26. Institutions from which members of the American Philosophical Society received their Ph.D. or M.D. degrees.
27. Institutions from which members of the National Academy of Sciences received their Ph.D. or M.D. degrees.
28. Institutions from which fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences received Ph.D. or M.D. degrees.
Probably the best way to give this varied group of measures their optimum weights would be to ask a group of recognized leaders in the field of higher education to express their judgments at to their relative importance as crietria and then average the results of these judgments. No such attempt is here made. Instead, they have all been given equal weight in combining them into a single composite measure by the method of average ranks. Each of the institutions has been ranked in each of the 28 features according to the data given in Mr. Foster's tables, and the sum of these ranks computed for each institution.
If an institution ranked first in all the measures, obviously the sum of its ranks would be 28. The nearest approach to this unanimity of rank is found in the case of Harvard University, the sum of whose rank total 63. Harvard stood first in thirteen of the measures, Columbia in three, Chicago, California, Johns Hopkins, and Princeton in two each, and Yale, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, Institute of Technology in one each. A complete tabulation is shown in the accompanying table. A comparison with Mr. Foster's composite shows a change in rank of nine of the sixteen institutions, the greatest change being in the case of Michigan, which is raised from eleventh to ninth rank. The most notable change, perhaps, is in the case of Chicago, which is raised from third to second place. By either method Harvard easily stands at the top. Walter Crosby Eells. School of Education, Stanford University