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Category: Rankings

Higher Education in Bulgaria: Rankings, Reform, and Demographic Pressures

It seems hard to believe sometimes, but after 110 or so episodes of this show, there are still a few countries we haven’t been to. One of them is today’s destination of Bulgaria. It’s not a place which is often top of mind as far as higher education goes, but maybe it should be. Among European countries, Bulgaria has been one of the leaders in dealing with a question of sharply declining youth populations. In recent months, it’s had an

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March 5, 2026 No Comments

2026 Rankings Overview (International)

Yesterday we looked at how individual institutions within Canada fared in the last round of international rankings. One of the key phenomena that we saw was that while the eight Canadian institutions in the top two hundred of the major rankings were more or less holding their own, the slightly less research-intensive were seeing their numbers slip across all. Today, I want to show why that phenomenon is more about improvements in higher education in other countries than it is

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January 7, 2026 2 Comments

2026 Rankings Overview (Canada)

Most years, I do a quick overview of the major international rankings and how Canadian institutions have fared in them. Today is the day I do that for the 2026 rankings from the Times Higher and QS, as well as the 2025 Shanghai Ranking (Shanghai is dated the year they come out, Times Higher and QS are numbered like automobiles, one year ahead of the release date). In a bit of a departure from past practice, I am going to

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January 6, 2026 5 Comments

Scholarly Outputs

Every couple of years, I do an analysis of Candian university research ouptut data from the Leiden rankings, which always provide excellent and transparent data on publications and citations linked to each university. And, well, it’s that time again. So let’s dive in. My first comparison is just about simple production: how many papers came out of each university? Figure 1 shows the data from the period 2020-2023. This graph doesn’t change much over time: Toronto is always way, way,

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November 17, 2025 4 Comments

Strategy Horizons at the Top

I’ve been working on a project recently, looking at current university strategic plans around the world, and particularly those of leading “world-class” universities. One of the key things I am looking at is what you might call “strategic horizons”— how long do institutions see or plan ahead? My sample for this is the Top 100 universities from the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), done by the Shanghai Rankings organization (minus the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, which is

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May 26, 2025 1 Comment

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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