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Category: Rankings

The 2016 U21 Rankings

Universitas 21 is one of the higher-prestige university alliances out there (McGill, Melbourne and the National University of Singapore are among its members).  Now like a lot of university alliances it doesn’t actually do much. The Presidents or their alternates meet every year or so, they have some moderately useful inter-institution mobility schemes, that kind of thing.  But the one thing it does which gets a lot of press is that it issues a ranking every year.  Not of universities, of course

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May 30, 2016 No Comments

The Times Higher Education “Industry Income” Rankings are Bunk

A few weeks ago, the Times Higher Education published a ranking of “top attractors of industry funds”.  It’s actually just a re-packaging of data from its major fall rankings exercise: “industry dollars per professors” is one of its thirteen indicators and this is just that indicator published as a standalone ranking.  What’s fascinating is how at odds the results are with published data available from institutions themselves. Take Ludwig-Maximillans University in Munich, the top university for research income according to

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May 20, 2016 2 Comments

World-Class Universities in the Great Recession: Who’s Winning the Funding Game?

Governments always face a choice between access and excellence: does it make more sense to focus resources on a few institutions in order to make them more “world-class”, or does it make sense to build capacity more widely and increase access?  During hard times, these choices become more acute.  In the US, for instance, the 1970s were a time when persistent federal budget deficits as a result of the Vietnam War, combined with a period of slow growth, caused higher

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November 5, 2015 No Comments

University Rankings and the Eugenics Movement

Over the course of writing a book chapter, I’ve come up with a delightful little nugget: some of the earliest rankings of universities originated in the Eugenics movement. The story starts with Francis Galton. A first cousin to Charles Darwin, Galton was the inventor of the weather map, standard deviation, the regression line (and the explanation of regression towards the mean), fingerprinting, and composite photography.  In other words, pretty much your textbook definition of a genius. At some point (some believe it

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September 25, 2015 1 Comment

A Global Higher Education Rankings Cheat Sheet

As you likely noticed from the press generated by the release of the QS rankings: it’s now rankings season!  Are you at a university that seems to care about global rankings?  Are you not sure what the heck they all mean, or why institutions rank differently on different metrics?  Here’s a handy cheat-sheet to understand what each of them does, and why some institutions swear by some, but not by others. Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU): Also known as the Shanghai Rankings,

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September 17, 2015 2 Comments

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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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