As a skullar of self-repute from my ivory tower I use nout but:

- "...is informed by"

Failing that

- "it privileges..."

- any serious left-winger in his/her estimation, is "a truth-teller".

And I never cease to adhere to the American usage, 3/4s through any paper of serious academic intent, of

- "To be sure..."

Not the Orish "to be sure, to be sure" just "To be sure..."

Armed with these gems any budding scholar is set for unpaid stardom.

I would have said stardom at ANU but poor-lil ANU has quietly slid down this year's world University ratings from being top Uni in Oz - and now can't advertise about it to mega-fee paying foreign students.

Melbourne University is now top Oz Uni this year.

Yours

Planta Highbrow

Melbourne University is now top Oz Uni this year.
plantagenet,
Where does that put them on the international scale or are it's lecturers imports ?
What has that much publicised brain-drain from Australia left us with ?

Hi individual

Actually ANU remains second in Oz falling from 37th to 48th worldwide.

Melbourne University remains first in Oz - falling from 28th to 34th worldwide.

Caltech (USA) a serious technical university ranks first in world. Then Harvard and Oxford (equal second)

US and Asian universities dominated the top 100.

Much goes to the extreme alumni funding of US universities (very little in Oz) which draws the top lecturers and can pay for the largest facilities.

Its not our government's fault.

We can't match Harvard's alumni funding which may be around $500 million a year plus US government funding plus fees of around $60,000 per student.

Pete

Correction

Harvard University's interest paying "Endowment" - a largely tax-free bank account - in 2012 was US30 Billion Dollars.

Maybe comparable to Australia's whole tertiary education budget per year - its unclear http://www.budget.gov.au/2012-13/content/bp2/html/bp2_expense-15.htm .

plantagenet,
So how is this placing evaluated ? I mean if a business produces something of value then the sales & subsequent profits increase. How does churning out academics increase whatever Universities are supposed to be achieving. Is the number of graduates the benchmark or the quality of the graduates ? How then is this quality evaluated ? I work on a daily basis with University educated people & I fail to detect anything that they offer to be of any value to the society I frequent in. On the contrary, they are literally more of a burden then of use. They chew up a huge slice of the funding of projects by designing problems instead of solutions. The whole business seems to evolve around getting projects approved & then prolong everything to such a degree that it provides huge profits for extremely little input if any at times. I fail to see any degree of improvement or increased efficiency in literally anything University educated people get involved in. There really are only a handful of University graduates who actually achieve something that is beneficial to society. The bulk are a mere burden.

Individual

The most commonly used global ranking is the Academic Ranking or World Universities launched by Shanghai Jiaotong University. It's methodology is completely transparent.

You can find the 2013 rankings here:

http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2013.html

And you can find a discussion of methodology here:

http://www.shanghairanking.com/grup/index.html

The top ten, out of the top 500, are:

1 Harvard University
2 Stanford University
3 University of California, Berkeley
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
5 University of Cambridge
6 California Institute of Technology
7 Princeton University
8 Columbia University
9 University of Chicago
10 University of Oxford