Cornell ranks No. 14 in Times Higher Ed rankings

Cornell ranks as the 14th-best university in the world, up from 15th last year, according to the World University Rankings by Times Higher Education (THE), a London education publication, and No. 16 in the recently released Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings. This is the first year that THE and QS (a private company that specializes in education and study abroad) did not issue joint rankings.

Also, in a Wall Street Journal poll of universities top rated by recruiters, Cornell ranked No. 14 overall and No. 7 in the engineering major category.

In THE's rankings, Cornell achieved an overall score of 83.9 out of 100, compared with Harvard (No. 1, with 96.1), California Institute of Technology (No. 2, 96) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (No. 3, 95.6). Among all universities in North America, Cornell ranked No. 11; it was fourth among the Ivies, topped by Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Although this is the seventh year that THE has issued university rankings, methodology this year was "completely overhauled," says the THE website, adding that this year's rankings "should be considered the first of a new annual series."

The World University Rankings 2010-11 were developed in concert with a "new rankings data provider, Thomson Reuters, with input from more than 50 leading figures in the education sector from 15 countries across every continent, and through 10 months of extensive consultation," the website states.

The rankings were based on 13 performance indicators to capture the full range of university activities, from teaching and research to knowledge transfer. These 13 elements were brought together into five categories:

To determine rankings, THE surveyed 2,375 academics worldwide on their selections of top universities and programs and combined the results with such factors as the number of times published research papers were cited by colleagues, staff-to-student ratios and the number of students and faculty recruited from overseas. The rankings also take into account which universities international employers prefer to recruit from.

In the new QS World University Rankings, Cornell fell to No. 16 from 15 last year. The QS ratings based rankings on academic peer review (40 percent); employer/recruiter review (10 percent); student-faculty ratio (20 percent); citations per faculty (20 percent); and international factors (5 percent each).

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Joe Schwartz