Sushi: Visualization System for Exploring and Comparing World University Rankings
World University Rankings, namely rankings of higher education institutions given order based on various factors. There are dozens of newspapers, websites, or academics working on evaluating global universities, formulating different methodologies. However, different ranking systems can lead to completely different rankings that may confuse people to some degree. They complain about wildly variable rankings for UK universities, making them hard to figure out which one should be trusted.
This issue inspires us to find a way to compare rankings from different ranking system. Also, we want to explore rankings in country levels, especially for how they get involved with national conditions,
like economic and demographic situations.
MOTIVATION
ACHIEVEMENT FLOW
Conducted research on Worldwide University Rankings
Crawled and Cleansed the data from determined organizations
Designed visualization
Implemented visualization by d3.js
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Data crawled: Python
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Visualization: D3.js, javascript, html, css
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UI library: Bootstrap
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATION
DATASET
U.S. News
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We use U.S. news global university ranking in 2016 to do visualizations.
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The data is available on U.S. news official website. We do some pre-processing works to make it clean and usable for further analysis.
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The dataset includes 4 features, namely rank, university, country, and overall scores.
U.S. news Methodology
QS World University Rankings
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We use U.S. news global university ranking in 2016 to do visualizations.
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The data is available on U.S. news official website. We do some pre-processing works to make it clean and usable for further analysis.
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The dataset includes 4 features, namely rank, university, country, and overall scores.
2016 GDP per CAPITA
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GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is the total market value of all final goods and services produced in a country in a given year.
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GDP per capita is calculated by dividing GDP by midyear population.
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This dataset contains projected GDP per capita of 189 Countries/Economies in current prices (U.S. dollars) of year 2016.
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In this project, we try to find relationship between university rankings on country level and national GDP per Capita.
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We provide a criteria to normalize the ranking indicating the educational level for each country.
LIST OF COUNTRIES AND DEPENDENCIES BY POPULATION 2016
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This is a list of countries and dependent territories by population.
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By calculating the educational level based on QS world university rankings, we compare it with world population via visualizations.
VISUAL DESIGN
Institution based Visualization
COMPARISON OF RANKINGS FROM U.S. NEWS AND QS
Year based Visualization
QS RANKING FLUCTUATION FROM 2012 TO 2016
Country based Visualization
EDUCATION LEVEL WITH NATIONAL CONDITIONS
CASE STUDY
COMPARISON OF RANKINGS FROM U.S. NEWS AND QS
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University of Pittsburgh: It is considered way better according to Q.S. than U.S. News.
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Ecole Normale Superieure: It gets higher ranking by U.S. News.
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Many universities perform equally in these two evaluation systems.
QS RANKING FLUCTUATION FROM 2012 TO 2016
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It is noticeable for users that rankings fluctuate over years. Users will see the significant rises for some Asian schools, like Tsinghua University in China.
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While MIT always rank the top for five years in row.
EDUCATION LEVEL WITH NATIONAL CONDITIONS
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Users may notice that the yellow circles, which represent countries with low education quality, normally have low GDP, except for Qatar, a country wealthy for its nature resources.
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On the contrary, the black ones are mostly small advanced countries, like Switzerland and Singapore, who have very high education quality.
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The two circles at the upper left corner, China and India, whose education resources are way not enough for their large population, will pop out in users' eyes.
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They can also see the biggest two circles, the US and the UK, who owns the most great universities in the world.