Top university ? World classification rates Harvard University ; # 1 . Why ?

Any real experiences , folks .

Top university ? World classification rates Harvard University ; # 1 . Why ?
Right. This is going to be a long post.





If you don't want to read all the detailed stuff below, just read this first phrase:





Harvard is the best because they have the most people "out there" being successful in various fields. A lot of brilliant people come out of Harvard and are highly successful folks in society. Because of this, Harvard gains recognition as the best school in the world.





Universities are ranked by several indicators of academic or research performance, including alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, articles published in Nature and Science, articles indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution.





Definitions:





Alumni. The total number of the alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals. Alumni are defined as those who obtain bachelor, Master's or doctoral degrees from the institution. Different weights are set according to the periods of obtaining degrees. The weight is 100% for alumni obtaining degrees in 1991-2000, 90% for alumni obtaining degrees in 1981-1990, 80% for alumni obtaining degrees in 1971-1980, and so on, and finally 10% for alumni obtaining degrees in 1901-1910. If a person obtains more than one degrees from an institution, the institution is considered once only.





Award. The total number of the staff of an institution winning Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics and Fields Medal in Mathematics. Staff is defined as those who work at an institution at the time of winning the prize. Different weights are set according to the periods of winning the prizes. The weight is 100% for winners in 2001-2005, 90% for winners in 1991-2000, 80% for winners in 1981-1990, 70% for winners in 1971-1980, and so on, and finally 10% for winners in 1911-1920. If a winner is affiliated with more than one institution, each institution is assigned the reciprocal of the number of institutions. For Nobel prizes, if a prize is shared by more than one person, weights are set for winners according to their proportion of the prize.





HiCi. The number of highly cited researchers in broad subject categories in life sciences, medicine, physical sciences, engineering and social sciences. These individuals are the most highly cited within each category. The definition of categories and detailed procedures can be found at the website of Institute of Scientific Information.





N%26amp;S. The number of articles published in Nature and Science between 2001 and 2005. To distinguish the order of author affiliation, a weight of 100% is assigned for corresponding author affiliation, 50% for first author affiliation (second author affiliation if the first author affiliation is the same as corresponding author affiliation), 25% for the next author affiliation, and 10% for other author affiliations. Only publications of article type are considered.





SCI. Total number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index-expanded and Social Science Citation Index in 2005. Only publications of article type are considered. When calculating the total number of articles of an institution, a special weight of two was introduced for articles indexed in Social Science Citation Index.





Size. The weighted scores of the above five indicators divided by the number of full-time equivalent academic staff. If the number of academic staff for institutions of a country cannot be obtained, the weighted scores of the above five indicators is used. For ranking 2006, the numbers of full-time equivalent academic staff are obtained for institutions in USA, UK, Japan, South Korea, Czech, China, Italy, Australia, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Slovenia, New Zealand etc.
Reply:Is this the Liberal classification list???
Reply:U.S. News and World Report ranks Harvard number one based on several criteria, some of which are (if I remember correctly):





1) High school class rank


2) S.A.T. scores


3) Peer rank from other universities


4) %age of alumni who give to the university


5) Median class size





You can access this information online at the U.S. News and World Report website.