The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Rankings

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

Read More »
April 23, 2013 1 Comment

Times Higher Education Reputation Rankings 2013

You’ll recall that yesterday, in reference to the orgy of hype that accompanies the annual release of the THE World Reputation Rankings, I made the point that universities’ reputation really doesn’t change all that much on a year-by-year basis, and that, therefore, perhaps said orgy was a wee bit overdone. When all was said and done, five universities (Arizona, Indiana, Leeds, U Zurich, and Tel Aviv) fell out of the rankings, with a similar number replacing them (Monash, Moscow State,

Read More »
March 5, 2013 4 Comments

The Paradox of University Rankings

By the time you read this, the Times Higher Education’s annual Reputation Rankings will be out, and will be the subject of much discussion on Twitter and the Interwebs and such.  Much as I enjoy most of what Phil Baty and the THE do, I find the hype around these rankings pretty tedious. Though they are not an unalloyed good, rankings have their benefits.  They allow people to compare the inputs, outputs, and (if you’re lucky) processes and outcomes at

Read More »
March 4, 2013 6 Comments

A Revolution in Faculty Bargaining?

Earlier this week, I was riffing on how to make good salary comparisons when I came across a faculty union which has been doing just that. The faculty union at the University of Victoria is feeling a bit aggrieved that its members’ pay is lower than at comparable universities.  When I first saw their numbers, I was a bit skeptical: UVic went through a significant generational shift nine or ten years ago, so their age/rank profile might potentially account for some of

Read More »
February 15, 2013 6 Comments

If University Presidents had a Union

It occurred to me while writing that last piece about salary comparisons: what if University Presidents used the same set of arguments about salary that professors do?  What if we set their salaries as a function of what a comparator set of institutions were paying? For this exercise, I have compared the presidential salaries at each of the top eight Canadian institutions in the Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities to those at the nearest comparator institutions among public universities

Read More »
February 13, 2013 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...