Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Shanghai without the Awards

Updated. The link to the site is here.

The Center for World-Class Universities (CWU) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University has produced an interesting new ranking by removing the Alumni and Awards indicators from its Academic Ranking of World Universities. These indicators have been criticised for allowing western universities to live off their intellectual capital and ignoring the rise of newcomers in Asia.

So what would ARWU look like without the Nobel and Fields awards?

At the very top things are the same. Harvard is still first and Stanford second. But Cambridge goes down and Oxford goes up.

Universities that would benefit significantly from deleting these indicators include Michigan, rising from 23rd  to 13th, Pennsylvania State University from 58th  to 35th, University of Florida, Tsinghua University, Alberta, Peking, Sao Paul, Tel Aviv, Zhejiang and Scuola Normale Pisa, which would rise to the 201-300 band.

CWU have calculated the ratio between places in ARWU and the Alternative Ranking. The higher the score the greater the benefit from the Awards and Alumni indicators. The biggest gainers from Nobel and Fields laureates are Princeton, Moscow State University and Paris Sud (11).

The countries that have benefited most from these indicators are the USA, France, Germany.

It looks as though the ARWU has favoured the Ivy League, continental European universities and Cambridge at the expense of American public universities and the rising stars of Asia.
.

2 comments:

Magnus Gunnarsson said...

Interesting post, thanks!

But I can't find this ranking. Do you have a link?

Magnus MacHale Gunnarsson

Carles Viladiu said...

http://www.shanghairanking.com/Alternative_Ranking_Excluding_Award_Factor/Excluding_Award_Factor2014.html

A university which scores due to a single student award, obtained more that 50 years ago, produces a difference of 70 positions in ARWU...