THES Top 100 2006

Ah... the much "awaited" and possibly "controversial" world rankings of the world's top universities compiled by the Times Higher Education Supplement has been partially released. While we await for further details to be out in the next couple of days, I thought it might be worthwhile having a quick review of the Top 100 universities which has been released. Of course, many who have wagered that no Malaysian university appearing in the Top 100 list would find their cash and property safe for the moment. :)

The above table is taken from The Times report on the latest rankings. Click on the image for a larger view.

Good news for both Kian Ming's and my alma mater in the United Kingdom (UK), Cambridge and Oxford University moved up a notch to 2nd and 3rd in the world respectively. Imperial College makes up 3 entries from UK in the Top 10 at 9th, up from 13th last year. The remainder of the Top 10 universities however, are populated by universities from the United States, with Harvard firmly rooted at the top of the list.

From the 2005 Top 10 list, Ecole Polytechnique dropped from 10th to 37. While the data breakdown has yet to be released, I can assume that this was largely due to statistical errors a-la-University Malaya (UM) in the points calculation, as pointed out by Richard Holmes on his blog RankingWatch here.

Our neighbours down south has a mixed year, whereby National University of Singapore (NUS) broke into the Top 20 at 19th from 22nd, while Nanyang Technological University (NTU) dropped out of the Top 50 from 48th to 61st, sharing the position with Dartmouth College.

As for the Australian Universities down south which I've blogged about here based on last year's data, there appears to be a marked deterioration, as 6 universities dropped out of the Top 100 list, leaving a remainder of 6. Of the remaining 6, only MacQuarie University dropped significantly from 67th to 82nd, while the rest had marginal changes to their position. Could this be due to major fine-tuning of some of the dubious international faculty and students data in the previous year's table?

Asia is represented by 13 universities, with 3 from Hong Kong and Japan, 2 from China, Singapore, India and 1 from Korea. Topping this list remains Beijing University at 14th. The university which showed the greatest improvement from this list would be TsingHua University of Beijing, up from 62nd to 28th. Seoul National University has also shown remarkable progress over the past 2 years to improve from 118 (2004) to 93 (2005) to 63rd (2006). The only new entrants to the Top 100 club would include Osaka University, from 105th to 70th. Four Asian universities however, dropped out of the Top 100 list - Tokyo Institute of Technology (99th), China University of Science & Technology (93rd), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (77th) and
Fudan University (72nd).

UK universities are some of the biggest gainers, with 29 universities in the Top 200, up from 23 in 2005. Based on The Times report, new entrants include Cardiff and Southampton both at 141, Reading at 190 and Aberdeen at 195. Of the 29, 15 are ranked in the Top 100 this year, compared to 10 in 2005.

US universities made some of the biggest improvements in rankings into the top 100 list - Vanderbilt from 114th to 53rd, Case Western Reserve (109th to 60th), Dartmouth (117th to 61st) and University of Pittsburgh (193rd to 88th). Other notable new entries into the Top 100 include University of Otago, New Zealand from 186th to 79th and University of Birmingham, UK from 143rd to 90th.

Overall, the US universities increased their dominance in the Top 100 rankings table from 23 universities in 2005 to 33 in 2006. Interestingly, Kian Ming's current place of study, Duke University had only a marginal drop in ranking from 11th to 13th. This is despite another gross statistical input error in the previous year's ranking as pointed out by Richard Holmes here. The faculty-student ratio which was impressively low as due to the fact that the undergraduate population figure was treated as the faculty population instead. It appears likely that this error has not been rectified.

Without looking at the complete data which has yet to be released, it appears that the initial "euphoria" in the inaugural 2004 and 2005 rankings table on the significant presence of "world-class" institutions outside of US and UK, particularly in the Asia Pacific, is slowing eroding. The researchers and statisticians appear to have in one way or another "corrected" the inherent bias of the earlier methodologies towards "international universities" in the earlier surveys. As a result, this years table appears to see a significantly increasing dominance of US and UK based universities. This appears to be more in line with the other rankings table of note compiled by Shanghai Jiaotung University. Interestingly, there was also no mention of QS Quacquarelli Symonds, which carried out the error ridden and controversial rankings survey in the first 2 years.

Anyone want to wager on the fact that Universiti Malaya may find itself a casualty of rhe refined methodology and be left out of the Top 200 list? We'll see :).

Well, that's enough inane and mundane statistical analysis for now (a subject I'm proud to say that I aced in Maths and Economics :p). More detailed analysis later once the full tables are released.