Harvard Ranked Top in World

A recently released ranking by a prominent British publication has named Harvard the best university in the world, beating out institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge and Yale.

American schools took seven of the top 10 slots in the results, published in last Friday’s issue of The Times Higher Education Supplement. The three other schools in the top 10 were Oxford, at fifth, Cambridge at sixth, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland at tenth. The top 20 included schools from Australia, China, Japan and Singapore. There were a total of 29 countries represented in the 200 universities ranked.

The rankings were based on five different factors. The most heavily weighted was a survey of 1,300 academics from 88 countries which asked respondents to name top institutions in their field of expertise.

The rankings also took into account the number of citations per faculty member, faculty-to-student ratios, percentages of international students and percentages of international faculty.

Director of Undergraduate Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73 said she was pleased with Harvard’s strong showing and with the strength of American schools in general.

“It’s always flattering to be admired,” she said. “I think they are correct to include a large number of great American universities.”

Lewis said she felt that the worldwide ranking would be helpful to international students who might be considering the United States for their education, and would enable Harvard to continue recruiting these students.

“The media have done a wonderful job around the world of making people informed about higher education sources,” she said. “We have worked very hard to search around the world for the most promising students.”

Martin J. Ince, a contributing editor with The Times Higher Education Supplement who coordinated the rankings, said that more than two million students now leave their country for undergraduate studies and that this number has been growing by about 20 percent each year.

While Harvard had a very strong showing in this worldwide ranking, some other Ivy League schools did not fare as well. The University of Pennsylvania, which was ranked fourth in U.S. News & World Report’s American rankings this past year, was ranked 28th by The Times Higher Education Supplement. Dartmouth, given the ninth spot by U.S. News, was 138th in the international Times rankings.

Lewis said she felt these schools suffered from a lack of name recognition.

“I think there is a familiarity gap between Harvard and a number of other great universities,” she said.

Some other American universities, however, benefited from the international peer review and achieved higher rankings than in U.S. News. The University of California Berkeley, 21st on the U.S. News list, was propelled to a second place rank overall in The Times Higher due to its first-place finish in the peer review category. Harvard came in second in this category.

Ince stressed the difficulty in finding criteria which could be used to fairly judge such a broad range of universities. He said that factors like course cost and library spending would favor countries with strong economies and admitted that some of the indicators that were used had problems as well.

Using citations per faculty member favored schools with strong programs in the sciences and biomedicine, for example. “People in that field expect to publish more papers,” he said. “[And] they cite more papers.”

Caltech, with its extensive resources the sciences, beat Harvard in this category.

The Times Higher Education Supplement soon plans to rank the schools by discipline in order to help those which do not necessarily do well in the citations category. They also plan to expand their data collection for subsequent rankings.

“In future years, we are going to develop more data from employers,” Inca said.

Although Harvard did not win every category, it will not be easily knocked from its top position, according to Editor John O’Leary in Friday’s Times Higher Education Supplement.

“Strong performances in all five measures confirm what most observers have long suspected: that Harvard is in the position to which all leading universities aspire,” he wrote. “A reputation for being the best in the world acts as a magnet for the most talented students and staff.”