American institutions again dominate a British list of the world’s top 200 international universities, the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings, according to a BBC News report. The list is produced by Times Higher Education, formerly the Times Higher Education Supplement, and Quacquarelli Symonds, a company that provides career and education information.
In the 2008 rankings, Harvard University kept its No. 1 spot, a position it has held all five years the list has been produced. Yale University came in second. Last year Yale shared that position with the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, but this year it held the spot alone. The two British institutions slid to third and fourth, respectively.
An article in Times Higher Education noted that several British institutions had slipped to lower positions this year, and raised concerns about the nation’s level of financial support for higher education. Of the list’s top 100 institutions, the article said, 17 are British, two fewer than in 2007. Thirty-seven American universties made the top 100, including six in the top 10. After Harvard and Yale, the other American institutions in the top 10 are the California Institute of Technology (5), the University of Chicago (8), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (9), and Columbia University (10).
The rankings are based on the opinions of academics and corporate recruiters, plus statistical measures such as the ratio of faculty members to students and how often faculty members’ publications are cited in academic journals.
As nations increasingly compete for foreign students, critics have raised questions about the validity of rankings and the influence of such lists on students’ choices. Yet rankings, within countries and across borders, seem only to grow in popularity and now are produced in more than two dozen countries. An international group of experts that met in Berlin in 2006 developed a set of best practices for such rankings. One of the sponsors of that meeting, the Institute for Higher Education Policy, based in Washington, has recently launched an online resource devoted to the fast-growing field. —Charles Huckabee
