The Shanghai ranking doesn't put much weight on student performance. "The ranking compares 1200 higher education institutions worldwide according to a formula

The Shanghai ranking doesn't put much weight on student performance. "The ranking compares 1200 higher education institutions worldwide according to a formula that took into account alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (10 percent), staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (20 percent), highly-cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories (20 percent), articles published in the journals Nature and Science (20 percent), the Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index (20 percent) and the per capita academic performance (on the indicators above) of an institution (10 percent)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Universities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Unive... However, nice bit of selective statistics to only use the top 300 in your calculation. The shanghai list actually has 500 universities listed, which bumps the number of Finnish universities to 5. So on a per capita basis Finland comes out ahead of USA!* * - Cherry picked and irrelevant