The University has once again topped the world rankings released by the Center for World University Rankings. The Ivy League School is followed by Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Center's annual rankings are based on eight criteria: quality of education, alumni employment, quality of faculty, publications, influence, citations, broad impact and patents. Harvard scored perfectly on all categories but patents. The category MIT bagged the top prize for.
Despite consecutive No. 1 titles in QS World University Rankings, MIT has failed to give a similar performance in CWUR rankings. The CWUR has questioned the website's methodology.
"One of its shortcomings is its reliance on reputational indicators for half of its analysis. Another shortcoming is the faculty to student ratio indicator, where the number of faculty could be inflated by including academic-related and non-teaching staff, resulting in the indicator failing to reflect the quality of teaching," CWUR said in a statement.
On the other hand, CWUR argued that its rankings are purely based on quality of education, training of students, faculty members and the quality of their research instead of surveys and university data submissions.
The United States dominated the world rankings with 229 institutions followed by China (84), Japan (74), United Kingdom (64) and Germany (55), News-Record reports. Among the 229 institutions, seven North Carolina universities are featured among the top 1,000 colleges in the world - Duke University (26 - world, 19th local); UNC-Chapel Hill (45 - world, 28th local ); Wake Forest University (145 in the world); UNCG (867 in the world); N.C. State (228th in the world), East Carolina (718) and UNC-Charlotte (727).
In the Top 10 list, Harvard is joined by seven other universities from the United States, while the rest two - the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford - belong to the United Kingdom.
