Top 500 Universities in the World, Academically Speaking

The Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Institute of Higher Education did an extensive survey of the top five hundred universities based on several fields. It's interesting that the university doing this research finished 301st - they must have been very disappointed.

The fields studied carried different weights that led to the university's final scoring. The fields are listed below:

Criteria	Indicator	Code	Weight
Quality of Education	Alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals	Alumni	10%
Quality of Faculty	Staff of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals	Award	20%
	Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories	HiCi	20%
Research Output	Articles published in Nature and Science*	N&S	20%
	Articles in Science Citation Index-expanded, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index	SCI	20%
Size of Institution	Academic performance with respect to the size of an institution	Size	10%
Total			100%

As for the results, seventeen of the Top 20 universities are located in the United States. Only Cambridge, Oxford and Tokyo University crack the top twenty internationally.

As you might expect, Harvard earned the top spot with a perfect score of 100 points. Cambridge was second, followed by Stanford, Cal-Berkeley and MIT.

For our local schools,

• Duke is 37th with a score of 37.7 (surrounded by Northwestern and Minnesota);
• UNC-Chapel Hill is 55th with a score of 30.3 (surrounded by Carnegie Mellon and Australian National U.);
• NC State is 113th with a score of 19 (surrounded by the National U. of Singapore and Oregon State);
  
• University of South Carolina is 280th;
  
• Wake Forest is 296th; .

With all these top-notch universities in the USA, why does the world think we are so stupid? Are we?