I am aware of US News which publishes the rankings for US Universities every year. But somehow I feel that they try to emphasize more on private universities than public(state) universities. Also they have recently stopped showing the rankings according to fields of study(CS, ECE, Mechanical, etc) without paying them. Google also could not help me find any reliable ranking organisation. I would like to know whether there is any respectable ranking organisation other than US News.
2 Answers
Both of these organisations are International but you can search by region and study area.
Top Universities is complied by the QS Quacquarelli Symonds This page explains the methodology they use to rank institutions.
The Times Higher Education rankings are compiled by the Times Higher Education magazine in the UK with the help of Thomson Reuters. According to their site
rankings employ 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available, which are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.
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2Unidimensional rankings are pretty meaningless. For example, Times Higher Education says the world's greatest school is Cal Tech, with Oxford second. What in the world does that mean? You go to those schools for completely different reasons. They claim that Berkeley is better than Yale. Well, Berkeley and Yale are completely different places; one is a big state school in a major metropolitan area, while the other is a small private school in a small city where there's nothing to do but go to bars and drink.– user1482Mar 24, 2014 at 20:57
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I think Times ranking is not logical at all. Top Universities is the best of the 3 for me. Mar 27, 2014 at 16:20
If your goal is a general list, @gman's answer, as well as other general guides, will do.
If your goal is to select a graduate program to apply for, I recommend phds.org. You can specify which criteria are most important to you: research productivity, support for graduate students, diversity, funding, etc. Based on your choices, you will get a personalized ranking of the graduate programs in your area.
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2In principle, it makes sense to have this kind of multidimensional ranking. In practice, I wasn't impressed with the phds.org web site. It's disorganized and buggy, and they try to get users to provide a lot of private and irrelevant personal information so they can spam them and call them on the phone. Also, their rankings don't seem very accurate, e.g., in physics they rank Yale immediately below Cal Tech and Stanford, which is utterly wrong -- Yale is much, much lower. (I got my PhD in physics from Yale.)– user1482Mar 24, 2014 at 21:01
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I totally agree with Ben on this one. Although the website also provide some useful information. Mar 25, 2014 at 15:38