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."

Gatherers vs. Hunters

[P(0)(!P(k)+P(k+1))]

From TFS:

Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end.

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.

Re:Gatherers vs. Hunters

[mdsolar]

A counter example is Harvard's failure to promote Mageret Geller.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/286/ 5443/1277?ck=nck [sciencemag.org]

True, astronomy does not come into the prize metric, but her work
on dark matter is revolutionary despite requiring a lot of gathering,

Re:Gatherers vs. Hunters

[Otter]

I'd say that given that these "studies" (I'm not sure how they count three of them) are basically counting Nobel prizes, the trend simply reflects changes in what wins Nobels. When the awards were dominated by traditional medicine and physiology, Harvard Med School owned them, and MIT and some of the other competitors mentioned don't even have med schools.

Let's ignore the elephant in the closet, shall we?

[turing_m]

The SAT is a proxy IQ test. It's good enough that most high IQ societies will accept sufficient SAT scores in lieu of an IQ test. The only place IQ has been discredited is in the popular mind. The military and education system are still firm practitioners, simply because the concept works.

The SAT is taken in high school, way before any of these colleges can "work their magic".

Caltech has the pick of the high IQ (but smaller numbers of students), MIT follows, and then come the other Ivy League schools not far behind. See the attached link.

If you notice that IQ is roughly normally distributed (especially in a genetically similar population), look at the population of high IQ college age kids in the USA, and then compare to the populations of the elite US schools, you will see that they are very similar. It did not happen that way by accident.

Hell, put the student population of Caltech in your local community college and you'd find all sorts of revolutionary science suddenly springing from there too.

The US government prevents the corporate world nabbing the A-list by banning IQ tests in job interviews. Thus corporations use the proxy of school (or in the case of companies like M$, they ask questions that serve as a proxy IQ test). In the popular mind, the cause and effect gets confused between the brand (MIT/Harvard/Yale etc.) and the student body (high IQ/SAT scoring individuals). Universities don't exactly have a huge financial incentive to dissuade people either.

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V111/N41/usnews.41n.html [mit.edu]

Re:Caltech

[rucs_hack]

It's somewhat easier to do well when funding is high. I wonder what the ratio of funding to Nobel Prizes is.

A Study?

[optimusNauta]

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.

Re:For how long?

[grumling]

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.