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Category: Rankings

The THE’s Top 100 under 50

So, last week the Times Higher put out one of its two subsidiary sets of rankings called the Top 100 under 50 – that is, the best “young” (under 50 years old) universities in the world.  The premise of these rankings is that young universities don’t really get a fair shake in regular rankings, where the top universities, almost all from before World War I, dominate based on prestige scores alone.  That the THE would admit this is both excellent and

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June 24, 2013 3 Comments

Some Developments in Rankings

I was in Warsaw the week before last for the International Rankings Expert Group (IREG) Forum.  The forum is designed both for those interested in rankings, and for rankers themselves – the principals behind the US News & World report rankings, the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings, Germany’s CHE rankings, and the  Quacquarelli Symonds rankings are all regular participants.  It’s always been an interesting place to hear firsthand how rankings are evolving.  When it first started nearly a decade ago, there

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May 28, 2013 No Comments

The Universitas 21 National Rankings: a Spotlight on Canada

Though it made very little news in Canada when released in Vancouver last week, Universitas 21 Network (of which UBC and McGill are members) published the second edition of their Rankings of National Higher Education Systems.  There’s nothing really new in the 2013 ranking: the methodology is largely unchanged (there was a small redistribution of indicator weightings), as are the results – the top ten remains the same, and Canada stays 4th overall.  But it’s still an opportunity to reflect on

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May 13, 2013 No Comments

The Leiden Rankings 2013

Though it was passed over in silence here in Canada, the new Leiden university research rankings made a bit of a splash elsewhere, last week.  I gave a brief overview of the Leiden rankings last year.  Based on five years’ worth of Web of Science publication and citation data (2008-2012), it is by some distance the best way to compare institutions’ current research output and performance.  The Leiden rankings have always allowed comparisons along a number of dimensions of impact and

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April 25, 2013 No Comments

U-Multirank

Some of you have been calling and e-mailing over the last few weeks, asking me about the new global higher education rankings system called U-Multirank (full disclosure: I played a very minor “advisory” role in this project, in 2009).  To save everyone else a call, I thought I’d give you the skinny, via this blog. U-Multirank is a creation of the European Union.  Stung by the THE and Shanghai rankings, which showed continental European (especially French) universities lagging badly, France took advantage of

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April 23, 2013 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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