One hundred and 11 years ago, at the dawn of the college-rankings era, an Englishman named Alick Maclean published a study entitled “Where We Get Our Best Men.” It looked at the characteristics of the eminent men of the day, including nationality, family, birthplace, and university attended. In the back of the book, according to a terrific rankings history published by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Maclean published a list of universities ranked by the number of their prominent alumni. A decade later, a similar exercise in reverse-engineering produced the first U.S. college ranking, which began with a list of successful individuals, then looked back to see where they had been educated, crediting their alma maters for their accomplishments.
Last week, using a methodology remarkably similar to MacLean’s, the French grande école Mines ParisTech, a prestigious engineering school, released its own lineup of the world’s top universities. The creators of the fifth annual International Professional Ranking of Higher Education Institutions begin their analysis with a list of the chief executives of the 500 global firms listed in Fortune magazine’s 2010 Fortune Global 500. They then determine which higher-education institution each executive attended. One point is awarded to a university from which a CEO earned a degree; in cases where a business leader attended two institutions, each receives a half point. The college or university found to have trained the most CEOs comes out on top, the one with the second highest number of graduates-turned-titans-of-industry second, and so forth. Et voilà – a ranking is created, one that included 392 institutions this year, topped by Harvard, Tokyo, and Keio universities, and HEC Paris, France’s leading school of management.
The Mines ParisTech ranking is an explicitly chauvinistic exercise, born of French unhappiness with the dismal showing of its universities in influential surveys such as the Academic Ranking of World Universities created at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2003. When designing the Mines ParisTech ranking, with a view to influencing the architects of the Shanghai methodology, the college says in the FAQ section of its survey results, “we believed it was useful to highlight the good results of French institutions at a time when the Shanghai ranking was widely and is still widely discussed, and not always to the advantage of our own schools and universities.” What’s more, it goes on, “these results constitute a genuine communication tool at an international level, both for the recruitment of foreign students as well as among foreign companies which are not always very familiar with our education system.” Given the genesis of the ranking, it doesn’t seem too surprising that three French institutions made it into this year’s top 10 — École Polytechnique and École Nationale d’Administration joined HEC Paris — while Mines ParisTech itself placed 21st in the world.
I generally applaud the proliferation of serious university rankings, on the theory that the entire enterprise is in a period of ferment and needs all the good ideas that are out there to measure teaching, learning, research, and post graduation success. For instance, a controversial recent French government survey that ranks the nation’s public universities by how well graduate students fare in the employment market seems, at least in principle, a worthwhile exercise. But it’s hard to view the Mines ParisTech effort as anything but cynical. Yes, other global rankings have many shortcomings; there’s absolutely a case to be made that they don’t do justice to the strengths of certain French institutions, among others. Still, I don’t buy Mines ParisTech’s argument that it is simply engaging in the business-world equivalent of the academic honor-counting undertaken by the Shanghai rankers. The Academic Ranking of World Universities includes a measure that adds up the number of a university’s graduates who go on to win Nobel prizes or Fields medals for outstanding young mathematicians Yet the Mines ParisTech rankers neglect to mention that in the Shanghai rankings (which focus heavily on faculty research output) alumni academic honors count for just 10 percent, not the 100 percent weighting given to the alumni-turned-CEO measure in the Mines ParisTech survey.
Imagine if one were to look up the alma maters of all living Nobel winners, count which universities appear most frequently, then deem those the best universities in the world. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense. In a related vein, the frequent observation that most American CEOs attended public universities rather than elites doesn’t really tell us much about whether, say, Dartmouth, is disproportionately likely to mold future business leaders. After all, most Americans attend large public universities, so one would want some kind of per-capita measure to gauge an institution’s influence vis-à-vis its size. Even then, picking individuals who have made it to the top of their fields, and then engaging in ex post facto analysis of the institutions that ostensibly had a role in their success seems to me inherently problematic. Reverse-engineering certainly has its uses in many other contexts. But by now the world of college rankings should have moved on from the methods of Alick Maclean.
