Rankings

International rankings of universities have become popular in the last ten years or so. They can provide some useful advice to prospective students, especially those wishing to study abroad. However, students should bear in mind that rankings are distillations of a great diversity of information, and all of them present methodological peculiarities in terms of the emphasis placed on the various factors considered.

All the main international rankings are usually based on a direct or indirect measure of a combination of the following five main factors:

1. Teaching quality, which can be either indirectly measured through the student/faculty ratio or directly estimated through interviews to graduates;
2. Scientific productivity, usually proxied by the number of publications and/or citations of the permanent faculty members;
3. Placement and career development, either directly estimated through the average graduate salary after a number of years from graduation, or indirectly measured by interviewing major recruiters;
4. Internationalization, usually proxied by the percentage of foreign students and of foreign faculty members;
5. Faculty quality and diversity, usually indirectly estimated through the percentage of permanent faculty members with a PhD and the percentage of female faculty members.

Bocconi and the Ranking

International Rankings

Articles