newsweek top 100 global universities

educators love to grade and rank others, but we get a little cranky when we're ranked ourselves. sometimes this is because we don't like the ranking criteria and sometimes it is because we don't like the results.

newsweek just released their list of the top 100 global universities this week, based on the following criteria:

fifty percent of the score came from equal parts of three measures:
1. the number of highly-cited researchers in various academic fields
2. the number of articles published in nature and science
3. the number of articles listed in the isi social sciences and arts & humanities indices

another 40 percent of the score came from equal parts of four measures:
4. the percentage of international faculty
5. the percentage of international students
6. citations per faculty member
7. the ratio of faculty to students

the final 10 percent came from ...
8. the number of volumes in the library

the minnversity placed thirtieth on the world list, situated somewhere between kyoto and geneva. the public/private split is blurring these days, but i believe that places us about eleventh among the american publics. we're looking up at berkeley, san francisco (whose ranking was sort of a surprise to me), michigan, ucla, washington, san diego, wisconsin, and texas. since we're minnesotans, of course, we'd never look down on anybody.

1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. Yale University
4. California Institute of Technology
5. University of California at Berkeley
6. University of Cambridge
7. Massachusetts Institute Technology
8. Oxford University
9. University of California at San Francisco
10. Columbia University
11. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
12. University of California at Los Angeles
13. University of Pennsylvania
14. Duke University
15. Princeton Universitty
16. Tokyo University
17. Imperial College London
18. University of Toronto
19. Cornell University
20. University of Chicago
21. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
22. University of Washington at Seattle
23. University of California at San Diego
24. Johns Hopkins University
25. University College London
26. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
27. University Texas at Austin
28. University of Wisconsin at Madison
29. Kyoto University
30. University of Minnesota Twin Cities
31. University of British Columbia
32. University of Geneva
33. Washington University in St. Louis
34. London School of Economics
35. Northwestern University
36. National University of Singapore
37. University of Pittsburgh
38. Australian National University
39. New York University
40. Pennsylvania State University
41. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
42. McGill University
43. Ecole Polytechnique
44. University of Basel
45. University of Maryland
46. University of Zurich
47. University of Edinburgh
48. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
49. University of Bristol
50. University of Sydney
51. University of Colorado at Boulder
52. Utrecht University
53. University of Melbourne
54. University of Southern California
55. University of Alberta
56. Brown University
57. Osaka University
58. University of Manchester
59. University of California at Santa Barbara
60. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
61. Wageningen University
62. Michigan State University
63. University of Munich
64. University of New South Wales
65. Boston University
66. Vanderbilt University
67. University of Rochester
68. Tohoku University
69. University of Hong Kong
70. University of Sheffield
71. Nanyang Technological University
72. University of Vienna
73. Monash University
74. University of Nottingham
75. Carnegie Mellon University
76. Lund University
77. Texas A&M University
78. University of Western Australia
79. Ecole Normale Super Paris
80. University of Virginia
81. Technical University of Munich
82. Hebrew University of Jerusalem
83. Leiden University
84. University of Waterloo
85. King's College London
86. Purdue University
87. University of Birmingham
88. Uppsala University
89. University of Amsterdam
90. University of Heidelberg
91. University of Queensland
92. University of Leuven
93. Emory University
94. Nagoya University
95. Case Western Reserve University
96. Chinese University of Hong Kong
97. University of Newcastle
98. Innsbruck University
99. University of Massachusetts at Amherst
100. Sussex University

i'm glad the minnversity registers on such lists, especially since our stated aim is to become one of the top three public research universities in the world. still, i'm not sure whether these particular rankings give us a reasonable picture of either "top" or "global." what do you make of the list?