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[quote=Anonymous]Interesting ranking I found, discussions are welcome: https://qz.com/498534/these-25-schools-are-responsible-for-the-greatest-advances-in-science/

The US News college rankings emphasize subjective reputation, student retention, selectivity, graduation rate, faculty and financial resources and alumni giving. Recently, other rankings have proliferated, including some based on objective long-term metrics such as individual earning potential. Yet, we know of no evaluations of colleges based on lasting contributions to society. Of course, such contributions are difficult to judge. In the analysis below, we focus primarily on STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine/mathematics) contributions, which are arguably the least subjective to evaluate, and increasingly more valued in today’s workforce.

We examined six groups of exceptional achievers divided into two tiers, looking only at winners who attended college in the US. Our goal is to create a ranking among US colleges, but of course, one could broaden the analysis if desired. The first level included all winners of the Nobel Prize (physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, literature, and peace), Fields Medal (mathematics), and the Turing Award (computer science). The second level included individuals elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), National Academy of Engineering (NAE), or Institute of Medicine (IOM). The National Academies are representative of the top few thousand individuals in all of STEM.

We then traced each of these individuals back to their undergraduate days, creating two lists to examine whether the same or different schools rose to the top. We wanted to compare results across these two lists to see if findings in the first tier of achievement replicated in the second tier of achievement and to increase the sample size to avoid the problem of statistical flukes.

Simply counting up the number of awards likely favors larger schools and alumni populations. We corrected for this by computing a per capita rate of production, dividing the number of winners from a given university by an estimate of the relative size of the alumni population. Specifically, we used the total number of graduates over the period 1966-2013 (an alternative method of estimating base population over 100 to 150 years led to very similar lists). This allowed us to objectively compare newer and smaller schools with older and larger schools.

[b]Schools with most undergraduate alumni winning the most Nobel, Fields or Turing prizes between 1966 and 2013, per capita (total number in parenthesis) - 
[/b]1. Caltech (11 winners)
2. Harvard (34)
3. UChicago (15)
4. Swarthmore (5)
5. Columbia (20)
6. MIT (14)
7. Yale (13)
8. Amherst (4)
9. CUNY (13)
10. CMU (7)
11. Case Western (4)
12. Princeton (5)
13. Berkeley (19)
14. Stanford (5)
15. Navy (3)
16. Dartmouth (3)
17. Cornell (9)
18. Michigan (7)
19. UCLA (7)
20. Penn (3)

[b]Schools with most undergraduate alumni elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), National Academy of Engineering (NAE), or Institute of Medicine (IOM), per capita (total number in parenthesis) - [/b]
1. Caltech (78)
2. MIT (255)
3. Harvard (326)
4. Swarthmore (49)
5. Princeton (109)
6. Amherst (35)
7. Yale (112)
8. UChicago (56)
9. Stanford (117)
10. Haverford (15)
11. Oberlin (38)
12. Reed (16)
13. Columbia (78)
14. Cooper Union (10)
15. Rice (31)
16. JHU (42)
17. Dartmouth (43)
18. CUNY (74)
19. Rensselaer Polytechnicic Institute (41)
20. Cornell (128)[/quote]

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