Cornell was ranked the 19th best university in the world and the 13th best university in the United States in this year’s Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
The ranking is a slight improvement over Cornell’s performance on the renowned U.S. News and World Report National Universities list, which was released earlier this month and named the University the 16th best college in the United States.
Cornell’s ranking has hovered steadily in the high teens over the past year — it held at 17 from 2012 to 2014, and then dropped to 18th in 2015 before landing at 19th this year. However, the University’s performance has noticeably declined since the start of the decade; it stayed at 14th place in 2010 and 2011 before dropping three places in 2012.
The Times Higher Education says they judge universities on four core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. They then examine each school’s learning environment, research efforts, citations in literature, number of international community members and industry income. Data is provided by the institutions being ranked.
The teaching and research categories both give significant weight to a reputation survey distributed and collected in the year before the rankings are released, according to THE.
Cornell performed best in the citations criterion, earning a 97.2 percent, but fell short in industry income — the lowest weighted category, accounting for only 2.5 percent of the University’s total ranking — weighing in with a middling 36 percent. It also scored 62.2 percent in teaching, 79.9 percent in international outlook and 85.5 percent in research.
These scores are fairly consistent with Cornell’s historical performance. It regularly performs well in the citations category, but has not broken 40 percent in industry income this decade.