QS Energy Inc (QSEP)

[Zizek]

Two problems with your awesome new lists:

1) You concede my central claim, that the overall strength of schools and programs is irrelevant. You can find scientists at the top of their fields at small schools that are off the radar all across the US. Instead, the better metric is who is publishing the best peer-reviewed research, and Tao's work, compared to his actual colleagues at other universities, has been published in the journals with the highest impact factor. No one from MIT or Cal-Berkeley have done that, illustrating why trying to make general claims about places is a silly task, and why the actual metrics of individuals is better.

2) These new lists still don't say anything relevant about the quality of Temple. For instance, your new USN&WR list grades physics departments in 7 areas: Atomic/Molecular/Optical; Condensed Matter; Cosmology/Relativity/Gravity; Elementary Particles/Field/String Theory; Nuclear; Plasma; and Quantum.

So do tell - if you were trying to place Tao's work into one of these subfields, where would you put it? Probably Condensed Matter, but even that's a problem because it fails to distinguish between all of the radically different experimental and theoretical avenues that this area covers. For instance, in this area, the University of Illinois is the #1 program in the US. But, they have 35 faculty members all working in the area of theory. Comparing this to Tao's experimental lab is comparing apples and oranges. This is another moment where the tool you are using to evaluate the question at hand is inadequate, as Tao's area isn't even one of the things being ranked.

As for your post from the ARWU, it's much more based on prestige than performance. After all, if 25% of the ranking is simply an up/down on whether or not an alumni or a staff member won a Nobel Prize, of course the rankings are going to skew toward the traditional powerhouses. Plus, the other indicators are total number of pubs by faculty. Which I agree is a good metric, but to return to the Illinois example above, they have a department with 35 people in one small subset. Temple has less than 20 total. So this skews the results to bigger programs, not necessarily better ones. I look forward to seeings your next wave of survey data!