Every fall the weekly magazine Elsevier publishes a ranking of the Dutch universities and at the same time the Keuzegids (Choice Guide) is released, which comewith a ranking too, based upon the yearly  held National Student Survey. Bottom line every year is that small universities score better than the big ones.

All those rankings and lists come from the USA. One of the most famous list is the Forbes 500, the annual listing of the top 500 American companies and in Holland the Quote 500 with the richest people of the world.

U.S. News & World Report added once a year a small service guide to its weekly with the top-100 universities of America, which grew to a phenomenon. Although the magazine itself has stopped, the U.S. News web attracts more than ten million visitors in the month that the meanwhile very thick guide appears.

In an old New Yorker (2009) I read an article of Malcolm Gladwell in which he stated that these rankings are incomparable and rubbish. Robert Morse who made the first ranking for U.S. News & World Report emphasized that the list was a very rough benchmark to help the readers choose. But nowadays even board of directors make objectives to climb on this list.

Gladwell gave as example a survey among a hundred lawyers to find out the best law schools in the country by sending  them a pre given list to which the lawyers could add their preferred law schools.

The Penn State Law School didn't score bad at all, but didn't exist. Professor Jeffrey Stake from the Indiana University (in that same article): "These lists are subjective and very arbitrary".

However in all these rankings about educational institutions, year after year, small schools and universities seem to score far better than these factory-alike universities. From a statistical point of view  we could say that small schools perform better.

WUP 29/10/12