Data: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/mylesoneill/world-university-rankings?select=cwurData.csv

Made in Python using the Plotnine Library

[removed]

Interesting that most of them are in the United States, and the relative movements among the top half of the chart are smaller than the movements in the bottom half.

USNews needs occasional movement among the top three so that the new ranking gets some press coverage. Once you get below the top 20 there is so much random variation that meaningless changes in a few statistics results in seemingly large moves.

That reminds me of this academic paper cited in the Wikipedia article on Master of Business Administration. While this focused on MBA rankings and not overall university rankings, I found it interesting that a simple ranking made by combining incoming student GMAT scores with salary after graduation resulted in a ranking that well-approximated the rankings by publications like USNews and Business Week.

Why didn’t you use newer data?

I was pretty surprised to see some of those (like U of Arizona, U of Utah) on the list, but not Brown or some other prestigious schools. I mean, UC Davis is a decent school, but one of the world's best?

Not much can change in three years. This would be more interesting if it showed change over several decades.

All of the data seems ridiculously US skewed

Right, no Brown no Dartmouth… seems to be missing some Top Universities.

Maybe cause some of the top universities are in the US?

Maybe because it's skewed. It doesn't help that it doesn't explain how they're ranked.

Edit: from reading the kaggle page it seems pretty subjective and is done by a private newspaper company in the UK.

Germany is usually underrepresented in these rankings since a lot of the research is not done by the university itself but by collaborating institutes like Fraunhofer, Max Planck, RKI and similar. It is just a different organizational setup that international comparisons do not take into account.

Whoever picked these colors for US and UK shoild be fired.

Sure, some. But I seriously doubt the majority of the Top 50. Most of these Universities I've never heard of

No Rice either. But Utah? Yes!

Do rankings matter anymore?

UC Davis is quite a bit bigger than either Brown or Dartmouth and has larger and similarly successful research programs. This is not an undergrad ranking, but overall university role.