Is There a Correlation between University Health Science and Arts & Humanities Rankings?

I am currently working with a few colleagues on a white paper that examines the role of arts and humanities at health science oriented campuses. One of the first topics with which we are concerning ourselves is the role that arts and humanities play on campuses with leading health science and medical schools. Is there, for example, a correlation between top-ranked health science and medical programs and top-ranked arts and humanities programs?

To begin the inquiry into this topic, I turned to two world rankings reports for 2020: the QS World University Rankings and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. I pulled two subsets of data from each of these reports. From the QS World University Rankings, I pulled “Subject 2020: Medicine” and “Subject 2020: Arts and Humanities.” From Times Higher Education, I pulled “World University Rankings 2020 by Subject: Clinical, Pre-clinical and Health” and “World University Rankings 2020 by Subject: Arts and Humanities.”

Despite their lack of granular detail, these four datasets are useful for considering whether there is a broad correlation between the strength of universities’ health sciences and arts and humanities programs.

The QS World University Rankings favors reputations and citations among academics, while the Times Higher Education rankings represent a wider cluster of metrics. So, examining these two separately offers some comparative insight.

For each of the four reports, I selected the top 200 schools, which ended up totaling 399 individual schools (usually listed as universities, but sometimes distinguished by campus).

I graphed each of the two reports by putting health science/medicine rankings on one axis and arts and humanities rankings on another. Unfortunately, for all but one of the reports, rankings above 50th or 100th are clustered. So, for example, the Times Higher Education “Arts and Humanities” rankings the top 100 schools are ranked from 1st to 100th. After that, schools are clustered in groups: “101st-125th,” “126th-150th,” and so on. As a result, analytical precision is somewhat compromised, which results in banding in the graphs.

So, what do we know from this data? The initial analysis suggests a correlation between university health science and arts and humanities rankings. It is not clear what the causes of this correlation are just yet (though, my guess is that funding has something to do with it). And, it’s not yet clear if health sciences and arts and humanities rankings are mutually constitutive of each other (e.g. do reputations in one category drive reputations in another?).

Nevertheless, it seems pretty clear that when it comes to health sciences campuses, the strength of arts and humanities programs have a relationship to a campus’s reputation in the health sciences. In future work, I’m going to drill down a bit on this (with the help of one of my more quantitatively qualified colleagues) to examine some of the arts and humanities infrastructure at top-ranked health science schools.