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Category: Rankings

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,

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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

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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

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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

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February 13, 2013 1 Comment

Rankings Touchiness (Part 2)

As I noted yesterday, the basic fight over rankings in higher education boils down to two questions: should institutions be judged as whole entities, or on the basis of their constitutent parts?  And, should rankings give primacy to the existing hierarchy of values of higher education (i.e. research and publication), or to something else? Let’s start with the first question.   There’s absolutely nothing stopping us from ranking individual bits of the university, as opposed to the entire institution.  We’ve had

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February 6, 2013 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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