This week, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) published its 2009 list of the best 500 universities. The annual ranking, which is in its seventh year, began at Shanghai Jiao Tong University as an attempt to measure the performance of Chinese post-secondary education relative to the rest of the world. But according to The Economist, it’s since become “the most widely used annual ranking of the world’s research universities.”
Which isn’t to say the ARWU methodology is without its critics. One researcher reported that the results “cannot be reproduced,” and others have pointed out that the criteria used to determine the ranking, which include counting how many Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals have been won, as well as the number of articles published in Nature and Science, by staff and graduates, skew the results toward science and math… Read more at Huffington Post
Supplementary: Ranking – European leadership college ESMT
haplif – Frank Kalder (Global Haplifnet)
