The current coronavirus crisis has caused a dramatic decline in the numbers of internationally mobile students that is likely to continue for several years. Global rankings will probably become less significant and there will be renewed interest in the national assessment and comparison of universities.
One sign of this is the first edition of the QS USA rankings. These incorporate some of the data generated by the QS World University Rankings such as proportion of international students, student-faculty ratio and responses to the academic and employer surveys. Other indicators are derived from public data.
There are 17 metrics altogether in four groups:
- Employability (27% weighting) including employer reputation, alumni outcomes and salary after 10 years
- Diversity and internationalisation (25%) including gender pay gap, faculty gender diversity, undergraduates receiving Pell grants, student ethnicity, Fulbright recipients, international students
- Learning experience (22%) including instructional expenditure, retention rate, Pell grant student graduation rate
- Research (26%) including academic reputation, citations, international research network, partnership with employers.
The top ten universities in these rankings are:
1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
4. University of California Berkeley
5 . Columbia University
6= University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
6= Yale University
8. University of Pennsylvania
9. Princeton University
10. Cornell University.
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