Worldwide university ranking

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There are a lot of rankings of universities within a country. But finally I found a worldwide ranking which compares universities at different countries. Since I had quite a bit of difficulty finding it, I would like to share it with anyone else who might be interested:
http://www.answers.com/topic/global-university-ranking

this is bogus, not that i care but if you take a look at the criteria it s nobel prize and a prize from russian academy. in all the things that i looked at, russian univ is not ranked in the first 50.
but generaly rankings are for nobel prize winners, nothing that i should care for.

Actually education in Russia is much better than in USA. What they do in USA during the first two years of college, they do in Russia in high school. The Russian first year of university is the same as the third year in USA. Also, in Russia ithere is a lot more competition to get into a university. The notion of "going off to college to have fun" is unheard of in Russia.

Then why are Russian and Indian and Iranian universities ranked so low? Research and 'fame'?

As far as India or Iran I don't know their education system so I can't tell.

As far as Russia, due to a bad economic situation a lot of professors are trying to immigrate to USA, and typically the better ones are the ones that succeed, so that is what brings Russian research down. However, the other side of the coin is that one of the leading forces that bring USA research up are immigrants from Russia. Case in point: in University of Minnesota (the school where I did my master's) the physics department was four-floor building, and the whole fourth floor was made up by physicists from Russia, with only one person from USA. Now, the people on that floor were the best physicists in the department and they were the main reason that University of Minnesota has a good reputation.

Now, despite all the people that are leaving Russia for economic reasons, the educational system there is still one of the best in the world. The only problem is that you won't have a lot of people around to collaborate with once you are a professor since everyone is trying to leave. But even so, the whole situation of people leaving the country only started a couple of decades ago.

as one that had to endure "russian" type of education system, i must say that yeah one learns a lot but that is all useless, if you don't use it you forget it and it is not for everyone to think about general relativity. thus russians could have send people in space but couldn't make a proper shampoo.

yes, almost 50% of patents in us is made by other nationalities working here. whatever, eventually everyone use them and that's what matters for me.

If I take what you said, then Harvard should not rank high either since it makes the same mistake of "teaching too much". Now I agree that it is controversial whether or not learning too much is a good idea; and, for the same reason, it is also controversial whether or not going to Harvard is a good idea as well. But as far as rankings are concerned, they still rank Harvard high. So if Harvard is ranked high, then Russian universites should rank high as well -- it is only a question of consistency.

Let me give you another example. As a scientist, I believe that people who devote their career to sports, or chess, are wasting their life since to me science is a lot more valuable. But still, I am not going to use that argument to say that Einstein should be a chess champion rather than Kramnik. Even though Einstein had infinitely more valuable life, I still would call Kramnik a chess champion. So likewise, even if you don't agree that intensive education is such a good thing, still you should rank Russian schools high since their education happened to be intensive -- whether you think it is a good idea or not.

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Now, I know that, given what I just said above, the discussion of value of intensive education is a sidetrack. Nevertheless, since I happened to have a strong opinion in this area, I can't help but state it:

If I just look at one country, whether that country is Russia or USA, what I find is that in college students study A LOT more than within over a decade they spend in elementary school, junior high and high school put together. In fact, I would say it is a fair bet that even within a single year of college you learn an equivalent of everything you learned within a decade before you entered college. Another evidence I could bring in this respect is that there are adults who for various reasons did not have proper schooling, but were determined to make up for it. And a lot of them actually got through all of the material grade 1 - 12 within a year, without much difficulty.

Now most psychologists agree that the learning speed is higher when the person is younger. So this means that the average person could have learned high school material in the first grade if only they were putting just as much effort as they did in college

Now of course this has a very serious problem. Elementary school students are not driven to do what adults are doing, so if you would force them to do what they don't want this might potentially be very damaging. But at the same time, if you take a sample of adults who chose to be scientists, I am sure a lot of them regret that they didn't do in elementary school what they COULD HAVE done if only they wanted to. I certainly have this regret. So in this respect if education was a lot better then people like me would be happier as adults.

Now, of course, not everyone is like me so I understand it would be at expense of others. But at the same time we should also realize that if kids were REALLY allowed to do everything they wanted to, then our society would be ten times worse than it is today. At a young age the personality haven't completely formed yet, so by "forcing" little kids to do things they don't want to, you will train them to eventually like doing these thinsg and it will be a complete win win situation at the end. I know that too much forcing is a child abuse, so I agree that perhaps kids shouldn't study it in a year but instead may be three years. But still I think psychologists should sit down and find a line between healthy forcing and child abuse. I believe this line is no where close to where any country (including Russia) ever been. So in my opinion schools should be even more intensive than in Russia, let alone USA.

I thought as long as we know how to think, everything should be fine?