The three big global ranking outfits – The QS World University Rankings, the THE World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (aka Shanghai Rankings) have all released their rankings in the last few weeks, so it’s time to check in and see what if anything has changed. 

(A couple of preliminaries: the Shanghai rankings go by the calendar year in which they are released, so this year’s the 2020 edition, while the other two are more like automobile manufacturers and have their date in the following year. I suspect this is because they are lining it up with the academic year as understood by their alleged target audience (i.e. prospective students). Also, disclosure: I’m a member of the Shanghai Rankings’ International Advisory Board.)

Let’s start with the differences between the three rankings. The Shanghai rankings are focussed on finding the largest deposits of scientific talent. It uses a lot of bibliometric measures, particularly those which identify elite-level researchers, and prizes while eschewing surveys of institutions or of researchers, because these are viewed as insufficiently objective. THE and QS are similar in that their bibliometrics are more nuanced that Shanghai’s (both field-weight their measures, so there is less bias against the humanities and social sciences), they both rely on self-reported data from institutions, which is of questionable validity, and both rely heavily on the results of reputational surveys. Shanghai and THE both limit rank ordering to the top institutions (top 100 for Shanghai and 200 for THE), providing grouped rankings below that on the grounds that below the top tier the actual difference in scores aren’t all that significant; QS rank orders all the way down.

Broadly, all three rankings say the same thing: they all put MIT, Harvard, and Stanford in their top five and put Cambridge, Oxford, Chicago and CalTech in their top ten. It gets a little more complicated after that: Shanghai and THE put over 40 American universities in the top 100 while QS has fewer than 30 and tends to rank continental European universities somewhat higher than the others. Their reach is also somewhat different. Shanghai tends to be considered the more reliable ranking in China and in those parts of Europe which really dislike the UK (e.g. France) and thus its proponents tend to think of THE and QS as being anglo-centric. THE tends to be seen as a better ranking everywhere else, though QS gets a boost in countries where most institutions are outside the top 200 since their practice of ordinal ranking all the way down gives lower-ranked institutions a chance to see year-on-year changes and thus allows them to “keep score” (even though the level of precision is completely spurious).

Anyways: the results. The biggest news was probably with respect to Paris-Saclay – the new “conglomerate” university in Paris’ southern suburbs. This institution formed from the old Paris-Sud campus and a number of independent research institutes along with a couple of branches of the “grandes écoles” (most notably the École normale supérieure). They combined to create a kind of “super-institution,” which could more closely resemble the big US “multiversities” that dominate global rankings, but which were hitherto unknown in France. It debuted this year and boy did it reveal the difference between the various rankings. In the two that rely strongly on reputational services (THE and QS), Saclay ended up in the mid-to-low 200s, presumably because many people did not know of/think of the new institution. But the Shanghai rankings, which uses more objective criteria and seems to have simply combined publication counts for the merged institutions, Saclay debuted at no. 14, slightly ahead of Johns Hopkins. 

Other than this, there are not a lot of changes to note other than the lower reaches of the Shanghai top-500 are increasingly populated with Chinese universities: almost one quarter of the institutions ranked between 300 and 500 are now from mainland China.

There was really no change to speak of for Canadian institutions. At the top institutions, there was no significant movement up or down, and apart from York slipping a bit in the Shanghai rankings, there wasn’t a lot of slippage in or out of the top 500 in any of the rankings either. The only real movement of note perhaps was McMaster continuing to revert to the mean (now down to 98^th worldwide) in the Shanghai rankings after that one-off performance in 2017 when it briefly vaulted over McGill.

Of course, the obvious question in this pandemic-ravaged world is: who cares? Rankings certainly seem beside the point at the moment. But, in truth, they have become less relevant for several years now. To the extent they were initially useful as benchmarking tools, the gains from this kind of analysis seem to be decreasing. The novelty value has worn off. We kind of know where everyone is going to land, and major changes in the geo-politics of higher education don’t seem very likely. Even the THE World Rankings can’t even muster a “rise of Asia” headline for its annual publication anymore. 

This seems unlikely to change any time soon. THE tied to shake things up with a new set of “Impact” Rankings which were meant to highlight institutions’ commitment to broader social responsibility. In the current circumstances this seems quite valuable. But a) most of the big important universities in the US and Europe refused to provide data because they don’t want to participate in rankings competitions they won’t win and b) THE continues to prioritize its “regular” rankings, leaving the distinct impression that “social impact” and “global excellence” are two quite separate concepts.

Rankings won’t become completely passé: for countries just outside the world’s elite they are too useful a benchmarking tool to be entirely dispensed. But I have a feeling that we hit peak institutional rankings a few years ago, and they will become decreasingly central to the global higher education conversation.But rankings of national performance in education? Those will never go out of style. And a few hours ago, the OECD’s annual Education at a Glance report dropped. I’ll be back tomorrow with some coverage and analysis.