Harvard Tops ‘Times’ Rankings Again

We’re number one—again.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings released last week placed Harvard in the number one spot this year, for the fifth year in a row.

Yale finished second, and the University of Cambridge came in third.

Though there were some significant changes in the positions of schools in the rankings this year, most U.S. universities stayed pat. Brown, Penn, and Cornell moved up in the rankings while Columbia, Princeton, and Dartmouth moved down. The Hanover, N.H. college lagged behind its peers—the only Ivy to finish out of the top 50.

This newest round of scores comes at a time when people through academia are growing increasingly resistant to the idea of numerical rankings and the industry that has grown up around them.

“It’s always flattering to be appreciated,” said Marlyn E. McGrath ’70, Harvard College director of admissions. “But it’s foolish to put too much faith into a numerical ranking system.”

McGrath said that rankings do not provide a perfect way for a student to choose the right college. In fact, they can be misleading.

“One very important aspect of these upper colleges is that in a sense they are very incomparable,” McGrath said. “You can measure acreage, the size of a library, or student-faculty ratio, but you can’t measure some certain aspects of a college that will fit a student’s wants and needs. [The rankings] are there to help get you started.”

Former Harvard College Dean Harry R. Lewis ’68 also took a circumspect view on the most recent rankings announcement.

“Human beings are complex, and what’s best for one person won’t be best for another,” Lewis said in a written statement. “So I approve of transparency, but tend not to assign to much significance to one-dimensional rankings,”

U.K. schools saw a widespread drop in rankings this year, with top universities Cambridge and Oxford falling behind Yale to third and fourth place. Higher education observers in England worry that their universities will continue to fall behind American peers due to their comparative poverty.

Oxford’s endownment stands at a fifth the size of Harvard’s coffers.

In May, the university announced a massive fundraising campaign to add $2.18 billion to its accounts.

According to the Times Higher Education publication, spending on university in the United Kingdom is less than half of that in the United States, as a proportion of gross domestic product.