The Chronicle

Issue date: 2/22/08 Section: News
Last update: 2/22/08 at 8:32 AM EST

Media Credit: Eric Mansfield Professor Adrian Bejan applied his constructal theory to explain why university rankings tend to stay the same from year to year.

Based on a recently devised theory, the U.S. News & World Report might want to reconsider publishing an updated university rankings list every year-not because of the list's lack of accuracy, but because of its improbability to change.

According to the constructal theory developed by Adrian Bejan, J.A. Jones professor of mechanical engineering, nature has a tendency to travel "down the path of least resistance," optimizing efficiency and making certain structures more stable-and thus more prevalent-than others.

Bejan said the theory, which has been successful in predicting such diverse configurations as river basins, earth climate, blood circulation and traffic patterns, could also be applied to university rankings.

According to the theory, a university's ranking is largely determined by its number of renowned researchers, who bring fame to the university through the ideas they devise. The best indicator of renowned researchers, Bejan said, is the number of citations they have received in others' works, which reflects the extent of their ideas' influence.

For each top 50 U.S. graduate engineering school ranked by U.S. News, Bejan counted the number of researchers' names that appeared on the Thomson Scientific's most-cited list. In general, he found that higher ranking schools tended to have more cited researchers.

"If you rank universities in terms of how many names they have on the [most-cited] list, you obtain a ranking that is essentially the same as the U.S. News & World Report's," he said.

Bejan said there is not much change in rank among the top 50 schools because lower-ranked schools face large barriers to compete.

He predicted that the Pratt School of Engineering's current position at 30 on the graduate engineering school list will not alter significantly when U.S. News releases its new rankings in early April.

"These hierarchical flow designs serve everybody well," Bejan said. "The highly ranked and the lowly ranked go together. The flow of science improves in time because each school improves while maintaining the place that it has earned in the global structure."

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools