Note that Swarthmore appears not only in the best liberal arts ranking but also in the best overall ranking because even though it is much smaller than Duke or Northwestern, its concentrated influence, by controlling for size, makes it comparable to those schools. Īcademic Influence's top schools for undergraduates as gauged by concentrated influence are as follows.

Concentrated influence, by controlling for size, attempts to correct for this imbalance. The idea is that larger schools will naturally acquire more influence, and thus rank more highly, simply in virtue of their size. In ranking undergraduate institutions, Academic Influence argues that the best metric for doing so is not influence per se but what it calls 'concentrated influence,' which normalizes influence by size of the undergraduate student body. Academic Influence thereby claims to produce college and university rankings that are not only objective and unbiased, but also non-gameable (features it argues should be present in school rankings but are largely absent from them). As a consequence, all its influence-based rankings occur without human intervention but instead are algorithmically driven. In ranking people and institutions by influence, Academic Influence uses a machine-learning technology implemented by its InfluenceRanking engine. By then associating influential people with their academic affiliations, Academic Influence was able to induce rankings of higher education institutions. News & World Report also publishes a separate ranking of global universities, including United States' universities, that are 'ranked based on 13 indicators that measure their academic research performance and their global and regional reputations.'Īcademic Influence's rankings of colleges, universities, and disciplinary programs began as a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA) initiative for ranking persons according to their areas of influence.

News & World Report Best Global Universities Ranking

Niche top high schools 2017