World University Rankings

University rankings have become increasingly popular in recent years and an unavoidable part of academic life. Not only have the general public and the media enthusiastically embraced them, these rankings have also become popular among the universities themselves, as long as they consider their ranking position is worth publishing. Students and their parents, junior faculty and scientists, participants of continuous and executive education programs as well as sponsors and politicians are all looking for guidance in evaluating the quality of different universities. Rankings thereby create a public platform for competition between universities, which did not exist previously. And the universities themselves have welcomed rankings as a marketing tool to communicate their performance and build their international reputation. Some rankings evaluate institutions within a single country, while others assess them worldwide. We will be focusing on rankings assessing institutions worldwide. Two global influential ranking lists have attracted much public attention recently: The Shanghai ranking of world class universities, first published by the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai in 2003 (Shanghai ranking list), and the Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of world universities, first published in 2004 (THES ranking list). We will give also a quick overview of The Center of World University Ranking(CWUR).

THE Ranking

THE (Times Higher Education) has been providing trusted performance data on universities and a resource to understand the different missions and successes of higher education institution, for students and their families, university academics, university leaders, governments and industry, since 2004. The THE World University Rankings, is the definitive list of the top universities globally, including more than 1,400 institutions across 92 countries in 2020. It is the only global university league table to judge research-intensive universities across each one of their core missions: teaching (the learning environment); research (volume, income and reputation), international outlook (staff, students and research); citations (research influence); industry income (knowledge transfer). It uses 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons. Each university in the rankings has a detailed profile, with a breakdown of its overall scores across the rankings and supplementary data designed to help students making one of the most important decisions of their lives. Under the THE World University Rankings umbrella, and using the same range of performance metrics, THE also publishes a series of highly regarded regional and thematic rankings, including the THE Asia University Rankings, the THE Latin America University Rankings and the THE Young University Rankings. This data is also used, combined with an annual Academic Reputation Survey of 10,000 scholars around the world, to produce the THE World Reputation Rankings which looks at the world’s top universities based purely on their academic prestige.
The following graph (fig.1) shows elements and weights for calculating the total score for THE.

I- Countries in THE

Let’s start by having a look at the countries involved in THE university ranking. As mentioned before, this ranking groups around 92 countries. The following word cloud gives a quick view of the top countries.

We can say that the United States has the highest number of universities participating in THE university ranking, since the word United States has the largest size in the word cloud, which means it has the highest occurrences in the dataset.

II. TOP 10 universities

The evolution of the world rank of Top 10 universities according to THE university ranking is represented by the following scatter plot. As we can see, the university of Oxford has progressed over years until reaching first place in 2020. However, Harvard university, after being placed first in 2011, moved down to the 7th place in 2020.

III. Performance of the Top 10 universities

It would be interesting to compare the performance of the Top 10 universities in the word, to visualize the difference between scores that influenced the word ranks in 2020.

a. Teaching

The Stanford University is leading with an average value of teaching score of approximately 92.8/100. Imperial college London has the “poorest” performance in teaching, although its score has a value of 84.5.

b. Researches

On the other hand, the University of Oxford is leading with an average value of researches score approaching 100, 99.6. However, Imperial College London acts poorly for this indicator too, with a score of 87.6.

c. Citations

As for citations, the Stanford university is also leading with a score of 99.9/100. University of Cambridge has the lowest score for this indicator, 95.8.

d. International

For this indicator, Imperial College is Leading with a score of 97.1. We can see that Yale University has the poorest performance with a score of 68.7.

e. Income

Lastly, we can see that California Institute of Technology is leading and has a score of 88. There is a gap between this university and Harvard, that unfortunately has the lowest score with a value of 47.3.

We can notice that the performances of Top 10 universities are very close in teaching, researches and citations, the gap between scores isn’t really significant. However, the difference is remarkable for the international indicator and the industry income.

ARWU Ranking

Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU): Starting from June 2003, ARWU has been presenting the world top universities annually based on a set of objective indicators and third-party data. ARWU has been recognized as the precursor of global university rankings and the most trustworthy league table. It adopts six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni (alumni) and staff (award) winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science (ns), the number of Highly Cited Researchers (HiCi) and articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index (pub) based on data in the Web of Science, and per capita performance (pcp). The total score for ARWU will be the sum of weighted indicators. The highest scoring institution is assigned a score of 100, and other institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top score.

𝑡𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑒=0.1∗𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑚𝑛𝑖+0.2∗𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑+0.2∗ℎ𝑖𝑐𝑖+0.2∗𝑛𝑠+0.2∗𝑝𝑢𝑏+0.1∗𝑝𝑐𝑝

The quality of education is defined by the alumni indicator, the quality of faculty by the award and HiCi indicators, the research output by the ns and pub indicators and the per capita performance by pcp.

More than 2000 universities are ranked by ARWU every year and the best 1000 universities are published. Although the initial purpose of ARWU was to find the global standing of top Chinese universities, it has attracted a great deal of attention from universities, governments and public media worldwide. ARWU has been reported by mainstream media in almost all major countries. Hundreds of universities cited the ranking results in their campus news, annual reports and promotional brochures. A survey on higher education published by The Economist in 2005 described ARWU as “the most widely used annual ranking of the world’s research universities”. Burton Bollag, a reporter at Chronicle of Higher Education wrote that ARWU “is considered the most influential international ranking”.

ARWU was first published in June 2003 by the Center for World-Class Universities (CWCU), Graduate School of Education (formerly the Institute of Higher Education) of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and updated on an annual basis. Since 2009, The ShanghaiRanking Consultancy has been the official publisher of the Academic Ranking of World Universities. It is a fully independent organization dedicated to research higher education intelligence and consultation.

This study is based on scores between 2005 and 2015.

I. TOP 10 universities

The total score of the TOP 10 universities in year 2015 for the Shanghai Ranking is represented in the following pie chart (fig.9). Harvard University, ranked first worldwide, has a full score of 100. Stanford University comes in second place, with a score of 73.3. The gap between these two scores is significant, but it is less remarkable between the rest of the scores.

II. Performance of the Top 10 universities

In this section, we will be comparing the performance of the Top 10 universities according to the six principle indicators of the ARWU ranking in the year 2015.

a. Alumni

Let’s start with the first indicator: alumni. It represents the total number of alumni in an institution that has won awards like Nobel Prizes or Field Medals. The weight is 100% for alumni obtaining degrees in 2001-2010, 90% for alumni obtaining degrees in 1991-2000, 80% for alumni obtaining degrees in 1981-1990, and so on, and finally 10% for alumni obtaining degrees in 1911-1920. If a person obtains more than one degree from an institution, the institution is counted once only.

Ranked first with a total score of 100, Harvard University has a full score in the alumni indicator. University of Cambridge comes in second with a score of 77.1. Stanford university comes in last with a score of 40.

b. Award

The award indicator represents the number of staff in an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Field Medals while they were working for this institution. The weight is 100% for winners after 2011, 90% for winners in 2001-2010, 80% for winners in 1991-2000, 70% for winners in 1981-1990, and so on. If a winner is affiliated with more than one institution, each institution is assigned the reciprocal of the number of institutions. For Nobel prizes, if a prize is shared by more than one person, weights are set for winners according to their proportion of the prize.

As shown in the figure (fig.11), Harvard University has also a full score, then comes the University of Cambridge with a score of 96.6. And in third place, we have Princeton University with a score of 93.4. Notice that the gap between consecutive scores isn’t large.

c. Highly cited researchers

The HiCi indicator represents the number of highly cited researches selected by Thomson Reuters in 21 broad subject categories. The following radar chart (fig.12) shows the score of the Top 10 universities for this indicator. Harvard University has a full score. Stanford University comes in second with a score of 80.1. However, the rest of the scores are significantly lower than the first two. For example, the University Of California is in third place with a score of only 66.1.

d. Nature and Science

This indicator represents the number of articles published in nature and science. For humanities and social sciences institutions, the ns indicator is not taken into consideration and its weight relocates to other indicators. To distinguish the order of author affiliation, a weight of 100% is assigned for corresponding author affiliation, 50% for first author affiliation (second author affiliation if the first author affiliation is the same as corresponding author affiliation), 25% for the next author affiliation, and 10% for other author affiliations.
The following spider chart (fig .13) represents the score of the Top 10 universities for this indicator. Harvard University will surely obtain a full score.

As we can notice, there is a big difference in the scores between Harvard University and the universities that follow. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has the second highest score (73.1).

e. Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index

The pub indicator represents the number of articles in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index.

University of Oxford comes after Harvard University in this indicator with a score of 70.9/100. University of California and Stanford University have very close scores with the values of 70.7 and 70.6 respectively.

f. Per capita performance

The per capita performance indicator is the weighted score of the above five indicators divided by the number of full-time equivalent academic staff. If the number of academic staff for institutions of a country cannot be obtained, the weighted scores of the above five indicators is used.

For this indicator, Harvard University has a score of 76.6. Although its total score is 100, but the idea is that since this university has the highest score, it will be assigned a total score of 100 as mentioned before.

CWUR Ranking

The Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) is a leading consulting organization providing policy advice, strategic insights, and consulting services to governments and universities to improve educational and research outcomes.

Since 2012, CWUR has been publishing the only academic ranking of global universities that assesses the quality of education, alumni employment, research output, and citations without relying on surveys and university data submissions. The ranking started out as a project in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia with the aim of rating the top 100 world universities. It was quickly reported worldwide by universities and the media and many requests were received to expand it. In 2019, the ranking expanded to list the top 2000 out of 20000 universities worldwide, making it the largest academic ranking of global universities.

Since 2016, the Center for World University Rankings is headquartered in the United Arab Emirates.

CWUR uses eight objective and robust indicators to rank the world’s top 1000 universities: 1. Quality of Education, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have won major international awards, prizes, and medals relative to the university’s size [25%] 2. Alumni Employment, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have held CEO positions at the world’s top companies relative to the university’s size [25%] 3. Quality of Faculty, measured by the number of academics who have won major international awards, prizes, and medals [25%] 4. Publications, measured by the number of research papers appearing in reputable journals [5%] 5. Influence, measured by the number of research papers appearing in highly-influential journals [5%] 6. Citations, measured by the number of highly-cited research papers [5%] 7. Broad Impact, measured by the university’s h-index [5%] 8. Patents, measured by the number of international patent filings [5%]

The dataset that we will be working on includes the broad impact indicator that started in 2014. The scores cover the years 2012 until 2015.

Note that each university is ranked based on every indicator, the score is no more over 100 but rather a sub-rank. For example, rather than saying that a university has a full score, we say that it’s ranked first for a particular indicator.

I. Correlation between indicators

In order to see the influence of each indicator on the world rank, a heat map would be useful.
The main result of a correlation is called the correlation coefficient r. It ranges from -1.0 to +1.0. The closer r is to +1 or -1, the more the two variables are related. If r is close to 0, it means there is no relationship between the variables. If r is positive, it means that as one variable gets larger the other gets larger. If r is negative it means that as one gets larger, the other gets smaller.

As shown in the heatmap (fig.17), the correlation coefficient between all the principle indicators and the world rank is positive. Which means, the smaller the rank of each indicator is, the smaller the world rank. However, the highest the total score, the lower the world rank.
When ranking the indicators in decreasing order of influence (the most influencing to the least), based on the heatmap and the correlation significance, we get the following sequence: broad impact (0.95), publications (0.92), influence (0.9), citations (0.86), patents (0.7), quality of education (0.68), alumni employment (0.67) and quality of faculty (0.66).

Lebanese Universities

In 2020, three Lebanese universities entered THE ranking: American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanese American University (LAU) and Université Saint Joseph de Beyrouth.
AUB was ranked 351-400, LAU 801-1000 and USJ 801-1000.
There are very few Lebanese universities in the THE ranking. And although they are very low in the hierarchy, we will nonetheless compare their performance with the performance of the Top 5 universities in the world. And then, we will compare the additional metrics between the three Lebanese universities only.

I. Lebanese vs Top 5 universities

The performance of the Lebanese universities against Top 5 universities is very poor in teaching, researches and industry income. (fig. 18, 20 and 22)
They range much better on international, where LAU scores 84.7, AUB 78.2 and USJ 70.7. (fig. 19)
For the citations, AUB performs much better than the other Lebanese universities and has a score of 77.1. (fig.21)

II. Additional metrics for Lebanese universities

As mentioned before, the additional metrics in the dataset are the number of students, the number of international students (%) and the ratio of students per staff.

As shown in the bubble chart (fig. 23), AUB has the largest number of students, 8401, then comes LAU with a number of 7866 students and USJ with 7566 students.
Lastly, the following bar chart (fig.24) shows the percentage of international students and the student/staff ratio. AUB has the highest number of international students (21%) and USJ has the highest ratio of students per staff (19.4).

Comparing Rankings

Each ranking has its own set of weighted indicators. That’s why the total score of each university differs from one ranking to another, and could affect its world rank. The chart above (fig.25) shows the difference in the scores. Putting aside Harvard University, the difference between Shanghai ranking and the other two is very remarkable. Some universities’ world rank differs from a ranking to another due to the methodology used for calculating the score.

References

https://www.kaggle.com/mylesoneill/world-university-rankings
https://www.kaggle.com/joeshamen/world-university-rankings-2020