globalicious

Newsweek International Edition has published a “Global Education Special Report” with a Web Exclusive feature ranking the top 100 “global universities.” Harvard and Stanford were ranked first and second respectively, and UCSF was ranked ninth, so my household’s alma maters and current employer were quite well represented. Yale, Cal-Tech and Berkeley were ranked third, fourth, and fifth, followed by Cambridge, MIT and Oxford at sixth, seventh and eighth. Columbia rounded out the top ten, finishing below UCSF. My adopted home state of California captured four of the top ten spots, with Massachusetts and the UK tied with two each. Also further down the list than UCSF were UCLA (12), Penn (13), Duke (14), Princeton (15), Cornell (19, sorry, Peg), and Johns Hopkins (24).

The really nice thing about this evaluation is that it seems fairly rigorous; often, rankings of “best schools” (and note that this list says nothing about the value of the education from the university, only its degree of global integration) are based on interviews with university presidents and chancellors and influenced by “common wisdom.” This, however, used a series of weighted measures: fifty percent of the total score came from equal parts of 1) the number of highly cited researchers in various academic fields, 2) the number of articles published in Nature and Science, and 3) the number of articles listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities indices; forty percent of the total score came from equal parts of 1) the percentage of international faculty, 2) the percentage of international students, 3) citations per faculty member, and 4) ratio of faculty to students (probably one reason we did so well); the final ten percent of the score was based on number of volumes in university libraries (and that certainly helps Harvard).

Needless to say, we’re very pleased here at the office this morning.