Last month Times Higher Education (THE) published its rankings of the 200 best universities internationally. Ever inundated with U.S. News rankings, many Americans are unaware of the international rankings.
Several observations about THE rankings:
- They favor British institutions with four of the top ten institutions located in the United Kingdom, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the source of the rankings.
- They favor research universities. Of the 54 American institutions on the list, all are research universities and none is a small liberal arts college.
- They favor institutions with significant numbers of faculty from other countries, something that, in my humble opinion, helped my education not one jot as I struggled to understand what many of them were saying.
The interesting news this year: the slip in American universities’ rankings. The drop is due in part to major international investment in building first-class research universities, particularly in Asia. Some experts predict the downward trend will continue, in part because the United States will have less money to invest in higher education as it struggles to pay down its mounting debt.
Needless to say, no West Virginia institution made the international 200.