The 2013 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has placed UC Berkeley (my alma mater) behind Harvard and Stanford in the global rankings of universities in the world.
Overall in the top 500, Berkeley is #3; of the top 200 universities, in the sciences, it is #2 and in mathematics it is #3.
I was curious if any Indian university figures in the top 500. Yes, there is one: in the 301-400 range, there’s the Indian Institute of Science. (Great job, you stupid Congress shitheads.)
Here’s a bit more on the methodology:
(Begin quote.)
Berkeley is ranked third in the world using the Shanghai Jiao Tong University methodology, which focuses on quality of faculty and research. Berkeley is again the top-ranked public university, followed by UCLA (12th), UCSD (14th) and UCSF (18th).
. . .
The methodology uses four criteria to assess a university’s ranking: quality of education (worth 10% of the total), quality of faculty (40%), research output (40%), and per capita academic performance (10%). More specifically, these include Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners among faculty and alumni weighted by decade received, highly cited researchers from 21 subject areas, the number of papers in Nature and Science published between 2008 and 2012, the number of papers indexed in Science Citation and Social Science Citation in 2012. The weighted scores of these indicators are divided by the FTE of academic staff to obtain the per capita performance rating.
The total score is derived by summing these, and each institutional score is then standardized to the top-scoring university, which is assigned 100. [Source.]
(End quote.)
For more, see Academic Rankings of World Universities 2013.
Life is a Random Draw 