Is Harvard really that good?
Huge brand recognition, powerful alumni network and massive funding. This attracts a lot of top international students and researchers.
That being said, you also have to look at where their specialties lie: unlike Chinese universities which tend to specialize in STEM, Harvard is best known for Business, Law, Economics and Medicine. It’s very much America’s elite incubator for the political class.
To answer many people on the thread, it seems it’s the Leiden University’s Ranking. It was well circulated in my country for the top university here being in the top three outside China.
Paraphrasing what I read from a few local news outlets, it seems that they use bibliometric data (churning out articles, citations and such), as well as some diversity metrics, such as women in academia favoring a higher ranking than those unis that have worse numbers.
I did not check the method for myself, just because I like the result and didn’t bother to check further.
Thank you for confirming this. That was more or less what i found as well.
I know it’s corny, but my dream is to one day study in one of these Chinese unis once I get out of Ukraine and get my wife out of the Yankeestan with the polycule. Probably will study art if possible, since art is the only (side)income I have that doesn’t make me wanna turn to dust, tho I’m not holding my breath on being actually able to get in.
Hope things work out for you bro. And I hope you get into the art program.
I tried searching for this source but I couldn’t find it. I also don’t see such a stark difference over the years in the QS University Rankings and Times Higher Education, which may be biased, but they’re generally what universities compare themselves to in my experience.
This appears to be referring to the same ranking:
The criteria is just the number of scientific publications.
Nature uses the same sort of ranking system:
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/nature-index-research-leaders-chinese-institutions-dominate
A lot of the other rankings you commonly find use honestly questionable scoring systems that can be very subjective.
Harvard just really riding the corpse of its reputation
I don’t think it’s reputation else Oxford/Cambridge and MIT/Stanford would be higher and most Chinese universities would be lower.
Honestly, university rankings are kind of bullshit anyway. It’s still funny that the PRC seems to be beating out the western world by the latter’s own bullshit standards, but that doesn’t make university rankings less silly.
For once this is actually not based on bullshit standards. Other rankings have more western universities at the top because they use complex and somewhat arbitrary ranking scores that include “academic reputation” and “learning experience” which honestly aren’t really objectively quantifiable. This ranking just looks at number of scientific publications, which is objective and verifiable. Another objective metric you can look at is number of citations by other scientific papers.
I mean it’s pretty silly to rank ‘top’ by the metric of ‘number of scientific publications’.
The Chinese institutions listed here aren’t even the ones considered ‘top’ by Chinese people by normal standards.
Number of citations by other scientific publications might be a strong objective standard though but only if you cover recent years (because then older institutions would get an advantage). My reasoning is that if it was used by another scientific paper than its predicate either formed the reasoning for the new paper or bolstered the results, unless there was a contradiction addressed but those would have to be weeded out.
You’re thinking of the US News & World Report rankings
I recall reading tweets from Chinese users that China has a transformative experience every twenty years, this definitely looks on point
can I get a source for further reading? I’m having trouble finding it.
Here’s a different ranking from Nature where they rank based on research output:
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/generate/all/global/all
On this list China now has nine out of the top ten.
In 2024 they had seven: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/nature-index-research-leaders-chinese-institutions-dominate
