NEW JERSEY — Several New Jersey institutions are among the best universities in the world, according to a new ranking by U.S. News & World Report released Tuesday.
The publication’s 2023 Best Global Universities list ranks more than 2,000 schools in dozens of countries based on academic research and reputation.
Overall, 95 countries are represented on the 2023 list.
“The Best Global Universities rankings offer prospective students a valuable resource for exploring higher education options outside of their home country,” Robert Morse, chief data strategist at U.S. News, said in a news release. “Over the past nine years, these rankings have expanded to include more schools and more subjects, while maintaining a consistent focus on institutions that prioritize academic research.”
Princeton University ranked the highest, placing 16th globally. The Ivy League school consistently holds the best rankings in New Jersey on lists of top-overall colleges. U.S. News even placed Princeton first in its 2023 national college rankings. Read more: NJ Schools Ranked Among U.S. News’ 2022-2023 Best Colleges
These universities in New Jersey also made the world rankings (location in parenthesis if it’s not part of the university name):
This year’s list ranked an additional 250 schools, up from 1,750 last year.
Although Princeton ranked first on the national list from U.S. News, it wasn’t among the U.S. colleges that secured the top-four spots on the 2023 global rankings. Harvard University came in at No. 1, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of California – Berkeley at No. 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Rounding out the top five is the United Kingdom’s University of Oxford.
This year, the United States had 280 universities in the overall ranking, surpassed only by China’s 338 universities. Other countries with the most schools on the list include:
To determine which schools make the list, U.S. News analyzes data and metrics provided by global analytics company Clarivate, including student-to-faculty ratio and number of degrees awarded.
Researchers also used 13 separate ranking factors and focused on each institution’s research performance. Read more about the Best Global Universities methodology.
Some educational experts warn against overvaluing college rankings when selecting or evaluating an institution. Some of the issues with university rankings include the downgrading of colleges with less of a budget to promote themselves, important factors that can’t be quantified, and subjective reputational factors that often influence placement, writes Alexandru Pop of Studyportals.
Two businesses emerged in the 1980s that changed higher education: the test-prep business — largely shaped by Stanley Kaplan, who founded Kaplan, Inc. — and the start of the U.S. News & World Report rankings, according to Business Insider.
U.S. News began evaluating universities based on the test scores of admitted students, which prompted colleges to desire more applicants who tested high. The universities offered merit-based scholarships and financial incentives to students who tested high. As a result, affluent parents of college applicants paid for test prep for their children to get those incentives.
James Fallows, a former U.S. News editor, even called them “meaningless” in an interview with NPR.
“The reason they started doing it back in the early 1980s under the guidance of a man named Mel Elfin, was because it was a brilliant business strategy,” Fallows said. “By appealing to the human desire for rankings and knowing where you stand and where somebody else stands, they were able to make a very strong part of their business, which is now basically the only part of their business.”
But U.S. News says the global university rankings help students explore higher-education options that exist beyond their cultural boundaries.
The media outlet also added five additional subject metrics for 2023, according to a release, including artificial intelligence, education and educational research, meteorology and atmospheric sciences, and water resources.
See this full list of this year’s Best Global Universities.
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