There's no point being in the crappiest department of the "best" university.

The list is endless, visit their websites, look up all the teachers and programs they have going. Now research those and you will see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Top university implies that these schools have a large hub of academic progress, it might not be in a tangible form but the stuff they do at those universities does make a difference.

These schools get a lot of bad press because the big players of the world seem to come from them, but it does not diminish the contribution these higher education universities have added to the global community.

I'm a firm believer in the malevolence of unnecessary statistics. The only point I've ever seen in college rankings is for people to gloat over people in other colleges. I can't imagine the benefit of knowing just how these colleges rank according to an arbitrary study.

Like peer review score, employer score etc. But even then, I think this is more like a voting scheme to obtain scores rather than detailed assessment of each department/ research / paper published / nobel laureates produced/ entrepreneurs produced / innovation quotient etc.

Starting a few years ago, they started asking researchers and students to attribute their papers to "The University of Lyon", an entity that administratively does not exist, but logically it should. Most other universities I know in France are in the same situation, and have started applying similar measures.

Paris engineering colleges have grouped under a new entity, ParisTech, for example. Hopefully, this will focus attention and fix ratings. It should, because some member colleges have been around for some 1000 years, so they must be doing something right. Consider it a brand hack :)

UCL, Imperial, King's and LSE are all individual colleges within the University of London.

I think it is widely held that UIUC ranks higher than UIC.

Continental Europe would fare quite a bit better in that case.

I come from Trinidad & Tobago, and most of my schoolmates went to American universities for this reason: UK universities are completely unattainable to a non-western income.

A university has a wide scope of taught subjects and substantial variety of curriculum, which makes them a separate category in academic world. And the list was of that particular category, that's it.

Also from the comments:

As for the comparative ranking of U.S. universities . . . this list does not correspond very well to some rankings done by people competent to rate our institutions.

For example, only the delusional would rank U.C.L.A. as above U.C. Berkeley, the flagship and leading campus of the U.C. system. U.C. San Diego should also rank very high, it competes very well with UCLA.

Also: Did you REALLY repost your comment because the first time you submitted this it got swiftly downvoted? I replied to this same comment only to find it had been deleted and replaced with a dupe. Not cool.

What I'm trying to get you to understand, xiaoma, is that if ranking anything is stupid, then it doesn't make sense to point to a certain ranking system and say "Gee, that's stupid." Of course it's stupid. It's ranking.

I really don't care about karma. Apparently, you do and you dinged me twice. Congrats, but it's not really the kind of discussion I was looking for.

Your current comment is the exact same as your other comment. You edited that one, then deleted it as it got voted down. I believe that you didn't do it for karma, but still it was silly.

When I was writing my comment originally, I wrote the first line, tabbed over to the article to get the quote and tabbed back to this site and saw that I couldn't submit the comment. I hit the back arrow and then cut and paste my quote into the comment. Then I saw a comment was already there, cursed the fact that light accidental taps on my ASUS laptop's mouse pad get interpreted as clicks, deleted my comment and posted the corrected version. It was then that I saw a response to the [deleted]. Then I refreshed and finally saw the multiple downvotes and your comment along with odd insinuations about my personal motivations.

The cruftiness of the delete functionality and the entire... fuck it. This is just pissing me off. Forget it.

Not too long ago, I had an unpleasant situation in which I was locked from editing my own comment. That's why I don't have much confidence in the edit feature. I hadn't realized how the delete feature also sucked until this thread.