US News: 87 Chinese universities rank among world’s top 1,000

China has the second-largest number of universities in an evaluation of the top 1,000 schools in the world, according to the latest US News list 2017 Best Global Universities.

There are 87 Chinese universities among the 1,000. The US has 210 and the top five universities: Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology. The best overall global universities are dominated by schools in the US and UK.

Schools were accessed across 22 subjects, according to US News.

China took two of the top-five slots in best universities in Asia: Peking University was ranked No 3; Tsinghua University was ranked No 4.

“For the 2017 edition of Best Global Universities, US News expanded the rankings to the Top 1,000 schools — up from 750 last year,” said Robert Morse, chief data strategist at US News. “With this expansion, we were able to evaluate a greater number of schools in China, bringing the total to 87 institutions in the overall rankings.

“The growing presence of universities in China is a testament to China’s slowly rising influence in the global academic space,’’ he added. “However, it is worth noting that very few universities in China are among the Top 100 or Top 250 schools. Therefore, while there is a growing number of schools included in Best Global Universities, few are near the top.”

China’s universities are topranked in computer science and engineering, where the country placed second behind the US, followed by the UK, Canada and Germany in computer science, and the UK, Canada and Italy in engineering.

US News said that it placed emphasis on a university’s global and research reputation and its academic research performance, which is determined using factors such as publications, citations, and international collaboration. It factored in the number of highly cited research papers in the top 1 percent of the school’s respective fields and the percentage of a university’s published papers that are among the top 1 percent of most-cited papers.

US News is better known for its Best Colleges list, which ranks the best higher education institutions in the US and is consulted by many international students interested in studying in America. That list ranks schools based on other factors, such as graduation and retention rates, as well as SAT scores.

The US News school rankings have been the subject of much criticism, with many colleges and universities protesting the criteria used in judging schools. Critics say that the criteria reflect characteristics found at elite universities across the country.

US News has no way of independently verifying SAT scores provided by schools, which allows schools to game the rankings, said some critics. Claremont-McKenna College in California was caught in 2012 for providing fake SAT scores to US News. The lists also can’t accurately predict a student’s performance at the school, critics have said.