The Social Capital Foundation has released its ranking of the 150 best Universities in the world for 2020-2022.

Concept

Evaluating Universities can be tricky. Institutions can create a favorable environment for pedagogic performance. In a last resort, however, the latter lies on individual staff and students.

In addition, performance evaluation in this sector is widely subjective. It depends on:  the opinion of employers and families, the public image and fame of these organizations, the social class/cultural capital of the students they attract, and the involvement of these organizations in partnerships.

Institutional purpose

– The purpose of a University is first to transmit knowledge.

– Producing new knowledge through research comes second.

– Producing dissemination, applications, social promotion and economic development comes third.

Criteria

Because of this, our evaluation criteria include:

a) quality of education (student/faculty ratio, pedagogic methodology and research, logistics, income and budget) for 50%,

b) support to research (research budget, faculty involvement, patents, indexation and citation per faculty) for 25%,

c) and organization development (HR policy, institutional income, collaboration with the economy, international outlook including faculty, research and programs) for 25%.

Our approach, while it does not endorse as such the UN sustainable Development goals (SDGs) as some of them express a policy agenda. But it does take into account reformulated impact areas such as quality education (SDG4), economic growth (SDG8), industry and infrastructure (SDG9), and partnerships (SDG17).

Finally, we also take into account consensus within existing surveys, with exception of the Leiden ranking, which is based on limited and irrelevant criteria. As for the CHE ranking list, it is limited to German-speaking Universities,  which makes international comparison very difficult.

Methodology

We evaluate Universities against our scale levels.

In addition to the classic TSCF evaluation class, we attribute to each University a score in points.

Such institutions are unlikely to implement and materialize new policies in a very short time. As a result, we attribute our ratings for a period of 3 years.

Links

TSCF Ranking Department is here:

https://www.socialcapital.is/rating/

TSCF SQUAS methodology is here:

https://www.socialcapital.is/social_capital_main/wp-content/themes/inspirar_child/customize/images/TSCF%20SERVICE%20QUALITY%20SCALE3-copyrighted.pdf

TSCF University ranking is here:

https://socialcapital.is/ratings/