Diversity and Discrepancies in Water-related University Rankings: Is There a Need for More Consistency or Is There Value in Breadth?

Access to clean water is an urgent and socially relevant global issue, as recognized by the U.S. National Academy of Engineers and most other global scientific agencies. Universities directly inform advances in this domain, serve as a training ground for practitioners who address challenges in water supply and quality, and more broadly educate scientifically literate citizens. However, it is challenging for students seeking information on university degree programs such as Hydrology or other water-focused areas to find consistent information about programs, in part because of the disciplinary diversity of this subject. Ranking systems typically focus on more traditional departmental groupings (i.e., geosciences, civil & environmental engineering, public health, etc.). While special rankings do occur for water science and engineering related programs, they are topically incorporated within various categories, including “Hydrology and water resources”, “Water resources engineering”, “Water treatment and sanitation”, “Environmental and health sciences”, and others that span traditional departments and have multiple homes within and across institutions. These may involve categories that are absent at a particular university that has strengths in the co-listed category. For instance, our home institution of Colorado School of Mines (or “Mines”) offers well regarded degrees and/or research programs in Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Geophysics, Geology, and Hydrology, but lacks Public Health or Health Sciences degrees. Ultimately, water-focused domains of study fall outside of traditional degrees, groupings, and associated metrics leading to challenges in assessing strengths across both disciplines and degree programs.

Several ranking systems exist that rate universities based on their strength in a specific discipline, including water resources, but the metrics for each are quite different. Ranking systems are based on multiple factors including prestige of faculty members and publications, research funding, number and impact of publications, search engine traffic, international visibility, graduates in positions of influence, patent generation, perception by peer institutions, and financial sustainability, among others. The QS World University Rankings (QS), for example, is a ranking of the world's top universities (not degree programs) produced by Quacquarelli Symonds, that synthesizes peer rankings from thousands of scholars, academics, and recruiters in conjunction with Scopus citations, faculty/student ratios, and staff and student numbers. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THEWU), on the other hand, assesses universities using five categories: teaching, research, citations (research influence), salary of graduates, and international reputation based on surveys. Another influential ranking system is the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), also known as “Shanghai Ranking”, which is based on quality of education, faculty, and research output, among others. Beginning in 1983, U.S. News & World Report publishes an annual set of rankings of American colleges and universities that are based upon data from surveys that the organization collects from each institution, as well as opinions from faculty members and staff from other schools. This was expanded in 2014 to include Best Global Universities. As a synthesis approach, the Aggregate Ranking of Top Universities sums the QS, THEWU, and ARWU world ranks, excluding institutions that do not have a distinct rank in those three systems. Some educational institutions (e.g., United Nations University (UNU)) also publish their own ranking. Other international ranking systems include the Center for World University Rankings, the Leiden Ranking, the G-factor, the Global University Ranking, the Nature Index, the Professional Ranking of World Universities, the Reuters World's Top 100 Innovative Universities, the Round University Ranking, the SCImago Institutions Rankings, the University Ranking by Academic Performance, the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, and the Research Center for Chinese Science Evaluation Ranking at Wuhan University.

With an increased visibility toward global issues on water availability and quality, there is growing interest in undergraduate and graduate degrees in water-related areas. In this sense, though the QS and many other ranking systems do not consider “water” as a searchable topic of interest, both THEWU and ARWU develop a global ranking system for some water topics. In contrast, the prominent U.S. News and World Report Graduate Program Rankings no longer includes specialties of hydrology or water resources science and engineering. Table 1 shows some water-related global university rankings for 2020, wherein one can see differences across similar ranking categories. Higher ranking universities such as The University of Arizona and Texas A&M appear under the Shanghai and UNU rankings, but are not even listed within THEWU. In contrast, UNC Chapel Hill appears under the THEWU ranking system, but is not mentioned by the other two. Similar situations are shown for other educational institutions such as Wuhan University and the University of Colorado at Boulder. While different evaluation metrics can explain some of this, it also highlights discrepancies in binning water related programs across “Water resources” versus “Clean water and sanitation”, which in this example necessitates very different foundational approaches and expertise.

National ranking systems also exist in the U.S. such as the Forbes College Rankings (which is based on student satisfaction, post-graduate success, student debt, graduation rate, and academic success). Other national ranking systems are based on factors such as faculty publications, annual fundraising, graduation rates, student's future earnings, affordability, internet appearance, and even athletics, nightlife, and campus quality. Examples include the Council for Aid to Education, the Daily Beast's College Rankings, the Economist's Best Colleges, the Objective College Ranking, the Money's Best Colleges, the Princeton Review Dream Colleges, the United States National Research Council, the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, the Top American Research Universities, the Washington Monthly College Ranking, the TrendTopper MediaBuzz College Guide, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and the Niche College Rankings, among others. Additionally, websites such as universities.com (which considers average tuition cost, student-teacher ratio, and number of enrolled students), or stateuniversities.com (which is only based on the number of enrolled students) provide each year a ranking of educational institutions available nationwide to learn about different professional fields. A ranking of the top-10 U.S. universities from these two websites is included in Table 2, considering different water-related topics; discrepancies among sites and categories are clear.

As one can see, another source of confusion is the diverse factors that go into ranking such as cost of tuition, student-teacher ratio, or popularity metrics. However, these factors do not address the quality of the technical, discipline-specific education that is better suited for overall university or college rankings. As an example, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is ranked as one of the world's best universities in water education (see Table 1), but it does not even appear in the U.S. top-10 list from Table 2. Similarly, University of Pennsylvania is listed #1 at universities.com under the “Hydrology and water resources” search, and #7 on stateuniversities.com, but the institution is not included in the international ranking systems (see Table 1). Another good example is Mines, which regularly appears in worldwide and U.S. lists (see Tables 1 and 2). Based on research accomplishments (i.e., grants and peer-reviewed publications), Mines is strong in hydrology and water resources engineering, but while it currently plays a leading role in treatment technologies, it is not included within the top 50 in the THEWU “Clean water and sanitation” international list despite being listed at positions 40 (not shown) and 22 in the Shanghai and UNU lists, respectively (see Table 1).

The above analysis shows a few of the discrepancies across U.S. and international ranking systems which can partially be explained by a blurring across traditional categories and evaluation metrics. While discipline-specific ranking systems have inherent flaws, there is growing interest in hydrology, water resources, water and wastewater treatment, and other water-related programs in association with increasing environmental concerns and a rising need for professionals in this important area. To this end, a rating system and clearer definition of the discipline should be carefully considered and implemented for both undergraduate and graduate programs. Students seeking water-related careers should have more options than to look at rankings based on “civil and environmental engineering”, “public health” or “geosciences”. Rather, we propose the creation of a more specific, transparent, “Water” ranking system that could better encompass the inherent diversity across this topic. This could be extended to associated sub-disciplines such as “hydrology”, “treatment”, “watershed management”, “water resources”, “water policy”, and others. Similarly, a new “Water” ranking system should consider student-centric outcomes such as job placement and salary five years after graduating, among the other key factors previously listed such as research productivity and teaching. While analysis across different ranking domains can be used to inform prospective students, it is unnecessarily confusing and confined by traditional groupings and in some cases less relevant evaluation metrics. Rather our call to the academic community is to think about (and work on) key metrics needed to create a consistent and accurate ranking system for universities and programs that focus their efforts on water sciences and engineering. This evaluation needs to embrace the diversity and richness within this theme so as to best inform future students and practitioners.

ReNUWIt (Re-Inventing the Nation's Urban Water Infrastructure), an NSF-funded interdisciplinary, multi-institution engineering research center whose goal is to change the way we manage urban waters.

Center for Mining Sustainability, a joint adventure between Colorado School of Mines and Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa.

Dr. Pablo A. Garcia-Chevesich (corresponding author) is a Research Assistant Professor at Colorado School of Mines (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Member of the Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme of UNESCO. His research focus is on watershed hydrology, for a better environment. He may be contacted at [email protected].

Dr. Jonathan O. Sharp is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Hydrologic Science and Engineering Program at Colorado School of Mines. His research focuses on how microbial biogeochemical processes impact water resources in both natural and engineered systems.

Dr. John E. Mccray is a Professor at Colorado School of Mines (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) and campus PI for the NSF Engineering Research Center on Urban Water (ReNUWIt). His research focus is on chemical transport and treatment in urban and natural watersheds using a combination of field, laboratory, and modeling techniques.