THE rates universities all around the world each year. The ratings are based on 13 performance indicators ranging from teaching quality to the volume of research citing work done at each university. More than 50 educators from 15 countries contribute to the rating system.
The result is a ranking from first to 200th with the next 200 blocked in bands. Sharif was in the band ranked 301st to 350th.
Most glaringly, no other Iranian university even made it into the top 400.
The top ten schools in this year’s THE ranking are:
1—California Inst.of Technology
2—Harvard
2—Stanford (a tie)
4—Oxford
5—Princeton
6—Cambridge
7—MIT
8—Imperial College of London
9—University of Chicago
10—Univ. of Calif. at Berkeley
The winners comprised seven American universities and three British.
Sharif University of Technology is considered the MIT of Iran. It is sited within walking distance of Azadi Square in central Tehran. Originally called Aryamehr University of Technology, it was renamed following the revolution after Majid Sharif Vaghefi, a student of the university who was martyred in 1975.
Admission to the undergraduate school is limited to those scoring in the top 1 percent on the national university entrance exam. The student body now totals about 6,000 undergrads and 4,000 graduate students.
Some think Sharif deserved a much higher THE rating.
In 2000, Newsweek magazine reported that electrical engineering professors at Stanford were stunned when a group of foreign students—the majority of whom were Iranians with undergraduate degrees from Sharif—aced the notoriously complex doctoral entrance exam.
Bruce A. Wooley, former chair of the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford, described Sharif then as one of the best undergraduate engineering programs in the world, comparing favorably to such schools as MIT, Caltech and Stanford in the United States, Tsinghua in China and Cambridge in Britain.
Iranian universities remain popular places to go for Iranian undergrads. But for graduate degrees, admission to a foreign school is preferred.
Even the Iranian government acknowledges that top students are choosing to go abroad for their advanced degrees. The Mehr news agency last year reported that Hassan Moslemi-Naini, the Science Ministry official who runs the bureau dealing with students who go abroad, as himself acknowledging that American and Canadian graduate schools are the most popular places to go.
He said half the Iranians at Canadian and US graduate schools receive scholarships from those universities, indicating the level of the quality. Six years ago, the Islamic Republic ceased awarding scholarship to students choosing to go to schools in Britain, Canada and the United States.
