Ranking rankings: Crass materialism

As the number and scope of university rankings increase it is time to start thinking about how to rank the rankers.

Indicators for global rankings might include number of universities ranked (Webometrics in 1st place), number of indicators (Round University Ranking), bias, and stability.

There could also be an indicator for crass materialism. Here is a candidate for first place. CNBC quotes a report from Wealth-X (supposedly downloadable, good luck) and lists the top ten universities, all in the USA, for billionaires. Apparently, the ranking also includes universities outside the US.

1.  Harvard
2.  Stanford
3.  Pennsylvania
4.  Columbia
5.  MIT
6.  Cornell
7.  Yale
8= Southern California
8= Chicago
10 Michigan.

Where did the top data scientists study?

The website efinancialcareers has a list of the top twenty data scientists in finance and banking. This looks like a subjective list and another writer might come up with a different set of experts. Even so it is quite interesting.

Their degrees are mainly in things like engineering, computer science and maths. There is only one each in business, economics and finance.

The institutions where they studied are:
Stanford (three)
University College London (three)
Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble
Oxford
Leonard Stern School of Business, New York University
University of Mexico
Universite Paris Dauphine
Ecole Polytechnique
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)
California State University
Indian Institute of Science
Johns Hopkins University
Institute of Management Development and Research, India
University of Illinois
University of Pittsburgh
Indian Institute of Technology.

Harvard, MIT and Cambridge are absent but there are three Indian Institutes,  three French schools and some non-Ivy US places like RPI and the Universities of Pittsburgh and Illinois.

Why are US universities doing so well in the THE reputation rankings?

For the last couple of years the higher education media has tried to present any blip in the fortunes of UK universities as one of the malign effects of Brexit, whose toxic rays are unlimited by space, time or logic. Similarly, if anything unpleasant happens to US institutions, it is often linked to the evil spell of the great orange devil, who is scaring away international students, preventing the recruitment of the scientific elites of the world, or even being insufficiently credulous of the latest settled science.

So what is the explanation for the remarkable renaissance of US higher education apparently revealed by the THE reputation survey published today?

Is Trump working his magic to make American colleges great again?

UCLA is up four places, Carnegie Mellon seven, Cornell six, University of Washington six, Pennsylvania three. In contrast, several European and Asian institutions have fallen, University College London and the University of Kyoto by two places, Munich by seven, and Moscow State University by three.

In the previous post I noted that this year's survey had seen an increased response from engineering and computer science and a reduced one from the social sciences and the arts and humanities. As expected, LSE has tumbled five places and Oxford has fallen one place. Surprisingly, Caltech has fallen as well.

Some schools that are strong in engineering, such as Nanyang Technological University and Georgia Institute of Technology, have done well but I do not know if that is a full explanation for  the success of US universities.

I suspect that US administrators have learned that influencing reputation is easier than maintaining scientific and intellectual standards and that a gap is emerging between perceptions and actual achievements.

It will be interesting to see if these results are confirmed by the reputation indicators included in the QS, Best Global Universities, and the Round University Rankings