I Could've Been a Contender

The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) has published a list of the world's best universities . It is gratifying that I did ugrad+grad at #36 and now I postdoc at #20.

This is how THES ranked the universities:

"Universities were placed in the table with the help of findings from a survey for the THES of 1,300 academics in 88 countries. They were asked to name the best institutions in the fields that they felt knowledgeable about."

"The table also included data on the amount of cited research produced by faculty members as an indicator of intellectual vitality, the ratio of faculty to student numbers and a university's success in attracting foreign students and internationally renowned academics in the global market for education. The five factors were weighted and transformed against a scale that gave the top university 1,000 points and ranked everyone else as a proportion of that score."

If you haven't guessed, Harvard, with an annual operating budget of over 2 billion dollars and more than most third-world nations, is at position #1.