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MIT Leads in Revolutionary Science, Harvard Declines
Bruce G Charlton writes "In three studies looking at the best institutions for 'revolutionary' science, MIT emerged as best in the world.
This contrasts with 'normal science' which incrementally-extends science in pre established directions." If you're interested in reading more about how this was determined, read more below.
"My approach has been to look at trends in the award of science Nobel prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine/ Physiology and Economics — the Nobel metric) — then to expand this Nobel metric by including some similar awards. The NFLT metric adds-in Fields medal (mathematics), Lasker award for clinical medicine and the Turing award for computing science. The NLG metric is specifically aimed at measuring revolutionary biomedical science and uses the Nobel medicine, the Lasker clinical medicine and the Gairdner International award for biomedicine. MIT currently tops the tables for all three metrics: the Nobel prizes, the NFLT and the NLG. There seems little doubt it has been the premier institution of revolutionary science in the world over recent years. Also very highly ranked are Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Caltech, Berkeley, Princeton and — in biomedicine — University of Washington at Seattle and UCSF. The big surprise is that Harvard has declined from being the top Nobel prizewinners from 1947-1986, to sixth place for Nobels; seventh for NFLT, and Harvard doesn't even reach the threshold of three awards for the biomedical NLG metric! This is despite Harvard massively dominating most of the 'normal science' research metrics (eg. number of publications and number of citations per year) — and probably implies that Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end."
"My approach has been to look at trends in the award of science Nobel prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine/ Physiology and Economics — the Nobel metric) — then to expand this Nobel metric by including some similar awards. The NFLT metric adds-in Fields medal (mathematics), Lasker award for clinical medicine and the Turing award for computing science. The NLG metric is specifically aimed at measuring revolutionary biomedical science and uses the Nobel medicine, the Lasker clinical medicine and the Gairdner International award for biomedicine. MIT currently tops the tables for all three metrics: the Nobel prizes, the NFLT and the NLG. There seems little doubt it has been the premier institution of revolutionary science in the world over recent years. Also very highly ranked are Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Caltech, Berkeley, Princeton and — in biomedicine — University of Washington at Seattle and UCSF. The big surprise is that Harvard has declined from being the top Nobel prizewinners from 1947-1986, to sixth place for Nobels; seventh for NFLT, and Harvard doesn't even reach the threshold of three awards for the biomedical NLG metric! This is despite Harvard massively dominating most of the 'normal science' research metrics (eg. number of publications and number of citations per year) — and probably implies that Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end."
From TFS:
I attended Harvard for Ph.D. work, and can say that there has been a feminization of science; which is characterized, above all, by a gatherer-mentality (quantity over quality).
My peers at MIT, I remember, were doing risky and testosterone-laden work; they are the hunters.
I remember an article in the NY Times about Tim Berners Lee:
...
Time Berner's Lee, a physicist at MIT who invented the world-wide-web
This is not a signature.
...go to MIT.
On the other hand, if you want to design a cannon that will destroy the moon, go to Caltech.
I might also consider per capita - Caltech competes very favorably despite having a much smaller pool than many of these other institutions. They've had 3 Chemistry Nobel prizes since 1990 - pretty damned good for a department of about 30 full-time faculty.
This "study" is at best a crude approximation, and even then it isn't complete in terms of data. They left off my school, for example. I'm sure some others probably got stiffed too. Of course, I don't think you can fit a reliable trend to three data points anyway -- especially for something highly time delayed such as Nobel prizes.
Carnegie Mellon University
1947-1966: 0
1967-1986: 3
1987-2006: 7
A blog? And I thought it was going to be a credible article.
Is it really fair to compare, say, MIT and Caltech, given that the former has 1,554* faculty members and the latter has 300*? I'll grant that if you're trying to compare the amount of revolutionary work going on at a given school, the fact that one school is larger is a legitimate reason for them to do a larger amount of work. However, comparing the fraction of the school doing revolutionary work seems to be more useful when, for example, considering where to go for undergrad, grad, or postdoc, since it's more likely you'll get to work with one of those individuals conducting revolutionary work.
* Data from USNews Best Colleges 2007 listings for number of instructional faculty at both schools.
> As far as Harvard vs MIT, Harvard's medical, law, and business schools are still highly prestigious. I don't know of anybody who went to MIT to study those fields, although I'm sure they offer them (at least undergrad level equivalents).
MIT's Sloan is the 4th ranked business school in the nation...
In three studies looking at the best institutions for 'revolutionary' science
But revolution is a theory, not a fact!
Er, wait...
From my own personal and subjective experience, MIT has the best designed site from a usability perspective out of all the American university sites I have ever visited. I think it is seconded only by Berkeley.
If this guy really wans to study something like this, he needs to sit down and read some friggin' articles and come up with a metric to say whether an article is revolutionary. For example, Field's medals only honor Mathematicians younger than 40, and are only awards to one person ever some odd years, so that if two "revolutionary" papers are written in the same period, one gets nothing. In general the sample size of this "study", namely thee dozen prestigious awards of the past decade or two, is laughably small, and the only real result of his work is the suggestion that their should be more awards like the Nobels. To say that any one university tops any other from the information presented is foolish at best.
I'm currently a (male) course 8 grad student at MIT, working in the Media Lab. My group is very much a counterexample to this theory. We're roughly 50% women, and we're doing bleeding edge stuff that will either fall on its face or change the world. One interesting thing to note is that the women in the group aren't testosterone-laden, cut-throat man-wannabe's, either. They're intelligent women with the courage to try something that might fail. I watched a lot of men walk away from this incredible opportunity out of fear for their future.
Now, all this (Harvard and MIT women in general) is not where the issue starts. It may well be that female grad students tend to shy away from the scariest projects, but that possible tendency could be purely due to social norms. I can't be sure and neither can anybody else, because no woman or man has ever grown up without social norms.
What I do know is that in any research lab I've been in, the women there have pulled their weight and done good work. Also--and I think this is a point that often gets overlooked--I find the atmosphere and social interactions to be much better than a sausage fest. Obviously, a more cohesive working environment makes for better work output.
A couple other things about MIT and Harvard: MIT doesn't have a med school, but it does have two brain institutes, a genomics institute, a health science and technology program, various types of bioengineering... It does a lot of medical things in partnership with Harvard's med school. Med students' research isn't usually going to change the world. It's the MD-PhDs that want to do research foremost that will do that, and they very often get the PhD end of that from MIT.
Harvard *definitely* does science of all kinds. They are all things to all people. Well, the people who can't get into MIT anyway.
US higher education has some fantastic examples of greatness (MIT, Harvard, etc), but for every one of these there are hundreds of diploma mills, jock colleges, and party schools that basically teach networking skills and how to drink beer.
But, the much larger problem in the US is now that the public K-12 system is hopelessly mired in bureaucracy and political thinking (come on... a cabinet level post for education?), so the feedstock for the higher education system is drying up. Schools are able to attract smart, rich, foreign kids for a generation or so, but only until they begin teaching at home. It only takes a one shift in thinking (such as changing the imagration system) to keep the smart foreign kids home, and that's it. Professors will go into industry instead of teaching when there's no challenge, or kids who are capable of great things (because they lack the base knowledge). I think I will see the day when US kids go to the far east to get an education.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Err, there's a a whole school of humanities (alongside science, engineering and architecture; the departments are aggregated into schools). All MIT students take a bunch of humanities; it's just that MIT humanities majors also take Mechanics, E&M, diffeq, etc. After all, even unemployed English majors need might need to machine a replacement part for their car, you know!
It's very hard to use awards as a judge of the scientific worth of an institution. For example, my school (UCI) has three Nobels in the last 15 years or so, but none of them for research done at UCI.
If you're a good enough scientist to get a Nobel (or Fields, and so on...), then chances are at some point some big, well known, well paying school is going to recruit you. It doesn't take a Nobel prize for other scientists to recognize a great researcher, but recruiting someone who has already done their life's great work doesn't make you a great scientific institution.
No matter how much loyalty you may have to a particular place, there are perks at big private schools that state schools like Berkely and Michigan just can't offer. Some well known scientists stick around in smaller incubation schools, but many find that being a big fish in a little pond is just more work and doesn't pay as well.
If you're going to use awards to determine scientific worth, you need to look at where the research which won the prize was done. Of course, this would put my school off the list with a grand total of 0 Nobels. I'm sure other small universities would start moving up the list.
An open-ended question to the slashdot/scientific/tech communities:
Why the lovefest for MIT and the Ivy Leagues?
Sure, a lot of legitimately good science has come out of Harvard and MIT. However, there's a whole slew of great science being produced at any of the other instutions in the world that gets overlooked completely, while the world goes gaga over every poorly-conceived grad project that gets conducted at the MIT Media Lab.
There's some very awesome research going on at all sorts of public institutions around the country with results that are immediately released to the public domain.
Heck... we're working on several promising leads to finding a reliable cure to Cancer, and all I hear about on the news is the horribly impractical OLPC project (their hearts are in the right place, but the project itself isn't likely to get off the ground and make a noticable impact in people's lives).
MIT and Harvard have money. Lots of money. It's no secret that the Ivy League caters to students in the upper-income brackets (and admits a few low-income students each year to look good, completely cutting out the middle classes). Exeter and Andover (two insanely expensive private High Schools in New England) combined send over 50 kids each year to Harvard. MIT's not quite as bad, but it certainly employs similar tactics by hiring high-profile faculty members. What possible reason could they have for employing RMS? The amount of useful work he's completed has dropped off exponentially as time's gone on, and he's all but abandoned GNU for some suicidal quest of self-promition.
It pains me to see Harvard graduates being rushed into high-paying jobs, whereas students from my alma-mater have a tough time even getting interviews. Perpetuating the media hype around these institutions is only going to hurt the rest of us in the long-run.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose