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Category: Rankings

Measuring Innovation

Yesterday, I described how the key sources of institutional prestige were beginning to shift away from pure research & publication towards research & collaboration with industry.  Or, to put it another way, the kudos now come not from solely doing research, but rather in participating in the process of turning discoveries into meaningful and commercially viable products.  Innovation, in other words (though that term is not unproblematic).  But while we all have a pretty good grasp on the various ways

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November 10, 2016 2 Comments

International Rankings Round-Up

So, the international rankings season is now more or less at an end.  What should everyone take away from it?  Well, here’s how Canadian Universities did in the three main rankings (the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities, the QS Rankings and the Times Higher Rankings). Basically, you can paint any picture you want out of that.  Two rankings say UBC is better than last year and one says it is worse.  At McGill and Toronto, its 2-1 the other

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September 28, 2016 No Comments

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 1 Comment

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

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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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