That's interesting Reston,

I wonder why some of your Uni's were overlooked. It's not like there's a bias, as Europe, Asia, etc are certainly looked at.

One thing that's suspicious is that IIT is not on the list. IIT is the Indian Institute of Technology, it's India's MIT. But come to think about it IIT's resources are nowhere near MIT's; so maybe that was taken into consideration. Who knows.

Ah ha, here's some more information on how they ranked schools:

ed.sjtu.edu.cn . . .

= = = = =

1. Ranking Criteria and Weights

We rank universities by several indicators of academic or research performance, including alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, articles published in Nature and Science, articles indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution.

For each indicator, the highest scoring institution is assigned a score of 100, and other institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top score. The distribution of data for each indicator is examined for any significant distorting effect; standard statistical techniques are used to adjust the indicator if necessary.

Scores for each indicator are weighted as shown below to arrive at a final overall score for an institution. The highest scoring institution is assigned a score of 100, and other institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top score. An institution's rank reflects the number of institutions that sit above it.

Criteria Weight

"Quality of Education" - Alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals 10%

"Quality of Faculty" - (Staff of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals and Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories) 40%

"Research Output" - Articles published in Nature and Science* and Articles in Science Citation Index-expanded, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index 40%

"Size of Institution" - Academic performance with respect to the size of an institution 10%

* For institutions specialized in humanities and social sciences such as London School of Economics, N&S is not considered, and the weight of N&S is relocated to other indicators

= = = = =

Interesting...

"Acknowledgements"

The Ranking Group (Professor Nian Cai LIU, Mr. Ying CHENG, Ms Li LIU) in the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University would like to express our gratitude for those who have provided us with the number of academic staff or thoughtful comments and suggestions.

At the very least it seems that the Chinese have very high opinions of a US and British higher education, if you think the results are unfair, Reston.

I'll take that regardless

Bombs:
The places RC mentions aren't considered universities by the French. They're considered "grandes ecoles," i.e. "great schools." Each has a specialty, unlike a university. L'ENA, for instance, turns out government officials whose chief mission seems to be running France into the ground. At my personal favorite, the Ecole Polytechnique, you get to wear funny two-cornered hats and rape women at the annual ball.

BALeMay, you are right on target. To have worked with some ITT's engineers myself I can tell you their university must be in the 30 first.

jukinj3:

LMAO my university is 34th, well above the french.

So much for the superior education of french. Might explain the 10+% unemployment.

More proof of the arrogance of ignorance that so typifies a french.

Actually, this study says little about quality of education.

Academic standards and teaching quality per se are intentionally not used in this study. And as RestonsCourtois already hinted, any studies that try to measure these factors generally rank ENS highest in the world and ahead of Harvard for these two categories. As he pointed out, anyone who knows anything about France can see the study has serious problems just by examining how the French schools compare with each other. I can pretty much guarantee you that anyone at Paris VI would leap at an opportunity to switch to ENS...even if it meant starting over...even if it meant gnawing off a few fingers. (just kidding...a little. )

This study uses some very good benchmarks to try to identify which schools have distinguished scientists and mathematicians among faculty and alumni. The underlying assumption is that this says something about the research level and learning opportunities at the school. I agree with this. But there are two big problems.

The first and most obvious is related to how they collect their data. Regardless of how people feel about the criteria employed, at least the raw data is reliable (I think) within the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and a number of other countries. However, the data is unreliable in several other countries. There are several reasons for this. Any country that underwent major educational reform and divided large universities into smaller subuniversities, pays for this by losing credit for its alumni. Also, if there is a very different structure by which faculties of Medicine do not just belong to a university but jointly belong to both a university and a hospital, then there is a serious problem if most medical faculty only publish under their hospital name. These two factors have a major impact on the ranking of France's major universities, especially those which focus on Medicine.

The second problem lies in the assumption that students will have opportunities to learn from or work under Nobel laureates and Field medal winners on faculty. I think the validity of this assumption varies enormously from school to school. I think it is true for Harvard and especially true for a school like Princeton. But it is not so true for some large state schools and not so true for most Canadian schools. Unfortunately, I don't think it's so true for some French universities either. The big exceptions, however, are some of the grandes écoles...especially ENS. An ENS student actually has fantastic access not only to Nobel laureates and Field medal winners at his school...he has fantastic access to Nobel laureates and Field medal winners at other schools as well. An ENS students is much more likely to get to have a Paris VI Nobel laureate as a professor than Paris VI students are.

If anyone thinks this is quibbling, consider that Jiao Tong ranks the College de France. Even though they clearly know little about France, it only would have taken a couple of minutes to find out that, no, it's not a college, and, no, it doesn't grant any diploma or admit any students. It's role is to keep the public abreast of modern research. They might as well have ranked the science advisors of PBS.

I only make a big deal of this because I'm familiar with two schools ranked highly on the list and one French school. And I know from first hand experience that the academic standards of the French school are higher than at my previous two schools.

If anyone wants to criticize French funding for universities, especially for research, I'd be happy to join in. But if you think the academic standards at French universities are a joke, you have no idea...

Thanks W&C,

Apples to oranges it seems.

Reston, don't pull shit like that again...

This list is curious. It seems to be for chinese people who want to study abroad.

There are also research units in some "grandes ecoles", they ressemble very much to universities. In france students are assigned according to their high school to the closest uni, there is no entry selection in Paris unis for people living in paris and close suburb. Everybody can register. ENA, X, Mines .. they all require tough admission procedures to be passed.


The best MBA school in the world is french (INSEAD) according to Forbes, by the way.

Oh, and how bad was/is Katrina tonight?



Looks like it hit in North Miami Beach?!

Suh! You have insulted my honor! There is no way the U. Of Paris beats my alam mater: William and Mary!!!

Congratulations.

You and GBush are fellow alums.

Papa,

The best MBA school in the world is french (INSEAD) according to Forbes, by the way

I am not surprised. There simply has to be at least one really good business school in France, otherwise France would practically be a third world country these days after a decade of that corrupt and bumbling fool Chiraq.

Bombs_Away_LeMay:

Thanks W&C,

Apples to oranges it seems.

Reston, don't pull shit like that again...

?????
I don't know what you're talking about. RestonsCourtois was bang on in his post. W&C is correct in suggesting that some of the grandes écoles specialize in certain areas. But the only way they are apples to other universities' oranges is that some of these apples have some of the most difficult admissions exams in the world. Apart from that, yes, they're colleges. If you disagree, then you might as well exclude MIT, CalTech, all American liberal arts colleges, Johns Hopkins and any other American university that is a too focused in one or two faculties.

It's interesting that you mentioned IIT because IIT and AIIM in India also have very high academic standards. It's no mistake that they're not highly ranked on this list because their research funding isn't in the same league. But they are both supposed to have high admissions standards and very difficult exams. I know people who consider IIT and AIIM to have higher academic standards than most of the top 50 universities on this list.

The best MBA school in the world is french (INSEAD) according to Forbes, by the way.

-the best NON US school, add in US schools and Inseaman falls to sixth www.forbes.com . . .=

-And just for fun, rankings by GMAT scores, Insead drops to 7th with the US taking the top 6 places in front of the dumb frogs. www.forbes.com . . .=

The top class at Insead, Money laundering. "How to accpet a bribe and not get caught" was a close second.

Cowboy,

Some Ecoles are on the euro/UK 100 list. For instance Ecole Normale Super Paris and Ecole Polytechnique are listed. So it's not like the Ecoles are not considered. Unless there is a "super" Ecole that the authors of the list refused to consider maybe because they do not fit into their traditional idea of what ir or isn't a Uni or Institute? Furthermore I see no "colleges" either on the list(s) either.

Oh sure, some schools like IIT have extremely high entry standards, but the authors who researched this list do in fact consider other factors as well-like a Uni's resources for example.

Bombs_Away_LeMay:

Cowboy,

Some Ecoles are on the euro/UK 100 list. For instance Ecole Normale Super Paris and Ecole Polytechnique are listed. So it's not like the Ecoles are not considered. Unless there is a "super" Ecole that the authors of the list refused to consider maybe because they do not fit into their traditional idea of what ir or isn't a Uni or Institute? Furthermore I see no "colleges" either on the list(s) either.

Oh sure, some schools like IIT have extremely high entry standards, but the authors who researched this list do in fact consider other factors as well-like a Uni's resources for example.

I know some of the grandes écoles are on the list. The Jiao Tong team clearly tried to rank them. What I was trying to point out was the order they assigned to French schools. Ninety-third in the world might not sound terrible, but ranking ENS behind Paris VI, Paris 11 and Strasbourg is really ridiculous. Trust me on this.

I can understand how they reached the conclusions they did though. Grandes écoles tend to be very small and some of the brilliant people they draw on to teach either come from research institutes or other universities. Sometimes they "officially" share faculty with other universities. What this means is many of their professors either aren't counted or their scoring value is halved. In other studies that consider academic standards and teaching quality, both ENS and X rank very highly in these two categories.

As for College de France not being on the Jiao Tong list, trust me it is. They rank it 101st in the world. Your list was just a tad short.

As for the Jiao Tong team taking other factors into account, yes, they do. But if they had a separate category for academic standards, IIT would likely be highly ranked at least in that category.

When it comes to IIT and AIIM, I don't especially care. I have no connection to them apart from what I've heard second hand. I'm simply curious about schools that have extreme academic standards. In the case of IIT and AIIM they're even more interesting since they are practically unknown to most Americans and many people would dismiss them simply because they're Indian schools. The fact that they don't even show up on a list like this just reinforces that perception. This seems a shame considering what students have to do to be admitted and graduate from these schools.

Cowboy,

I grew up in a ghetto, studied hard, worked my ass off, went to UCSB (worked the entire time), became a millionaire by thirty and semi-retired at 35. I will let that speak for itself.

If you think that could have happened in france you are delusional, brain washed, and ignorant.

BTW I have been traveling to europe for over 20 years on business (when you have attained a platinum mileage card, let me know). So yes, I have been there and that is the main reason that hold such disdain for the lazy, traitorous , never living up to their agreements french.

In the words of emenem, suck my mother fucking dick. The range of an excuse is zero meters.

jukinj3:

Cowboy,

I grew up in a ghetto, studied hard, worked my ass off, went to UCSB (worked the entire time), became a millionaire by thirty and semi-retired at 35. I will let that speak for itself.

If you think that could have happened in france you are delusional, brain washed, and ignorant.

BTW I have been traveling to europe for over 20 years on business (when you have attained a platinum mileage card, let me know). So yes, I have been there and that is the main reason that hold such disdain for the lazy, traitorous , never living up to their agreements french.

In the words of emenem, suck my mother fucking dick. The range of an excuse is zero meters.

????
Well....uh...good for you.

But there isn't exactly an ironclad connection between your post and mine.

On the one hand you seem to be looking for a pat on the back and on the other hand you seem to be trying to elicit some sort of angry response. I'll go with the pat on the back.

I can only assume that the idea of some French schools having decent academic standards offends you personally. I'm not really sure why.

Kickass!

The university I'm attending is ranked #16 in the world and #14 in the U.S. Any UW Madison people here? Speaking of which, school starts in a week.

Damn.

That was a good explanation for the seeming disparity, suburbancowboy. I'm curious, how accented is your spoken English? You're written English is flawless.

W&M and UVA aren't on the list because it's FIXED.

Probably by some cocksucker who never went to school like sLyme!!

Let me explain something : it DOESN'T rank any french GRANDE ECOLE???? How can this ranking be trustable??
You compare what you can compare. In France university is for average students. The best ones go to Grandes Ecoles. The educational system is different.
But wait, it is american ranking for the chinese? Then I understand : it is a political ranking serving a political goal. Attract the chinese elites. That what we do also in Shanghai: find elites who will go to study in french grandes ecoles.

I grew up in a ghetto,…

If you think that could have happened in France you are delusional, brain washed, and ignorant.

And I thought this was a French bashing forum!

This Ranking make me laught ! Then American education is perfect ? the best in the world ?
hahahahhahahahahahahaha
Maybe the selection is the ranking of the price. For american more if expensive more the university is good.
Or the selection could made by the level in sport.

Seriously this renkins in cheated because it doesn't count "grandes ecoles". American can say what they want about the system of "grande école" but they can not forgot them in a ranking.
And by the way the 10% of unemployment DON'T concern the students of "grand écoles"... This student'll nerver know the unemployment.

Barril:

Let me explain something : it DOESN'T rank any french GRANDE ECOLE???? How can this ranking be trustable??
You compare what you can compare. In France university is for average students. The best ones go to Grandes Ecoles. The educational system is different.
But wait, it is american ranking for the chinese? Then I understand : it is a political ranking serving a political goal. Attract the chinese elites. That what we do also in Shanghai: find elites who will go to study in french grandes ecoles.

No, it's not that. The study was conducted by Jiao Tong university in Shanghai and they made an attempt to rank grandes écoles too. But if you read the posts above, you'll see why they had so much trouble ranking them. Basically, they knew squat about France.

But if there was a hidden agenda, I'm pretty sure it wasn't to aid US recruiting. In their first study, I think they were trying to drive the point home to Beijing that foreign schools, especially American schools, had far more Nobel laureates and it was about time Beijing increased research funding. One reason I suspect this is that their methodology ranks the University of Beijing extremely low, even though other studies usually rank it in the top 30.

I'm wondering how they rank their universities!
Aren't they ranked by the price you have to pay to go in there?

UPENN 15th which seems right with the price it cost me when I went there!

The only good way to rank Universitis and Grands Ecoles, would be the annual incomes of their graduateds

LOL - A considerable number of my friends have got a job in your Silicon Valley with only a DUT (less than a degree).

possibly true - but what you have to realise that all the major employers in civilised countries have to take a certain percentage of their staff from the mentally or physically 'challanged' communities - like 'green-card' holders etc - and Even Microsoft and Intel etc need shithouse cleaners, tea-boys, and someone to empty the machine in the womens toilet - you know the one I mean - no - just cos smoke comes out of the flue of it does not mean 'they are electing a new pope'

and what is this DUT certificate that they have -

"Does'nt Understand Technicalities" -

so only employ if you need brain dead staff