Nineteen of the top 200 universities in the world have graduate programs in STS!

Nineteen of the top 200 universities in the world (according to the Times Higher Education rankings) have Science and Technology Studies graduate programs!

Keep in mind that rankings are formulaic, formulas are made by people, and people are biased (see my disclaimer at the bottom of this post).

  The Times Higher Education rankings seem to have covered most of the West, and also East Asia.  Immediately these questions come to mind:

• where are the South American universities?
  
• where are the African universities (besides Egypt and South Africa)?
  
• what about the South Asian universities (besides Singapore; sheesh where are the Indian Institutes of Technology)?
  
• what about the Eastern European universities?
  
• where are the Middle Eastern universities (besides Turkey which considers itself part of Europe anyway)?"
  

If you look at history of science narratives, before the U.S was the 'center' of knowledge, the center was located in Europe. Before Europe was the center of knowledge, there were multiple centers in the Middle East, South Asia and China.  Therefore I find the lack of representation of universities from the Middle East and South Asia to be especially confusing.

I read some of the Times Higher Education articles summarizing rankings by regional areas.  For the continent of Africa, they heavily quote a scholar who suggests that African universities should not compete to be ranked because they are heavily disadvantaged due to colonialism and current exploitation by the West. I acknowledge that African universities are disadvantaged according to the way that Times Higher Education (and I suspect many other companies) conduct rankings of higher education institutions.  However, I think that there are alternatives to telling African universities to stop trying to compete with Western universities.  For example, how about changing the methodology of university ranking formulas, so that local societal improvement is taken into consideration? Not only would this make African universities more competitive, it would make other universities around the world with a mission of social improvement (i.e. land-grant universities in the U.S.) more competitive.

Regardless of the limitations of the Times Higher Education rankings, I have combined them together with the list of STS graduate degree programs I found by skimming the worldwide directory of STS programs in the Stswiki, This list of nineteen universities showcases some of the STS graduate degree programs (called "post-graduate" in Europe, Africa, and South America) along with their numerical ranking by the Times Higher Education. Please keep in mind, I am leaving out STS graduate programs in the global south that I am unaware of because of language barriers, or their lack of representation on STSwiki.  To see many institutions with undergraduate or graduate programs in STS, I suggest you look at the Stswiki page.  Please feel free to add any missing programs to the Stswiki page.

I have double-starred the leading STS programs (**).  My evaluation of them as leading is based upon some of the prominent STS scholars who are resident at these universities (where prominent is equivalent to heavily cited).    

(Disclaimer: I am a Ph.D. candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute which I have indicated as having a leading STS graduate program.)


AUSTRIA
University of Vienna (195)

CANADA
University of Toronto (17)
York University** (not ranked by Times Higher Education)

FRANCE
École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris** (not ranked by Times Higher Education)

KOREA
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (79)

NETHERLANDS
Delft University of Technology (151)
University of Amsterdam (165)
University of Twente** (185)

SWEDEN
Uppsala University (147)

UK
University of Bath** (not ranked by Times Higher Education)
Imperial College London (9)
University College London (22)
University of Edinburgh** (40)
Lancaster University** (124)
University of Nottingham (174)
University of Sussex (79)

USA
Arizona State University (161)
Cornell University** (14)
Georgia Institute of Technology (27)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology** (3)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute** (104)
University of Massachusetts -- Boston (not ranked by Times Higher Education)
University of Pennsylvania (19)
Virginia Polytechnic Institute** (not ranked by Times Higher Education)