Monday, July 28, 2008

Another University Ranking

The Ecole des Mines de Paris has produced a new ranking based on the number of corporate leaders trained by universities. Its website reports:

The École des Mines de Paris ranking is based on a quite different
criterion: the number of alumni holding a Chief Executive Officer position (CEO)
in one of the 500 leading worldwide companies as of the date of the Shanghai
ranking 2006. This criterion is aimed at being the equivalent among companies of
the criterion for alumni who have been awarded the Nobel Prize or the Fields
Medal, as the numbers involved are similar.
We have chosen to identify the
500 leading enterprises on the basis of the "Global Fortune 500", based on the
criterion of the published annual turnover and conducted by Fortune
magazine.


It is good to be reminded that universities do other things and not just research. Still this is a very limited measure of excellence.

Here are the top ten

1. Harvard Univ

2. Tokyo Univ

3 Stanford Univ

4 Ecole Polytechnique Paris

5 École des Hautes Études Commerciales Paris

6 Univ Pennsylvania

7 Massachusetts Inst Tech (MIT)

8 Sciences Po - Paris

9 ENA Paris

10 Ecole des Mines de Paris


There are five French schools in the top ten which may say something about the excellence of these institutions or perhaps something about French cultural introversion. Only four foreign institutions have contributed to the training of 37 French CEOs. For the 38 British CEOs the corresponding figure is 22, including Gettysburg College, the US Naval Academy, University College Cork, Utrecht, Witwatersrand and, of course, the Ecole des Mines.

I noticed that in at least two cases, Strode's College in Surrey and Malay College in Malaysia, secondary schools were listed as diploma-granting institutions.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Richard.
Keep up the good work.
Just wanted to add a note about submitting data to THES based on my experience here at a large Australian university. We forwarded our submission earlier this year and now we have received a query on someof our numbers - a check just to confirm if they are correct. And I can understand why they would need to be checked. The numbers we submitted for staff (in the thousands) seem to have changed to a number in the very low hundreds. Also, comments (made by us) that were attached to specific sections have, in the past come back with typos... I think this indicates that there is greater scope for human error in the compilation of the data, even at such an early and relatively uncomplicated phase of the data gathering process...
Cheers

Unknown said...

I think you posted last year's university ranking (2007) from Les Mines, here is the 2008 one:

1 University of Tokyo (+1)
2 Harvard (-1)
3 Stanford Univ (=)
4 Keio univ (+6)
5 University of Pennsylvania +1)
6 Waseda University (+11)
7 HEC Paris (-2)
8 Kyoto University (+26)
8 Oxford University (+4)
10 Ena - Paris (-1)


And about the training of French and British CEOs: how many British CEOs were trained in a country where the teaching was not done in their native language? This might say something about "cultural introversion"...

Unknown said...

Here's the link (of the French version, the English version is supposed to be released soon):

http://www.ensmp.fr/Actualites/PR/defclassementEMP.html