This should be good news for the USA’s STEM movement as The Chronical of Higher Education noted that the ARWU list is “the best-known and most influential global ranking of universities.”
The list is broken down into five categories:
- Natural Science and Mathematics,
- Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences,
- Life and Agriculture Sciences,
- Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy and
- Social Science.
Published with each list is a pool of statistics and the methodology used to rank the institutions. For engineering schools, an equal weighting was given based on four categories: the school’s number of highly cited researchers, publications, articles in top publications and funding.
As a result, a major flaw exists in this ranking list – a lack of education pedagogy. The list focuses solely on research, as not one category focuses education. Therefore, this list might be more useful to those looking to fulfill a research based engineering masters or doctorate at one of these schools.
However, it is unreasonable to assume that the research capabilities of the school will translate into the classroom. After all, we’ve all had that brilliant professor that can fill a publication but leave the heads in the classroom empty.
Just because a university has great research funded by big government spending projects doesn’t mean it’s pushing out good engineers come graduation. As a result, the list may not be as useful for those looking to fulfill an undergraduate or a course-based engineering master’s degree.
Furthermore, funding fuels much of the other categories that ARWU looks at so it isn’t surprising to see the USA dominating the list.
A lot of funding is pouring into the STEM movement which looks to ensure that America leads the world in technological professionals. As a result, it could be argued that the list is artificially inflated.
The richest schools may not be the best schools and the best schools may not be the best for you. It may be best to ensure you do your own research when looking for an education.
Here is a list of ARWU’s top 20 engineering schools:
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
2 Stanford University, USA
3 University of California, Berkeley, USA
4 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
5 The University of Texas at Austin, USA
6 The Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, UK
7 Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
8 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, USA
9 Carnegie Mellon University, USA
10 Texas A&M University, USA
11 Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
12 Tsinghua University, China
13 University of Cambridge, UK
14 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland
14 University of California, San Diego, USA
16 Pennsylvania State University - University Park, USA
17 National University of Singapore, Singapore
17 University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
19 Purdue University - West Lafayette, USA
20 California Institute of Technology, USA
For a full list and scores follow this link.