GLOBAL: Some surprises in THE university rankings

The California Institute of Technology has edged Harvard out of the global top slot in the just-published Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2011-12. The new ranking places Hong Kong as best in the world in university performance relative to gross domestic product, which tries to normalise the rankings for country size and wealth.

This is the first time that the ranking has measured the number of universities a country has in the top 200 relative to its GDP which, Times Higher Education said in a statement, also highlights how important higher education is in each society.

"When viewed through this filter, Hong Kong is the world's number one nation, followed by the Netherlands, the UK and Switzerland, with Sweden making up the top five." They are followed by Ireland, Denmark, Israel, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Belgium, Canada, United States, Norway, Finland, Germany, South Korea, Austria and South Africa.

As usual, America dominates the global university rankings compiled by Times Higher Education (THE) with data supplied by Thomson Reuters. It has 75 universities in the top 200 and seven in the top 10. However, said THE, many state-funded US universities "are sliding downwards as public funding cuts start to take hold".

Britain comes next with 32 universities in the top 200, three more than last year, and three in the top 10. But THE expressed concern at a fall in the number of universities in the top 100, with more than before "languishing in the bottom half of the table", and at whether tuition fee changes might "sacrifice our intellectual capital to pay for the stupidity of bankers".

The Netherlands and Germany are next in the top countries list, with 12 universities each in the top 200. Then comes Canada with nine universities, Switzerland and Australia with seven each, and then with five each are Japan, Sweden and France.

This makes Japan Asia's top country. "While France has one more top 200 institution this year than last, most of its top universities have dropped in position," said the THE statement. Italy does not have a single university on the list.

Hong Kong has four universities in the top 200, followed by South Korea, China, Belgium and Denmark with three each. With only eight million people, for Switzerland to have three universities in the top 70 is "testimony to the resources it puts into academia", said THE.

China's top two universities, Peking and Tsinghua, "are holding on among the elite, but the rankings show how much work China's other leading universities have to do to become truly world-class".

With two universities each are Singapore, Ireland, Israel and Norway, and countries with one university on the list are Austria, Brazil, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan and Spain. Taiwan used to have four universities in the top 200.

Regarding individual universities, says the UK magazine, the biggest surprise is that Harvard, "has been knocked off the top spot for the first time in the eight years that Times Higher Education has published a global university ranking.

"Not only that, but Harvard has been forced to share second place with another California institution, Stanford University."

THE attributes the specialist California Institute of Technology's success to "consistent results across the indicators, and a steep (16%) rise in research funding". Other American universities in the top 10 are Princeton (fifth), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (seventh), University of Chicago (ninth) and University of California, Berkeley (tenth).

Oxford passed Cambridge into fourth place, with Cambridge at sixth and Imperial College London ranked eighth. Oxford's improved performance was partly related to a refinement in methodology this year, made to reflect subject mix more fairly, and high scores for international outlook and research funding.

"With University College London also in the top 20, there is a widening gap in the UK between a super-elite and the rest of Britain's leading institutions," said THE.

The highest ranked university outside the United States and Britain is ETH Zürich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich, placed in position 15. The top Asian university is the University of Tokyo, at number 30.

Although Middle Eastern universities performed well in the recent QS world university ranking, in the THE-Thomsons ranking Israel is the only country in the top 200, with Hebrew University of Jerusalem placed at 121 and Tel Aviv University at 166.

Brazil's University of São Paulo entered the list at 178 "thanks to an increase in industry funding and a considerable rise in reputational standing", while South Africa's University of Cape Town edged up four places to 103.

Ann Mroz, editor of Times Higher Education, said the old order of top global universities could "no longer rest on its laurels. New powers are emerging, traditional hierarchies are facing challenges, the global competition for talent is heating up and these league tables help us understand this rapidly changing situation."

Data for the rankings were provided by Thomson Reuters from its Global Institutional Profiles Project, which collects and validate data about academic institutional performance across various aspects and disciplines.

Jonathan Adams, director of research evaluation for Thomson Reuters, said this year's methodology "was the most ambitious to date and captured information that profiled higher education institutions in a more rounded, global context".

The data judged universities on 13 performance indicators that, THE-Thomson Reuters said, examined all core missions of a global university: research, teaching, knowledge transfer and international activity.

They included the world's largest reputation survey, involving 17,500 academics, and an analysis of 50 million citations. The methodology was also slightly refined to place arts, humanities and social sciences on "an equal footing" with science.

The 13 indicators were: 1- Industry income (innovation); 2- Reputation survey (teaching); 3- Staff-to-student ratio; 4- PhDs awarded/undergraduate degrees awarded; 5- PhDs awarded/academic staff; 6- Institutional income/academic staff; 7- Citation impact (normalised average citations per paper); 8- Reputation survey of research; 9- Research income/academic staff; 10- Scholarly papers/(academic staff plus research staff); 11- International students/total students; 12- International academic staff/total academic staff; and 13- Scholarly papers with one or more international co-authors/total scholarly papers.

Phil Baty, editor of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, said: "We have put huge effort into making the rankings comprehensive and balanced, and into ensuring that they are carefully calibrated to look at the broad range of each university's activities and to recognise the unique characteristics and structures of each university we examine."