In the 2010 Times Higher Education "top universities" list, Alexandria University in Egypt ranked ahead of Georgetown and Delft. It also beat out Harvard and Stanford in the subcategory that measured the impact of research (1). Here's what happened:

Phil Baty, deputy editor of Times Higher Education, acknowledged that Alexandria’s surprising prominence was actually due to “the high output from one scholar in one journal” — soon identified on various blogs as Mohamed El Naschie, an Egyptian academic who published over 320 of his own articles in a scientific journal of which he was also the editor.

In 2009, an administrator at Clemson University in the U.S. revealed that the college had "... manipulated class sizes, artificially boosted faculty salary data and gave rival schools low grades in the rankings' peer reputation survey" with the goal of improving its U.S. News & World Report college ranking. This helped the university rise from #38 to #22 over a seven-year period (2). A few weeks ago, Emory University admitted it had also manipulated data/lied over a period of more than 10 years in order to improve its U.S. News & World Report ranking (3).

My takeaway from these incidents: Not only are university ranking systems imperfect to begin with, but it's also possible to game the system ... and it happens every year.

1. New York Times: "Questionable Science Behind Academic Rankings" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/education/15iht-educLede15...

2. USA Today: "Clemson official: School manipulated rankings " http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-06-04-clemson-ra...

3. Reuters: "Emory gave incorrect data to publications that rank U.S. colleges" in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/17/usa-emory-ranking-idINL2E8JHNG320120817

Honestly, these rankings are [always] ridiculous.

Clearly there is a need to capture certain metrics and display that as quantitative information, and the difference between, say, the top 10 and the 90-100 is probably relevant, but the difference within the top ~20 is so minimal its largely irrelevant.

It really galls me when people make decisions about undergraduate or graduate schools (or, probably employees, although this is a position I'm yet to be in) based on these kinds of rankings. Clearly it should factor to some extent (i.e. Harvard vs. Jeremey's University of Rubishville[1]) but there are MANY much more important factors to consider.

The irony is that the rankings are 50% opinion based, which basically amounts to identifying where people think are prestigious. I wonder what people use to identify which the prestigious universities are - they can't possible go and visit them all, but if only there were some kind of online ranking they could use to get an idea...

[1] When I went to undergraduate, this was the fictional university my younger brother suggested he might end up going to.

I never realised UCL was so high up. Among some people, it's seen as where you go if you fail to get into Imperial.

I can't comment on the methodology used to rank the universities, but I think it's interesting that a specialised (as opposed to "fully comprehensive") university has come out on top. MIT would probably not be a great choice of university for someone looking to take an arts degree :-)

Interesting how the UK manages to take 4 out of the top 6 places (yes, choosing 6 places does put the UK in the best light).

"QS selected the following indicators and weights. A much more detailed review of the methodology is available at http://www.iu.qs.com/university-rankings/world-university-ra....

- Academic Peer Review 40% - Global Employer Review 10% - Citations Per Faculty 20% - International Student Ratio 5% - International Faculty Ratio 5% - Faculty Student Ratio 20%"

Can't take it serious when Stanford is only #15

I find the rankings from ARWU (a Shanghai-based institute) makes more sense.

http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2012.html

The Top ten universities listed there are

1 Harvard University 2 Stanford University 3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 4 University of California, Berkeley 5 University of Cambridge 6 California Institute of Technology 7 Princeton University 8 Columbia University 9 University of Chicago 10 University of Oxford

undefined

More interestingly, Oxford overtook Cambridge in Computer Science :P

Ah, new rankings are up.