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Below is the selected publication:
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Title:
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Young and Old Universities Equally Represented in the World’s Top-25 Universities
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Date:
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28 Oct 2008
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Text:
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An assessment carried out by AllAboutUni.com reveals that young universities are very well represented in the World’s Top-25 universities [1]. AllAboutUni.com is an independent, global and inter-active website where visitors can obtain information about universities (global rankings, student reviews, university news and campus pictures).
The World’s Top-25 universities in 2008 (click here) are mainly located in the United States (18 out of 25) and are often private institutions (11 out of 25). This distribution is more pronounced for the World’s Top-10 universities, where 8 out of 10 are located in the United States (US) and 7 out of 10 are private institutions (click here).
The age of the World’s Top-25 universities ranged from 48 years (the University of California - San Diego, established in 1960) to 912 years (the University of Oxford, date established unknown but teaching has existed since 1096). The overall median age of the Top-25 universities is 147 years, with universities in the US (N=18) being younger (median of 145, range 48 to 372) than those in the other countries (N=7; median of 181, range 111 to 912).
We defined a ‘young’ university as being aged less than 150 years, and found that 13 of the World’s Top-25 universities fell into this category. This was also the case for the World’s Top-10 universities, where 5 out of 10 universities were aged less than 150 years.
The age of a university is often marketed as an important factor in the academic quality of a university. Our analysis does not support this, with young and old universities equally represented in the World’s Top-25 universities. In addition, it is of note that the oldest university in the Western world, the University of Bologna in Italy (established in 1088), is only ranked 201-302 in the World’s Top-500 universities.
These findings are very significant for universities around the world that want to move up the ranking of the World’s Top-500 universities and better position themselves in the global higher education market. The findings indicate that it is possible to get into the World’s Top-25 universities in a very short period of time. The best example is the University of California - San Diego which is ranked 14th in the world and has achieved this in just 48 years.
Background note:
[1] The analysis is based on a ranking of the World’s Top-500 Universities produced by the Institute of Higher Education at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (click here). Several indicators of academic or research performance are used to establish the ranking, these include staff winning Nobel Prizes, highly cited researchers and articles indexed in major citation indices. The rankings have been published since 2003, with the 2008 ranking published on 15 August 2008.
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Summary:
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An assessment carried out by AllAboutUni.com reveals that young universities are very well represented in the World’s Top-25 universities. Although the median age of the World’s Top-25 universities is roughly 150 years, the University of California - San Diego is ranked 14th in the world and this was achieved in only 48 years! Full text...
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Keywords:
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Education, higher education, university, college, year established
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Author:
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John Paget
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Copyright:
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AllAboutUni.com
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