Google Rankings vs. US News Rankings
Dec 14th, 2008 by GCR Editor
So what can we learn from the Google-ranked list of the top 25 American universities posted yesterday? And in particular, how does this list compare to the popular college and university rankings published every year by the magazine U.S. News & World Report in their “America’s Best Colleges” edition?
Here’s our Google-based top ten:
- University of Virginia
- University of Tennessee at Knoxville
- Harvard University
- Stanford University
- University of Washington
- University of Michigan
- University of Georgia
- University of Wisconsin at Madison
- University of Florida
- Cornell University
And here’s the top ten from the 2009 edition of “America’s Best Colleges” from U.S. News:
- Harvard University
- Princeton University
- Yale University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Stanford University
- California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech)
- University of Pennsylvania
- Columbia University
- Duke University
- University of Chicago
The first thing to know, if you’re a student trying to select a university, is that you can get an outstanding education at any of these institutions. That’s because what you get out of your time on campus depends more on the effort you put in than on the campus itself. Every campus has many more opportunities available than any one person can possibly grasp, so each student’s individual effort will always be more important than some average calculation of institutional resources.
That being said, every university is different: some are larger (Wisconsin), some are smaller (Cal Tech); some are urban (Columbia), some are small-town suburban (Cornell); some are wealthy (Princeton), some are less so (UTK); some are in the cold north (Chicago), some are in the humid south (Florida).
The U.S. News rankings come out only once a year, and their upper tier changes very little from one edition to the next. Princeton will trade places with Yale, which will trade places with Harvard, which will trade places with Princeton.
The Google rankings, on the other hand, are revised continually because they are drawn from Google’s natural indexes, which are themselves revised continually. We will have to watch and see how much the Google university rankings change from week to week and month to month. But with one exception, Google’s top ten above are all among the top 50 as ranked by U.S. News, so the two systems aren’t radically different.
The surprise in the Google rankings is the University of Tennessee at #2. U.S. News places UTK down at #106, along with the University of Oklahoma and the University of Dayton in Ohio. I have a secret theory that may explain UTK’s high position in the Google rankings. I may even reveal it in a future post.