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October 15, 2009

Pitt falls in worldwide university rankings

Pitt dropped from No. 97 to No. 114 among the top 200 universities worldwide that were ranked in the Times Higher-QS World University Rankings 2009, the latest edition of the ranking by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) and Quacquarelli Symonds.

THES is a London-based independent newspaper that reports specifically on higher education issues, and Quacquarelli Symonds is a global company that provides educational and career information and networking.

Among U.S. institutions that appear on the top 200 list, Pitt dropped from 35th to 37th.

Pitt’s drop reflected a trend among U.S. universities on the list. Although Harvard retained the top spot worldwide, this year 54 U.S. universities were ranked among the top 200, down from 58 the previous year. The United States also had 32 universities in the top 100 this year, compared to 37 last year.

The rankings are based on the opinions of 7,000 academicians and graduate recruiters, alongside quantitative data on research impact, staff and student numbers and universities’ levels of internationalization. The rankings include six categories — peer review score, employer review score, staff/student score, citations/staff score, international staff score and international students score — that are combined for the overall ranking.

According to THES, “We use broad measures which are intended to capture teaching, research, employability and international appeal, to produce an overall indicator of institutional standing.”

The rankings focus on three main characteristics of a university: size, scope and research intensiveness. “We regard a ‘fully comprehensive’ university as being one that is active in all five areas of scholarship — science, technology, biomedicine, social sciences and the arts and humanities. …Our final criterion is the amount of research a university has produced in the past five years” as identified by Scopus, a database of abstracts and citations in scholarly journals. “An institution’s rank here depends on the number of scholarly areas in which it is active and is not an absolute threshold,” the rankings state.

The full list is available at www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings.

—Peter Hart

Filed under: Feature,Volume 42 Issue 4

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