The last time I looked at Japanese universities in a global ranking, I commented that
most of the universities on this list were the product of the US Occupation education reforms, particularly the insistence on public universities in every prefecture.
In a sense, that was true, but it was a list of the top 500 global institutions, and there were 37 Japanese representatives. The top seven were the former Imperial universities: Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Tohoku, Nagoya, Hokkaido, Kyushu. Somehow I didn’t actually make that connection until looking at the Times Higher Education Top 200 global institutions [via], which included more or less the same list:
- 22. Tokyo
- 25. Kyoto
- 43. Osaka
- 55. Tokyo Institute of Technology (which was just below the Imperials on the old list)
- 92. Nagoya
- 97. Tohoku
- 142. Keio (Keio and Waseda did better in the THE lists than the old ones)
- 148. Waseda
- 155. Kyushu
- 171. Hokkaido
- 174. Tsukuba
Without a detailed look at methodology, it’s not easy to tell if the differences are substantial, but the strength of the technical schools (TIT, Tsukuba) and the private academies (KO, Waseda) was interesting.
And as a footnote, the former Taihoku Imperial University, now National Taiwan University, recently made it onto the top 100 worldwide ranking lists.