8 ms·

Why has no one brought up how the top German university is "ranked" 55th on this list: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/

Why has no one brought up how the top German university is "ranked" 55th on this list: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/world-ranking http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki... I'm not saying this list is definitive or that the US tuition prices are reasonable, but it stands to reason that the best of the best of anything is going to be exponentially more expensive than it's next closest competitors.

Glan1984 12y ago
Because that list was made by Brits. I bet a German made list would look different ;). Anyone who values lists like this is a fool. Just saying.
jbangert 12y ago
Without going into the metrics that these rankings use and their flaws, the German university system unfortunately focuses less on "elite" universitities, instead trying to create a good average experience, so most of the universities are actually fairly on-par with each other in terms of funding, and therefore also research output, teaching, etc. That being said, my experience with high-prestige american universities has been that the expense has very little to do, and feeds very little into, the quality of the education. US universities are expensive because they have massive bureaucratic overhead and are funded through a peculiar model (Government gives money to people, which give money to universities). Also, Germany used to have no tuition until the mid-2000s or so, and only some places introduced it, and it was really, really low.
- tegeek 12y ago
  I think you are right. Sweden is more or less has the same model as German when it comes to higher education. There are no particular "elite" universities & most of the universities are more or less on the same level when it comes to funding, research output, teaching etc. Even as an International student back in 2008, I paid 0$ in tuition fees & used to pay 30$ as student union fee per study term/semester and have best study experience I can imagine.
  - riffraff 12y ago
    and yet Karolinska University is 36th in the above list (the top university in the EU-sans-UK) while Stockholm University is 106th. The higher education list is quite unrelated to normal person perception, imo.
- 2ion 12y ago
  The aversion towards the promotion of a few selected university is also apparent in the fact that the only wide-scale national program for financing elite structures, the "excellence initiative", is subject to quite a bit of criticism (recent piece in the Spiegel: http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/exzellenzinitiative-elite-uni-programm-soll-ueberprueft-werden-a-993047.html http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/exzellenzinitiative...).
jbangert 12y ago
Without going into the metrics that these rankings use and their flaws, the German university system unfortunately focuses less on "elite" universitities, instead trying to create a good average experience, so most of the universities are actually fairly on-par with each other in terms of funding, and therefore also research output, teaching, etc. That being said, my experience with high-prestige american universities has been that the expense has very little to do, and feeds very little into, the quality of the education. US universities are expensive because they have massive bureaucratic overhead and are funded through a peculiar model (Government gives money to people, which give money to universities). Also, Germany used to have no tuition until the mid-2000s or so, and only some places introduced it, and it was really, really low.
troebr 12y ago
University rankings are full of manure if you will pardon my French. The model they use favors big general universities with a strong research department. Also how do you evaluate the learning environment? Number of flat screen tvs per student? Number of millions spent on sports facilities? Teaching: the learning environment (worth 30 per cent of the overall ranking score) Research: volume, income and reputation (worth 30 per cent) Citations: research influence (worth 30 per cent) Industry income: innovation (worth 2.5 per cent) International outlook: staff, students and research (worth 7.5 per cent).
- peteretep 12y ago
  Sure, but German universities are also surprisingly mediocre considering how good the Germans are at everything else.
  - Kurtz79 12y ago
    The parent post was challenging the definition of "mediocre". Given that such "mediocre" universities are able to sustain one of the most powerful economies in the world, they must not be so mediocre.
    - peteretep 12y ago
      By that logic, all sorts of institutions in the US and China are damn-near perfect, as they're able to sustain the world's most power economies.
  - Dewie 12y ago
    > Sure, but German universities are also surprisingly mediocre considering how good the Germans are at everything else. Which just puts into question how useful elite universities are, on the whole.
- peteretep 12y ago
  Sure, but German universities are also surprisingly mediocre considering how good the Germans are at everything else.
VLM 12y ago
Per http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/world-ranking/methodology http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki... 60% of the ranking is strictly research related, which is meaningless to undergrads although very important to grad students and above, and 10% is admitted to be subjective fluff. Perhaps important fluff, perhaps not, but definitely subjective fluff. Only 30% of the ranking score relates to teaching. So 60% to 70% of the score is irrelevant to undergrads, and the difference between 1st place and 55th place is a mere thirty percent or so. My engineering "sig figs" spidey sense is tingling that the "ranking" is meaningless.
Kesty 12y ago
Not really. 14 place ETHZ (Switzerland) https://www.ethz.ch/en/studies/financial/tuition-fees.html https://www.ethz.ch/en/studies/financial/tuition-fees.html $600 at semester = $1,200 (1 school year) 15 place John Hopkins(USA) http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/maryland/johns-hopkins-university/ http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/maryland/johns-hopkins-u... $45,470 (1 school year) Obviously it's US against Switzerland, it's completely different and very hard to compare. But bigger fees doesn't really means better university.
- vasilipupkin 12y ago
  Yes, but there are plenty of scholarhips and need based funds at John Hopkins. So this way a rich student has no problem paying either through loans or cash, but a poor student will be subsidized to a large extent. Also, if you want to major in something that is not in high demand then great, do it but why should everyone else subsidize your choices?
  - MAGZine 12y ago
    and if you're neither rich nor poor, you end up being one of the poor saps with a couple hundred thousand in student loans.
  - FlyingLawnmower 12y ago
    Just because a middle class student can pay for university through loans doesn't mean they should have to. Colleges advertise about their highly generous financial aid policies, but for most of the middle class whose parents earn say 120=150k together, little to no aid is given outside of loans.
    - vasilipupkin 12y ago
      well, theoretically, it makes sense for people to pay for their own education with loans that they can pay off, conditional on the sort of salary they expect to receive in the future as a result of their education. I mean if you want to major in quantitative finance and make a million a year, does it make sense for everybody else to fully subsidize your education ? What if you want to major in Japanese History pre 1600 ? does it make sense then?
3pt14159 12y ago
That link is laughably bad, at least for Canadian universities. U of Toronto at #20 world wide? Impossible. People are not lining up to get into Toronto. I was offered a full scholarship at my first choice at Toronto, and didn't even get my first choice at Waterloo. Waterloo behind 7 or 8 other Canadian universities? Also impossible.
- berelig 12y ago
  These rankings rely so heavily on research and reputation for scoring that you shouldn't look at it as an indicator of a university's academic quality. That would be the reason U of T is ranked so highly; they are even amongst competitive Ivy League schools! When I was applying for university (2007/08) U of T was handing out acceptance letters to everyone. Instead of rejecting you they would offer a place at a "lesser" campus (Mississauga or Scarborough) or defer you to a less competitive but related program. They are the largest university system in the nation with lots of spaces to fill so the scenario you described (getting accepted by the "#1 ranked school in Canada" and rejected by another") actually happens quite a lot. As for Waterloo, they're hardly a well rounded school. Yes, their engineering and computer science departments are internationally renown, but otherwise they are 2nd tier. Whatever the metric for rankings, I still think U of T is the best school in Canada. Just maybe not top 20 in the world.
  - 3pt14159 12y ago
    Waterloo very well known: Physics, CompSci, Mathematics, Engineering, Optometry departments. Good, but not great: Science, Econ. Average: Traditional arts and humanities. While Toronto has a first tier medical, legal, and maybe engineering programs. Everything else is just good or worse. for a top 3 school list in the country, Waterloo and Toronto both definitely deserve a spot, but I wouldn't say that Toronto is solidly the best in Canada; nor would I say that of Waterloo. But for the two of them to be that separated basically means that this list is measuring the wrong things.
sauere 12y ago
Mediocre performance is what you get with a system like the one that is in place in Germany. Let me throw in two numbers first: - over the last 15 years the total number of students has increased by ~48% (while the total population has shrunk by 3%) - the number of available majors has tripled within the last 7 years (with the large part of the new majors being in non-science fields) People have not gotten smarter over the last 15 years, but the majors are getting less less challenging and more specialized. The universities focus on pushing as many people threw the system as possible. There is no place, time or money for excellence. They produce what the german industry wants, not more and not less. This can be good or bad, depending on what you want.
- peterfirefly 12y ago
  This does not strike me as a particularly German development...
aschreyer 12y ago
In Germany the cutting edge research is usually done by specific research organisations that do no or only very little teaching such as the Max Planck Institutes, Helmholtz Association, Fraunhofer, etc. Of course, as a student you do not really benefit from that at the undergraduate level - those world-class researchers are usually too busy to teach and leave it to their assistants.
- wirrbel 12y ago
  however they do teach and you will attend their lectures as a grad student!
rbehrends 12y ago
That is actually a bit more complicated. (1) Germany traditionally hasn't done "elite universities". Even in the early 20th century (i.e. until about 1933), when Germany was a Nobel Prize factory, it was often individual departments that stood out (such as mathematics in Goettingen), not universities in their entirety. There's currently an attempt to change that (Exzellenzinitiative), but we'll see how that goes. (2) Until a while ago, it was difficult to become a full professor at a German university unless you were German (because you basically became a civil servant, part of the requirements for which was citizenship); German also wasn't the lingua franca of science anymore after WW II, which made it difficult for German universities to attract foreign academic talent. (3) In lieu of elite universities, Germany these days has hundreds of research centers (such as the Max Planck Institutes), which do attract the cream of the crop. (4) High college rankings do not actually seem to translate into better adult education [1]. Part of that is, of course, that American students enter college with 1-2 years less education than other developed countries [2], and that's really a problem of secondary education. But on the other hand, a Bachelor's degree in many European countries takes only three years instead of four (in part for that reason), so that should compensate. In this context, it's worth noting that the methodology that the THE uses for calculating the teaching score is imperfect, to say the least. It comprises the following factors [3]: (1) a survey of the perceived prestige of the institution, (2) staff-to-student ratio, (3) doctorate-to-bachelor ratio, (4) institutional income compared to staff numbers. While I do think that the German university system could be improved upon (no secret, pretty much all German professors I know think the same), this is an apple-to-oranges comparison: especially at the undergraduate level, there are fundamental structural differences in the two college systems that renders most of these factors meaningless as a basis for comparison. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/upshot/americans-think-we-have-the-worlds-best-colleges-we-dont.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/upshot/americans-think-we-... [2] http://www.vox.com/2014/7/5/5868791/does-america-have-good-colleges-or-not/in/5479029 http://www.vox.com/2014/7/5/5868791/does-america-have-good-c... [3] http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/world-ranking/methodology http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki...
luch 12y ago
As a French I'm always find those rankings entertaining : for exemple the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) is ranked 65 with a research score 37.1 . The ENS has outputted 11 Fields winning mathematicians (20% of the world's laureates) and 10 Nobel prizes. In comparison, Cornell Uni. (19th) count 13 alumni which has won the Nobel.
- DasIch 12y ago
  Research as well as number of graduates with noteworthy awards is a rather questionable metric, for someone chosing a university right now. The number of awards is particularly problematic due to the timeframes involved not to mention the fact, that you are probably going to study something different and thereby at a different faculty than those successful graduates.
  - luch 12y ago
    I'm not saying my metric is better, the problem lies in the fact that we are comparing oranges and apples here.
jre 12y ago
Germany has things like the Max Planck Society[1] (with 32 Nobel Prized), but it's not directly affiliated with a University, so it doesn't count in the rankings. It seems to me those rankings favor very large institution; are the score even normalized by number of students/faculty ? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck_Society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck_Society
GolfyMcG 12y ago
To play devil's advocate, I'm not necessarily saying that the best education stems from these schools but it's certainly other things that you're getting value from. This other HN article seemed relevant: http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/30/23581/ http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/30/23581/

Glan1984 12y ago

Because that list was made by Brits. I bet a German made list would look different ;). Anyone who values lists like this is a fool. Just saying.

jbangert 12y ago

Without going into the metrics that these rankings use and their flaws, the German university system unfortunately focuses less on "elite" universitities, instead trying to create a good average experience, so most of the universities are actually fairly on-par with each other in terms of funding, and therefore also research output, teaching, etc. That being said, my experience with high-prestige american universities has been that the expense has very little to do, and feeds very little into, the quality of the education. US universities are expensive because they have massive bureaucratic overhead and are funded through a peculiar model (Government gives money to people, which give money to universities). Also, Germany used to have no tuition until the mid-2000s or so, and only some places introduced it, and it was really, really low.

tegeek 12y ago
I think you are right. Sweden is more or less has the same model as German when it comes to higher education. There are no particular "elite" universities & most of the universities are more or less on the same level when it comes to funding, research output, teaching etc. Even as an International student back in 2008, I paid 0$ in tuition fees & used to pay 30$ as student union fee per study term/semester and have best study experience I can imagine.
- riffraff 12y ago
  and yet Karolinska University is 36th in the above list (the top university in the EU-sans-UK) while Stockholm University is 106th. The higher education list is quite unrelated to normal person perception, imo.
2ion 12y ago
The aversion towards the promotion of a few selected university is also apparent in the fact that the only wide-scale national program for financing elite structures, the "excellence initiative", is subject to quite a bit of criticism (recent piece in the Spiegel: http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/exzellenzinitiative-elite-uni-programm-soll-ueberprueft-werden-a-993047.html http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/exzellenzinitiative...).

jbangert 12y ago

troebr 12y ago

University rankings are full of manure if you will pardon my French. The model they use favors big general universities with a strong research department. Also how do you evaluate the learning environment? Number of flat screen tvs per student? Number of millions spent on sports facilities? Teaching: the learning environment (worth 30 per cent of the overall ranking score) Research: volume, income and reputation (worth 30 per cent) Citations: research influence (worth 30 per cent) Industry income: innovation (worth 2.5 per cent) International outlook: staff, students and research (worth 7.5 per cent).

peteretep 12y ago
Sure, but German universities are also surprisingly mediocre considering how good the Germans are at everything else.
- Kurtz79 12y ago
  The parent post was challenging the definition of "mediocre". Given that such "mediocre" universities are able to sustain one of the most powerful economies in the world, they must not be so mediocre.
  - peteretep 12y ago
    By that logic, all sorts of institutions in the US and China are damn-near perfect, as they're able to sustain the world's most power economies.
- Dewie 12y ago
  > Sure, but German universities are also surprisingly mediocre considering how good the Germans are at everything else. Which just puts into question how useful elite universities are, on the whole.
peteretep 12y ago
Sure, but German universities are also surprisingly mediocre considering how good the Germans are at everything else.

VLM 12y ago

Per http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/world-ranking/methodology http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki... 60% of the ranking is strictly research related, which is meaningless to undergrads although very important to grad students and above, and 10% is admitted to be subjective fluff. Perhaps important fluff, perhaps not, but definitely subjective fluff. Only 30% of the ranking score relates to teaching. So 60% to 70% of the score is irrelevant to undergrads, and the difference between 1st place and 55th place is a mere thirty percent or so. My engineering "sig figs" spidey sense is tingling that the "ranking" is meaningless.

Kesty 12y ago

Not really. 14 place ETHZ (Switzerland) https://www.ethz.ch/en/studies/financial/tuition-fees.html https://www.ethz.ch/en/studies/financial/tuition-fees.html $600 at semester = $1,200 (1 school year) 15 place John Hopkins(USA) http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/maryland/johns-hopkins-university/ http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/maryland/johns-hopkins-u... $45,470 (1 school year) Obviously it's US against Switzerland, it's completely different and very hard to compare. But bigger fees doesn't really means better university.

vasilipupkin 12y ago
Yes, but there are plenty of scholarhips and need based funds at John Hopkins. So this way a rich student has no problem paying either through loans or cash, but a poor student will be subsidized to a large extent. Also, if you want to major in something that is not in high demand then great, do it but why should everyone else subsidize your choices?
- MAGZine 12y ago
  and if you're neither rich nor poor, you end up being one of the poor saps with a couple hundred thousand in student loans.
- FlyingLawnmower 12y ago
  Just because a middle class student can pay for university through loans doesn't mean they should have to. Colleges advertise about their highly generous financial aid policies, but for most of the middle class whose parents earn say 120=150k together, little to no aid is given outside of loans.
  - vasilipupkin 12y ago
    well, theoretically, it makes sense for people to pay for their own education with loans that they can pay off, conditional on the sort of salary they expect to receive in the future as a result of their education. I mean if you want to major in quantitative finance and make a million a year, does it make sense for everybody else to fully subsidize your education ? What if you want to major in Japanese History pre 1600 ? does it make sense then?

3pt14159 12y ago

That link is laughably bad, at least for Canadian universities. U of Toronto at #20 world wide? Impossible. People are not lining up to get into Toronto. I was offered a full scholarship at my first choice at Toronto, and didn't even get my first choice at Waterloo. Waterloo behind 7 or 8 other Canadian universities? Also impossible.

berelig 12y ago
These rankings rely so heavily on research and reputation for scoring that you shouldn't look at it as an indicator of a university's academic quality. That would be the reason U of T is ranked so highly; they are even amongst competitive Ivy League schools! When I was applying for university (2007/08) U of T was handing out acceptance letters to everyone. Instead of rejecting you they would offer a place at a "lesser" campus (Mississauga or Scarborough) or defer you to a less competitive but related program. They are the largest university system in the nation with lots of spaces to fill so the scenario you described (getting accepted by the "#1 ranked school in Canada" and rejected by another") actually happens quite a lot. As for Waterloo, they're hardly a well rounded school. Yes, their engineering and computer science departments are internationally renown, but otherwise they are 2nd tier. Whatever the metric for rankings, I still think U of T is the best school in Canada. Just maybe not top 20 in the world.
- 3pt14159 12y ago
  Waterloo very well known: Physics, CompSci, Mathematics, Engineering, Optometry departments. Good, but not great: Science, Econ. Average: Traditional arts and humanities. While Toronto has a first tier medical, legal, and maybe engineering programs. Everything else is just good or worse. for a top 3 school list in the country, Waterloo and Toronto both definitely deserve a spot, but I wouldn't say that Toronto is solidly the best in Canada; nor would I say that of Waterloo. But for the two of them to be that separated basically means that this list is measuring the wrong things.

sauere 12y ago

Mediocre performance is what you get with a system like the one that is in place in Germany. Let me throw in two numbers first: - over the last 15 years the total number of students has increased by ~48% (while the total population has shrunk by 3%) - the number of available majors has tripled within the last 7 years (with the large part of the new majors being in non-science fields) People have not gotten smarter over the last 15 years, but the majors are getting less less challenging and more specialized. The universities focus on pushing as many people threw the system as possible. There is no place, time or money for excellence. They produce what the german industry wants, not more and not less. This can be good or bad, depending on what you want.

peterfirefly 12y ago
This does not strike me as a particularly German development...

aschreyer 12y ago

In Germany the cutting edge research is usually done by specific research organisations that do no or only very little teaching such as the Max Planck Institutes, Helmholtz Association, Fraunhofer, etc. Of course, as a student you do not really benefit from that at the undergraduate level - those world-class researchers are usually too busy to teach and leave it to their assistants.

wirrbel 12y ago
however they do teach and you will attend their lectures as a grad student!

rbehrends 12y ago

That is actually a bit more complicated. (1) Germany traditionally hasn't done "elite universities". Even in the early 20th century (i.e. until about 1933), when Germany was a Nobel Prize factory, it was often individual departments that stood out (such as mathematics in Goettingen), not universities in their entirety. There's currently an attempt to change that (Exzellenzinitiative), but we'll see how that goes. (2) Until a while ago, it was difficult to become a full professor at a German university unless you were German (because you basically became a civil servant, part of the requirements for which was citizenship); German also wasn't the lingua franca of science anymore after WW II, which made it difficult for German universities to attract foreign academic talent. (3) In lieu of elite universities, Germany these days has hundreds of research centers (such as the Max Planck Institutes), which do attract the cream of the crop. (4) High college rankings do not actually seem to translate into better adult education [1]. Part of that is, of course, that American students enter college with 1-2 years less education than other developed countries [2], and that's really a problem of secondary education. But on the other hand, a Bachelor's degree in many European countries takes only three years instead of four (in part for that reason), so that should compensate. In this context, it's worth noting that the methodology that the THE uses for calculating the teaching score is imperfect, to say the least. It comprises the following factors [3]: (1) a survey of the perceived prestige of the institution, (2) staff-to-student ratio, (3) doctorate-to-bachelor ratio, (4) institutional income compared to staff numbers. While I do think that the German university system could be improved upon (no secret, pretty much all German professors I know think the same), this is an apple-to-oranges comparison: especially at the undergraduate level, there are fundamental structural differences in the two college systems that renders most of these factors meaningless as a basis for comparison. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/upshot/americans-think-we-have-the-worlds-best-colleges-we-dont.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/upshot/americans-think-we-... [2] http://www.vox.com/2014/7/5/5868791/does-america-have-good-colleges-or-not/in/5479029 http://www.vox.com/2014/7/5/5868791/does-america-have-good-c... [3] http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/world-ranking/methodology http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki...

luch 12y ago

As a French I'm always find those rankings entertaining : for exemple the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) is ranked 65 with a research score 37.1 . The ENS has outputted 11 Fields winning mathematicians (20% of the world's laureates) and 10 Nobel prizes. In comparison, Cornell Uni. (19th) count 13 alumni which has won the Nobel.

DasIch 12y ago
Research as well as number of graduates with noteworthy awards is a rather questionable metric, for someone chosing a university right now. The number of awards is particularly problematic due to the timeframes involved not to mention the fact, that you are probably going to study something different and thereby at a different faculty than those successful graduates.
- luch 12y ago
  I'm not saying my metric is better, the problem lies in the fact that we are comparing oranges and apples here.

jre 12y ago

Germany has things like the Max Planck Society[1] (with 32 Nobel Prized), but it's not directly affiliated with a University, so it doesn't count in the rankings. It seems to me those rankings favor very large institution; are the score even normalized by number of students/faculty ? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck_Society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck_Society

GolfyMcG 12y ago

To play devil's advocate, I'm not necessarily saying that the best education stems from these schools but it's certainly other things that you're getting value from. This other HN article seemed relevant: http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/30/23581/ http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/30/23581/