After Dry Spell, Harvard Finally Tops a College Ranking Again

After Forbes magazine inexplicably denied Harvard the top spot on several of its college rankings this summer, equilibrium was restored Aug. 15 when our University was named best in the world by the Center for World-Class Universities at China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The news is even better for STEM-field concentrators: Harvard's first-place finish was based on criteria almost entirely centered on math and science.

Case in point: the rankings take into account how many articles are published in Nature and Science journals and how many articles are indexed in the Science Citation Index-Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index. The Shanghai rankings also consider how many alumni and staff win Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of "highly cited researchers," and "per capita academic performance," calculated based on the institution's size.

Harvard notably beat out second-place Stanford, America's "top" college, according to Forbes. It also topped fourth-place MIT, the trade school down the river that specializes in many of the fields valued highly in the Shanghai rankings' criteria.

Take Harvard's victory with a grain of salt, though: A recent study has called into question the value of the Shanghai rankings and other global college rankings systems. The paper, published in the research journal Minerva, claims that a few universities' high rankings "does not necessarily indicate social or economic benefit" for a society and that the rankings themselves can perpetuate inequities in higher education.

We, however, would rather top a possibly flawed ranking than no ranking at all.