Skip to Navigation
University of Pittsburgh
Print This Page Print this pages

October 15, 2015

Pitt climbs in higher ed world rankings

Pitt ranked in the top 10 percent in teaching, the top 20 percent in research and the top 10 percent in citations in the recently released 2016 Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The University ranked No. 79 overall, up from No. 91 last year in the annual survey of the world’s top 800 universities.

No. 1 in the ranking for the fifth year in a row is California Institute of Technology, followed by Oxford, Stanford, Cambridge and Massachusetts Institute of Technology to round out the top five.

Harvard ranked No. 6, followed by Princeton, Imperial College London, ETH Zurich-Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the University of Chicago.

A total of 147 U.S. universities were included in the top 800. Among the ranked Pennsylvania schools were No. 17 Penn, No. 22 Carnegie Mellon and No. 75 Penn State.

Performance indicators are grouped in the areas of teaching; research; citations (a measure of research influence); international outlook of staff, students and research; and industry income (an indicator of knowledge transfer).

Teaching, weighted at 30 percent of the total, is made up of a reputation survey (15 percent), staff-student ratio (4.5 percent), doctorate-to-bachelor’s ratio (4.5 percent), doctorates awarded to academic staff ratio (6 percent) and institutional income (2.25 percent).

Research, also weighted at 30 percent, is made up of a reputation survey (18 percent), research income (6 percent) and research productivity (6 percent).

The citations indicator, weighted at 30 percent, examines more than 51 million citations to 11.3 million journal articles published 2010-14 and collects citations to these papers made 2010-15. Data are normalized to reflect variations in citation volume between different subject areas.

International outlook, weighted 7.5 percent, takes into account an institution’s international-to-domestic-student ratio, international-to-domestic-staff ratio and amount of international collaboration in research journal publications, each factor weighted at 2.5 percent.

Industry income is weighted at 2.5 percent.

The complete rankings and methodology are posted at timeshighereducation.com.

—Kimberly K. Barlow              

Filed under: Feature,Volume 48 Issue 4

Leave a Reply