The Times Higher Education Supplement recently published an interesting set of University Rankings. These are always rather subjective – how do you assign a single number to a University – but interesting nonetheless.
The top ten were Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, Caltech, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Yale, Princeton and ETH Zurich.
The University of Queensland came in at 49.
The top-ranked Australian University was the Australian National University, at 16.
The thing is, these comparisons are worthless since they completely ignore field-by-field differences. For example, some of the schools in NSF’s CISM program tower over Harvard in space physics while in nanotech, for example, Rice University is certainly equal to Harvard (nanotubes, anyone?). I suspect we will find the same discrepancies topic by topic. Also, it is rather inappropriate to be comparing technical schools, like MIT, to schools that do everything, like Harvard, without accounting for that — the two cannot be compared directly because they do different things and thus have different reputations. The article did not make it clear that this was done or how, other than asking people to report which areas they felt competent to talk about and assuming honest self-reporting.