The Best Universities in the World, Part I

What University produces the most PHDs in US universities?

There are some great places to choose from. I would imagine that one of the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, or Berkeley would be the most frequent answers.Some might  guess some of the large state research universities across the US.

But the world is full of surprises. The answer is a university many in the US have not heard of.

Tsinghua University.

Suprised? You shouldn't be. Getting in to Tsinghua or to Bei Da (what most in the West call Peking University and the other top school in China) makes getting into an Ivy look easy. Really.

 Here are just a couple of stats on the kinds of students who go to Tsinghua: 

 10 million Chinese students took the Gao Kao, the national entrance exam for acceptance into Chinese universities. Only about 2000 are offered admission.

 

A 2008 report states that 215 out of the 300 students who scored the top 10 (people, not percent) in the 30 tested provinces and regions (this represents millions of people) chose Tsinghua. 21 out of the 30 top scorers in each province and region chose the university.

One of the reasons both President Obama and Mitt Romney want to increase the number of international students getting work visa after graduating from US schools become clear. Many of the best students who are coming into PHD programs are from schools like Tsinghua. These students are going to be the innovators and job creators, either here in the US or back in China or Singapore or the rest of the globe.

Tsinghua campus map

Just what is it like to be a student there?

Meet Wally Wang. He is currently in a PHD program at NYU's Stern school. He has generously allowed me to use the answer he gave to this question originally posted on quora.com

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For Engineering, I believe it is one of the best schools in the World for talented Chinese students. Many of my friends end up as top graduate researchers at MIT/Stanford/UC Berkeley/CMU etc as well as working at top tech firms like Google/Facebook/Microsoft.

However, for those average or below average students in Tsinghua, they receive little support from school/professors and may lose their confidence in comparison to more talented students.

It's my feeling that Tsinghua is the school for elites and it indeed does a great job as our alumni have great influence in almost every aspect of China and even the whole Chinese society all over the world.

I'm very glad to see my university is focusing more on its students like more exchange opportunities and more world well-known researchers to be mentors of average students.

In short, I'm proud of being a Tsinghua alumni and wish my university great success in welcoming the next 100th anniversary!

  *********************************************************************************  Wally's answer underscores something I say a lot to students: what matters when selecting a university is not the ranking; instead, it is how well a student does at that particular school. If you are a star anywhere you will have great future options. If you do not do well, the name on the diploma will not make much of a difference. This is equally true if not more so for those who enroll in schools in the US, but this message rarely defeats the irrational belief that it is a name rather than performance that matters.A glance at the data would back up my assertions, but decisions about schools are often made with an eye focused only on rankings instead of personal fit.