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Category: Rankings

The Problem with Global Reputation Rankings

I was in Athens this past June, at an EU-sponsored conference on rankings, which included a very intriguing discussion about the use of reputation indicators that I thought I would share with you. Not all rankings have reputational indicators; the Shanghai (ARWU) rankings, for instance, eschew them completely.  But QS and Times Higher Education (THE) rankings both weight them pretty highly (50% for QS, 35% for THE).  But this data isn’t entirely transparent.  THE, who release their World University Rankings

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September 30, 2014 3 Comments

May ’14 Rankings Round-Up

I’ve been remiss  the last month or so in not keeping you up-to-date with some of the big international rankings releases, namely the Leiden Rankings, the Times Top 100 Under 50 rankings, and the U21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems. Let’s start with Leiden (previous articles on Leiden can be found here, and here), a multidimensional bibliometric ranking that looks at various types of publication and impact metrics.  Because of the nature of the data it uses, and the way it

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May 29, 2014 1 Comment

Does More Information Really Solve Anything?

One of the great quests in higher education over the past two decades has been to make the sector more “transparent”.  Higher education is a classic example of a “low-information” economy.  Like medicine, consumers have very limited information about the quality of higher education providers, and so “poor performers” cannot easily be identified.  If only there were some way to actually provide individuals with better information, higher education would come closer to the ideal of “perfect information” (a key part

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May 15, 2014 No Comments

U-Multirank: Game On

Those of you who read this blog for the stuff about rankings will know that I have a fair bit of time for the U-Multirank project.  U-Multirank, for those in need of a quick refresher, is a form of alternative rankings that has been backed by the European Commission.  The rankings are based on a set of multi-dimensional, personalizable rankings data, and were pioneered by Germany’s Centre for Higher Education (CHE). There is no league table here.  Nothing tells you

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May 13, 2014 1 Comment

Those Times Higher Education Reputation Rankings, 2014

The Times Higher Education (THE) Rankings came out yesterday.  Compared to previous years, there was very little fanfare for the release this time.  And that’s probably because the results weren’t especially interesting. The thing to understand about rankings like this is that they are both profoundly true and profoundly trivial.  A few universities are undoubtedly seen as global standards, and so will always be at the top of the pile.  Previous THE rankings have shown that there is a “Big

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March 7, 2014 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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