How I can find out the tier of a university? Is it available in any website or report? If yes, what is the link?
I tried to find out the list and I got some pages which says how the universities are evaluated. I was more interested in current list.
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3A partially "shopping" question.– Leon MeierCommented Jul 6, 2017 at 22:35
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5Best to ask a senior person who has "been around". The highly-publicized rankings are not reliable, as they are more like "advertising" than they are about "results/production".– paul garrettCommented Jul 6, 2017 at 22:42
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4Global and local rankings are generally very different. What country are you interested in?– StrongBadCommented Jul 6, 2017 at 22:57
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5Rankings we have in the US are not for universities as a whole, but for individual programs. For example, it could be that Johns Hopkins is number 1 in medicine, but not in computer science.– GEdgarCommented Jul 7, 2017 at 0:06
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6I do not see this as a shopping question. On the contrary, I would very much like to see an answer to this question. I (and I guess others too) also wonder how people can say (or write) "top tier university", "top 20 university" and such. I see this regularly on this page by both new users and well established ones. I would guess that the only answer is a vague "Well, the 'tier' is not well defined and kind of a guess of the overall reputation." but I would really like to see the answers of our well established users even if they are that vague.– DirkCommented Jul 7, 2017 at 7:25
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4 Answers
Typically, when people talk about tiers in context of universities, the assumption is that they refer to levels of teaching and/or research activity within some standardized framework. As far as I know, the most well-known framework of this kind is Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Based on this question, I further assume that it implies an interest in university research tiers (which matches the traditional Carnegie Classification framework - the Basic criterion).
Thus, in order to find a research tier of a university, click LOOKUP link in the main menu of the above-mentioned website and enter your search criteria on the Institutional Lookup page. The request will generate a list of results or a single result, depending on your criteria. Click on the linked title of the relevant institution and browse the resulting webpage. On that page, find Basic classification row, which contains the target value. For example, performing the search for my current institution (employer), Georgia Institute of Technology (aka Georgia Tech), we find that it belongs to the category of Doctoral Universities: Highest Research Activity. This is what usually refers to as (the highest) R1 tier (for more details about the shorthand labels, see this page).
Note that, while level of research activity is the most popular classification criterion, there are other criteria (see Listings -> Standard Listings). Also note that Carnegie Classification is focused on the academic ecosystem in the United States. I am not familiar with similar national or international frameworks (but have no doubt that some exist).
answered Aug 31, 2017 at 10:37
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2The OP didn't mention he/she is focusing on the USA, so I'm not sure the answer is relevant.– DilworthCommented Aug 31, 2017 at 10:48
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3@Dilworth Well, the OP didn't mention their focus at all, so this is a moot point. Additionally, US academic ecosystem is a part (subset) of the global one, so I believe that alone makes the answer relevant. Finally, the answer can serve as a direction in searching for relevant non-US classification frameworks, which, I hope, makes it additionally relevant and valuable. Commented Aug 31, 2017 at 17:37
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Since this seems to be accepted as an answer, it means indeed that the OP meant to ask only about the USA, so I changed accordingly the title. Also, your answer didn't reserve itself to the USA. Perhaps you can add that you are talking only about the USA.– DilworthCommented Sep 5, 2017 at 23:48
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@Dilworth I have mentioned that in my answer: "Also note that Carnegie Classification is focused on the academic ecosystem in the United States". Commented Sep 6, 2017 at 1:08
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1Thank you both for the discussion. I was actually referring to USA based institution only. Sorry, I had to clear myself in the question, which I did not do.– ImranCommented Sep 8, 2017 at 16:32
I don't know if it includes a "tier" designation anywhere, but the Times Higher Education website has published rankings and there is a very handy search tool where you can sort universities based on the calibre of research they were evaluated to have. Another page discusses the methodology used to arrive at these rankings, and Wikipedia also lists criteria used. This isn't a perfect list of Tiers, but it should be a good place to start when searching for universities conducting quality research.
answered Sep 6, 2017 at 1:36
I don't have a quick and easy answer for you, but I'd like to point something out that might help-
There are general tiers, and then tiers for a specific field. For example, you can google a list of the top 50 schools for Computer Science.
Some also happen to be top universities like Stanford, MIT, etc. But not all.
So if you do have an area of study in mind, I'd try searching google for that.
I hope this helps a bit!
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1Note, however, that every ranking website will give you different results, sometimes a top 20 university on one site is not even top 100 on another one, as they have other criteria (which they don't publish, of course...). If you then start to only look at certain fields, things can differ even further.– DirkCommented Aug 1, 2017 at 9:13
For world university ranking, I can suggest Academic Ranking of World Universities, it is based on scientific method. Another one that uses my university is enter link description hereQS ranking and as mention above Times Higher Education website and Wikipedia pages on the Quality rank of university.
Also, this may be unpopular opinion since members of this website tend to attack RG, but I would also take a look at ranking and points of universities, departments, faculties and research groups that are available via ReserchGate website. Why I think RG is helpful metric because it can visualise collaboration and impact of publication and research teams.
