Week 4
 This week I talk about college. Now there are many colleges in the world. For example, Japan has 778 colleges, America has 2629, Korea has 407, Germany has 370, The United Kingdom has 167, France has 94 and so on. As you can see, Japan has the second most colleges in the world. By the way, how is the quality of Japanese university? According to World University Ranking (Times Higher Education), Number 1 is California Institute of Technology, 2 is University of Oxford, 3 is Stanford University. Top 10 is American or European university only. About Japanese university, Tokyo university is 27th, the university of Kyoto is 54th, and Tokyo technical university is 128th.  Compared to last year, on the whole, Japanese universities lowered their rank. By contrast, Chinese and Korean university raised their rank. So Times Higher Education says that the distribution of power of higher education is shifting from America and Europe to Asia. But in chemistry, Japanese university is not so bad. Kyoto university ranked number 9 and the university of Tokyo do 11 (Academic Ranking of World Universities). Not American or European university is Kyoto university only in the top 10. Japanese colleges are higher in the field of physics and chemistry. However in the other field, there are no name of Japanese university in higher rank. Especially, in economy and literature Japanese universities are out of ranking.

  But these ranking do not show all of worth of the university. There are some standards that judges decide which college is superior or inferior to the other universities. The standards are not same but depend on the persons who edited the ranking. For example, the ranking of Times Higher Education said that they mainly evaluated 13 performance indicators which are grouped into five areas: Teaching (the learning environment), Research (volume, income and reputation), Citations (research influence), Industry income (innovation), International outlook (staff, student and research). Shanghai Jiao Tong University which edited Academic Ranking of World Universities said that they evaluate universities by 6 standard of evaluation: the number of people who won the Nobel prizes and Fields prizes after graduate the school, the number of staff who won the Nobel prizes and Fields prizes, the number of scholar who is highly cited their thesis in 21 broad subject categories, the number of thesis which is published in Nature and Science, the number of thesis which is indexed in Science Citation Index expanded and Social Science Citation Index, per capita academic performance of an institution. In short, Academic Ranking of World Universities do not evaluate the side of education and evaluate achievements of professor or graduate people. Academic Ranking of World Universities attach greater importance to quality of as research institution than to education.
  Each ranking have each standard. So we cannot determine the worth of university. I think if you want to be scholar, you should evaluate what does the university study. But you can use as one of standard to evaluate each university. If you have a interest, I want you to see the ranking of university.