Most students probably don’t pay attention to world rankings of universities, but they can be important to international students. Important enough that one MSU faculty member spent years researching these rankings.
Yixuan “Shirley” Shi, an accounting graduate student from China, said she looked at world rankings as part of the decision process to come to MSU. She searched for a school ranked in the top 100 worldwide for her major.
“MSU has a pretty high accounting ranking, that is the key factor for me when I decided to come,” Shi said.
Brendan Cantwell, an assistant professor in MSU’s Department of Educational Administration said he spent about three years studying what predicts the position of a university on world ranking systems. He discovered universities and colleges that dedicate more faculty to research and allocate more money on science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM fields, tend to rank higher in world ranking systems such as Academic Rankings of World Universities conducted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
He said that on average, the amount of money and number of faculty and staff dedicated to STEM research correlated with higher rankings.
However, he said these rankings likely do not have a major affect on the allocation of research dollars at MSU, since the world rankings are more influential in Europe and Asia. He added that many U.S. colleges focus more on national rankings, and university officials agreed.
“As a top research university, MSU bases its academic funding decisions on many factors, including how well programs and departments fit within the university’s strategic objectives,” university spokesman Kent Cassella said. “While rankings by outside organizations can offer a glimpse into a program’s or college’s merit, these rankings do not drive funding decisions at MSU.”
There are 12,000 graduate, graduate professional and doctoral students at MSU, and about 35 percent of them are international, Dean Karen Klomparens of the Graduate School said.
Cantwell said his research focused on universities with the highest research rankings from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which included MSU.
The research paper was published in an international journal called Minerva, Cantwell said, because the correlation between ranking and research is more important to universities and governments outside the U.S., but added that the research probably is interesting to international and graduate students at American universities, like Shi, who might look at rankings when deciding where to go to college.
Support student media! Please consider donating to The State News and help fund the future of journalism.
