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World University Rankings 2004

8 December 2004

The Times Higher Education Supplement published its world university rankings on 5 November 2004. I have no access to the THES on line, but I read an excerpt of their findings on an Italian newspaper. (Readers of Italian can find the article here.)

The THES ranking is based on four main quality indicators:

The ensuing ranking is, maybe unsurprisingly, this one:
  1. Harvard University (USA)
  2. University of California Berkeley (USA)
  3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
  4. California Institute of Technology (USA)
  5. Oxford University (UK)
  6. Cambridge University (UK)
  7. Stanford University (USA)
  8. Yale University (USA)
  9. Princeton University (USA)
  10. ETH Zurich (CH)
The dominance of American universities is maybe expected, but the leading position of ETH amongst universities in continental Europe is possibly surprising. It seems that Swiss universities are becoming stronger and stronger, and I would not be surprised to see EPFL enjoy a very high ranking soon. France has the Ecole Polytechnique ranked 27th and the Ecole Normale Superieure ranked 30th.

You might ask: What about Italy? As an Italian abroad, I was shocked to see that "La Sapienza", the highest ranked Italian university, is only 162th in the list, and that Bologna ranks only 186th. What is going wrong?

I believe that Italian universities have a degree of internationalization that is too low. There are very few foreign academics who settle down in Italy, or work in the country for some of their lives. This is unsatisfactory as it may lead to staleness in the academic environment.

No doubt there are other problems, and I hope that the Italian academic community will work towards addressing those. Long live Italian academia!

Back to Harvard's success story. Amongst the faculty at Harvard, there are 40 Nobel prize winners. Harvard has a library holding about 15 million volumes, donations amounting to 12 billion dollars, and receives about 300 million dollars each year in research funds from the government. Excellence in research generates recognition, which feeds back into finances, which then allow Harvard to hire top notch faculty producing excellent research. This is a virtuous circle that looks "easy" to implement. Why can't we Italians do it at home?

A question to my readers: How would the ranking change if one focused on Computer Science only?

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Luca Aceto, Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University.

Last modified: Wednesday, 08-Dec-2004 15:37:55 CET.