The Foreign Service Journal, December 2010

102 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 0 S CHOOLS S UPPLEMENT The International Scene In the past few years, three promi- nent international guides to university quality have emerged. The first, put together by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is called the Academic Ranking of World Universities (www. arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp) . All inter- national university rankings have a heavy bias toward larger schools, but ARWU especially favors those with strong science programs; 20 percent of its ranking of a school is based on the number of staff winning Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Chemistry, Physics and Economics (as well as Fields Medals awarded for achievement in Mathe- matics). The Times Higher Education Sup- plement (www.timeshighereducation. co.uk/world-university-rankings/2010- 2011/top-200.html) assembles the world’s “Top 200” universities in one list based heavily on each school’s research volume and citations (repre- senting 62 percent of the total score). Finally, QS (www.topuniversities. com/university-rankings/world-uni- versity-rankings/2010/results) selects the world’s top 100 universities on the basis of academic reputation, which it calculates by soliciting peer reviews from university professors. In a broad sense, the three surveys delineate a fairly similar picture. U.S. schools, both private and public, dom- inate the list overall, especially in the top 20 where they are mostly unchal- lenged, except for Oxford University and Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. The University of Hong Kong and the University of Tokyo usually crack the list in the top 25, and Japan has by far the highest number of entries among Asian coun- tries in the top 100. Even more interesting than who makes the list is who doesn’t. For starters, some major regions of the world do not have a single elite uni- versity to represent them. Not a single Latin American country has a school in the top 100 worldwide, while South Africa’s University of Cape Town is number 107 in the Times survey and A dramatically different set of rankings emphasizes the social good provided by America’s colleges and universities.