings. A table that purports to show Macau University of Science and Technology as the world's most international university, Asia University Taiwan as the most innovative, and An Najah National University as the best for research impact, need not be taken too seriously.

Losing out to MIT in the QS world rankings probably does not mean very much either. Harvard is at a serious disadvantage here for international students and international faculty.

Harvard and Leiden Ranking

On the other hand, the performance of Harvard in CWTS Leiden Ranking, which is generally respected in the global research community,  might tell us that something is going on. Take a look at the total number of publications for the period 2017-20 (using the default settings and parameters). There we can see Harvard at the top with 35,050 publications followed by Zhejiang and Shanghai Jiao Tong Universities.

But it is rather different for publications in the broad subject fields. Harvard is still in the lead for Biomedical Sciences and for Social Sciences and Humanities. For Mathematics and Computer Science, however, the top twenty consists entirely of Mainland Chinese universities. The best non - Mainland institution is Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Harvard is 128th.

You could argue whether this is just a matter of quantity rather than quality. So, let's turn to another Leiden indicator, the percentage of publications in the top 10% of journals for Mathematics and Computer Science. Even here China is in the lead, although somewhat precariously. Changsha University of Science and Technology tops the table and  Harvard is in fifth place.

The pattern for Physical Sciences and Engineering is similar. The top 19 for publications are Chinese with the University of Tokyo in 20th place. However, for those in the top 10% Harvard still leads. It seems then that Harvard is still ahead for upmarket publications in physics and engineering but a growing and substantial amount of  research is done by China, a few other parts of Asia, and perhaps some American outposts of scientific excellence such as MIT and Caltech.

The Rise of China

The trend seems clear. China is heading towards industrial and scientific hegemony and eventually Peking, Tsinghua, Fudan and Zhejiang and a few others will, if nothing changes, surpass the Ivy league, the Group of Eight, and Oxbridge, although it will take longer for the more expensive and demanding fields of research. Perhaps the opportunity will be lost in the next few years if there is another proletarian cultural revolution in China or if Western universities change course.

What Happened to Harvard's Money?

It is standard to claim that the success or failure of universities is dependent on the amount of money they receive. The latest edition of the annual Nature Index tables was accompanied by headlines proclaiming that that China's recent success in high impact research was the result of a long term investment program. 

Money surely had a lot to do with it but there needs to be a bit of caution here. The higher education establishment has a clear vested interest in getting as much money from the public purse as it can and is inclined to claiming that any decline in the rankings is a result of hostility to higher education..

Tracing the causes of Harvard's decline, we should consult the latest edition of the Round University Rankings, now based in Georgia,  which provides ranks for 20 indicators. In 2021 Harvard was first but this year it was second, replaced by Caltech. So what happened?  Looking more closely we see that in 2021 Harvard was 2nd for financial sustainability and in 2022 it was 357th, That suggests a catastrophic financial collapse. So maybe there has been a financial disaster over at Harvard and the media simply have not noticed bankrupt professors jumping out of their offices, Nobel laureates hawking their medals, or mendicant students wandering the streets with tin cups. 

Zooming in a bit, it seems that, if the data is accurate, there has been a terrible collapse in Harvard's financial fortunes. For institutional income per academic staff Harvard's rank has gone from 21st to 891st.

Exiting sarcasm mode for a moment, it is of course impossible that there has actually been such a catastrophic fall in income. I suspect that what we have here is something similar to what happened  to Trinity College Dublin  a few years ago when someone forgot the last six zeros when filling out the form for the THE world rankings.

So let me borrow a flick knife from my good friend Occam and propose that what happened to Harvard in the Round University Rankings was simply that somebody left off the zeros at the end of the institutional income number when submitting data to Clarivate Analytics, who do the statistics for RUR. I expect next year the error will be corrected, perhaps without anybody admitting that anything was wrong.

So, there was no substantial reason why Harvard lost ground to Caltech in the Round Rankings this year. Still it does say something that such a mistake could occur and that nobody in the administration noticed or had the honesty to say anything. That is perhaps symptomatic of deeper problems within American academia. We can then expect the relative decline of Harvard and the rise of Chinese universities and a few others in Asia to continue.

The Remarkable Revival of Oxford and Cambridge

There is nearly always a theme for the publication of global rankings. Often it is the rise of Asia, or parts of it. For a while it was the malign grasp of Brexit which was crushing the life out of British research or the resilience of American science in the face of the frenzied hostility of the great orange beast. This year it seems that the latest QS world rankings are about the triumph of Oxford and other elite UK institutions and their leapfrogging their US rivals. Around the world, quite a few other places are also showcasing their splendid achievements.

In the recent QS rankings Oxford has moved up from overall fifth to second place and Cambridge from seventh to third while University College London, Imperial College London, and Edinburgh have also advanced. No doubt we will soon hear that this is because of transformative leadership, the strength that diversity brings, working together as a team or a family, although I doubt whether any actual teachers or researchers will get a bonus or a promotion for their contributions to these achievements.

But was it leadership or team spirit that pushed Oxford and Cambridge into the top five? That is very improbable. Whenever there is a big fuss about universities rising or falling significantly in the rankings in a single year it is a safe bet that it is the result of an error, the correction of an error, or a methodological flaw or tweak of some kind.

Anyway, this year's Oxbridge advances had as much to do with leadership,  internationalization, or reputation as goodness had with Mae West's diamonds. It was entirely due to a remarkable rise for both places in the score for citations per faculty, Oxford from 81.3 to 96, and Cambridge from 69.2 to 92.1. There was no such change for any of the other indicators.

Normally, there are three ways in which a university can rise in QS's citations indicator. One is to increase the number of publications while maintaining the citation rate. Another is to improve the citation rate while keeping output constant. The third is to reduce the number of faculty physically or statistically.

None of these seem to have happened at Oxford and Cambridge. The number of publications and citations has been increasing but not sufficiently to cause such a big jump. Nor does there appear to have been a drastic reduction of faculty in either place.

In any case it seems that Oxbridge is not alone in its remarkable progress this year. For citations, ETH Zurich rose from 96.4 to 99.8, University of Melbourne from 75 to 89.7, National University of Singapore from 72.9 to 90.6, Michigan from 58 to 70.5. It seems that at the top levels of these rankings nearly everybody is rising except for MIT which has the top score of 100 but it is noticeable that as we get near the top the increase gets smaller.

It is theoretically possible that this might be the result of a collapse of the raw scores of citations front runner MIT which would raise everybody else's scores if it still remained at the top but there is no evidence of either a massive collapse in citations or a massive expansion of research and teaching staff.

But then as we go to the other end of the ranking we find universities' citations scores falling, University College Cork from 23.4 to 21.8, Universitas Gadjah Mada from 1.7 to 1.5, UCSI University Malaysia from 4.4 to 3.6, American University  in Cairo from 5.7 to 4.2.

It seems there is a bug in the QS methodology. The indicator scores that are published by QS are not raw data but standardized scores based on standard deviations from the mean The mean score is set at fifty and the top score at one hundred. Over the last few years the number of ranked universities has been increasing and the new ones tend to perform less well than the the established ones, especially for citations. In consequence, the  mean number of citations per faculty has declined and therefore universities scoring above the mean will increase their standardized scores which is derived from the standard deviation from the mean. If this interpretation is incorrect I'm very willing to be corrected.

This has an impact on the relative positions of Oxbridge and leading American universities. Oxford and Cambridge rely on their  scores in the academic and employer survey and international faculty and staff to keep in the top ten. Compared to Harvard, Stanford and MIT they are do not perform well for quantity or quality of research. So the general inflation of citations scores gives them more of a boost than the US leaders and so their total score rises.

It is likely that Oxford and Cambridge's moment of glory will be brief since QS in the next couple of years will have to do some recentering in order to prevent citation indicator scores bunching up in the high nineties. The two universities will fall again although  it that will probably not be attributed to a sudden collapse of leadership or failure to work as a team.

It will be interesting to see if any of this year's rising universities will make an announcement that they don't really deserve any praise for their illusory success in the rankings.

Where is the real educational capital of the world?

Here is another example of how rankings, especially those produced by Times Higher Education (THE), are used to mislead the public.

The London Post has announced that London is the Higher Educational Capital of the World for 2019. Support for this claim is provided by four London universities appearing in the top 40 of the THE World University Rankings which, unsurprisingly, have been welcomed by London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

In addition, THE has Oxford and Cambridge as first and second in the world in their overall rankings and QS has declared London to be the Best Student City.

THE is not the only global ranking. There are now several others and none of them have Oxford in first place. Most of them give the top spot to Harvard, although in the QS world rankings it is MIT and in the GreenMetric rankings Wageningen.

Also, if we look at the number of universities in the top 50 of the Shanghai rankings we cannot see London as the undisputed HE capital of the world. Using this simple criterion it would be New York with three, Columbia, New York University and Rockefeller.

Then come Boston, Paris, Chicago and London with two each.

What to do to get into the rankings?

I have been asked this question quite a few times. So finally here is an attempt to answer it.

If you represent a university that is not listed in any rankings, except uniRank and Webometrics, but you want to be, what should you do?

Where are you now?
The first thing to do is to find out where you are in the global hierarchy of universities. 

Here the Webometrics rankings are very helpful. These are now a mixture of web activity and research indicators and provide a rank for over 28,000 universities or places that might be considered universities, colleges, or academies of some sort. 

If you are ranked in the bottom half of Webometrics then frankly it would be better to concentrate on not going bankrupt and getting or staying accredited.

But if you are in the top 10,000 or so then you might  be able to think about getting somewhere in some sort of ranking.

Where do you want to be?
Nearly everybody in higher education who is not hibernating has heard of the Times Higher Education (THE) world and regional rankings. Some also know about the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) or the Shanghai rankings. But there are now many more rankings that are just as good as, or in some cases better than, the "big three".
 
According to the IREG inventory published last year there are now at least 45 international university rankings including business school, subject, system and regional rankings, of which 17 are global rankings, and there will be more to come. This inventory provides links and some basic preliminary information about all the rankings but it already needs updating.

The methodology and public visibility of the global rankings varies enormously. So, first you have to decide what sort of university you are and what you want to be. You also need to think about exactly what you want from a ranking, whether it is fuel for the publicity machine or an accurate and valid assessment of research performance.  

If you want to be a small high quality research led institution with lavish public and private funding, something like Caltech, then the THE world rankings would probably be appropriate. They measure income three different ways, no matter how wastefully it is spent, and most of the indicators are scaled according to number of staff or students. They also have a citations indicator which favours research intensive institutions like Stanford or MIT along with some improbable places like Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Brighton and Sussex Medical School or Reykjavik University.

If, however, your goal is to be a large comprehensive research and teaching university then the QS or the Russia-based Round University Rankings might be a better choice. The latter has all the metrics of the THE rankings except one plus another eight, all with sensible weightings.

If you are a research postgraduate-only university then you would not be eligible for the overall rankings produced by QS or THE but you could be included in the Shanghai Rankings.

Data Submission
Most rankings rely on publicly accessible information. However these global rankings use include information submitted by the ranked institution:  QS world rankings, THE world rankings, Round University Ranking, US News Best Global Universities, U-Multirank, UI Greenmetric. Collecting, verifying and submitting data can be a very tiresome task so it  would be well to consider whether there are sufficient informed and conscientious staff available. U-Multirank is especially demanding in the the amount and quality of data required.

List of Global Rankings
Here is the list of the 17 global rankings included in the IREG inventory with comments about the kind of university that is likely to do well in them. 

CWTS Leiden Ranking
This is a research only ranking by a group of bibliometric experts at Leiden University. There are several indicators starting with the total number of publications, headed by Harvard followed by the University of Toronto, and ending with the percentage of publications in the top 1% of journals, headed by Rockefeller University. 

CWUR World University Rankings
Now produced out of UAE, this is an unusual and not well-known ranking that attempts to measure alumni employment and the quality of education and faculty. At the top it generally resembles more conventional rankings.

Emerging/Trendence Global University Employability Rankings
Published in but not produced by THE, these are based on a survey of employers in selected countries and rank only 150 universities.

Nature Index
A research rankine based on a very select group of journals. Also includes non-university institutions. The current leader is the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This ranking is relevant only for those universities aiming for the very top levels of research in the natural sciences.

National Taiwan University Rankings 
A research ranking of current publications and citations and those over a period of eleven years. It favours big universities with the  current top ten including the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan.

QS World University Rankings
If you are confident of building a local reputation then this is the ranking for you. There is a 40 % weighting for academic reputation and 10 % for employer reputation. Southeast Asian universities often do well in this ranking.

Webometrics
This now has two measures of web activity, one of citations and one of publications. It measures quantity rather than quality so there is a chance here for mass market institutions to excel. 

Reuters Top 100 Innovative Universities
This is definitely for the world's technological elite.

Round University Rankings
These rankings combines survey and institutional data  from Clarivate's Global Institutional Profiles Project and bibliometric data from the.Web of Science Core Collection. They are the most balanced and comprehensive of the general world rankings although hardly known outside Russia.

Scimago Institution Rankings
These combine indicators of research, innovation measured by patents and web activity. They tend to favour larger universities that are strong in technology.

Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)
These are the oldest of the global rankings with a simple and stable methodology. They are definitely biased towards large, rich, old research universities with strengths in the natural sciences and a long history of scientific achievement.

THE World University Rankings
The most famous of the international rankings, they claim to be sophisticated, rigorous, trusted etc but are biased towards UK universities. The citations indicator is hopelessly and amusingly flawed. There are a number of spin-offs that might be of interest to non-elite universities such as regional, reputation, young universities and, now, global impact rankings.

U-Multirank
Contains masses of information about things that other rankings neglect but would be helpful mainly to universities looking for students from Europe.

UI GreenMetric Ranking 
This is published by Universitas Indonesia and measures universities' contribution to environmental sustainability. Includes a lot of Southeast Asian universities but not many from North America. Useful for eco-conscious universities.

uniRank University Ranking
This is based on web popularity derived from several sources. In many parts of Africa it serves as a measure of general quality.

University Ranking by Academic Performance
A research ranking produced by the Middle East Technical University in Ankara that ranks 2,500 universities. It is little known outside Turkey but I noticed recently that it was used in a presentation at a conference in Malaysia.

US News Best Global Universities
Sometimes counted as one of the big four but hardly ever the big three, this is a research ranking that is balanced and includes 1,250 universities. For American universities is a useful complement to the US News' America's best Colleges.

You will have to decide whether to take a short-term approach to rankings, by recruiting staff from the Highly Cited Researchers list, admitting international students regardless of ability, sending papers to marginal journals and conferences, signing up for citation-rich mega projects, or by concentrating on the underlying attributes of an excellent university, admitting students and appointing and promoting faculty for their cognitive skills and academic ability, encouraging genuine and productive collaboration, nurturing local talent.

The first may produce quick results or nice bonuses for administrators but it can leave universities at the mercy of the methodological tweaking of the rankers, as Turkish universities found out in 2015.

The latter will take years or decades to make a difference and unfortunately that may be too long for journalists and policy makers.