A note on a very early academic quality ranking by James McKeen Cattell

Academic quality rankings are efforts to rank order colleges and universities or their individual departments in order of their presumed quality, based upon one or more criteria. The earliest such ranking is generally believed to have been published by Raymond M. Hughes in 1925. In actuality, however, the eminent psychologist James McKeen Cattell published one as early as 1910. He did so because he wanted to show the institutions where leading American scientists currently worked and to demonstrate that his home institution, Columbia University, had recently declined in scientific strength.