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Category: Rankings

Rankings Touchiness (Part 1)

The last decade or so has seen a lot of brouhaha about rankings, especially those of the global variety.  Loads of books have been written about how rankings are driving consumerism in higher education (mostly an anglo-American complaint, it should be said), and how they are altering (for the worse) policy-making in the sector. But one question which, to my knowledge, has not been addressed, is this: if rankings are so god-awful, why is higher education the only sector that

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February 5, 2013 3 Comments

Le Figaro Rankings

I was in Brussels last week and while wandering around town, I couldn’t help notice the cover of this week’s issue of Le Figaro, which was a ranking of top foreign universities. So far as I know, this is something new. National magazines tend to do national rankings. Occasionally, a paper with pretentions to an international scope (like the Times Higher) does an international ranking. But a ranking by a national magazine that focuses entirely on foreign institutions? Intrigued, I picked up a copy.

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November 19, 2012 No Comments

Research Rankings Reloaded

You’ll recall that a couple of months ago we released a set of research rankings; you may also remember that complaints were raised about a couple of issues in our methodology. Specifically, critics argued was that by including all permanent faculty we had drawn the net too wide, and that we should have excluded part-timers. Well, we’ve now re-done the analysis, and are releasing them today as an annex to our original publication for all to see. Two key things to highlight about

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October 26, 2012 No Comments

Times Higher Education Rankings – Hype

Okay, everybody take a valium. Quick recap: Times Higher Education, for a change, kept its methodology stable two years in a row. That means that for once, it’s okay to compare data across years. But – shock! Horror! – Canada’s three standard-bearers all fell in the rankings – U of T from 19th to 21st, UBC from 22nd to 30th and McGill from 28th to 34th. Cue the usual suspects grasping for an opportunity to talk about underfunding. “This is a wake-up call, we

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October 5, 2012 No Comments

A Response to Critics

So, we’ve been hearing a number of criticisms – both directly and via the grapevine – of the research rankings we released last week. (Warning: if you’re not entranced by bibliometric methodology, you can safely skip today’s post). The main point at issue is that at some schools, our staff counts appear to be on the high side. Based on this, some schools have inferred that we are judging them too harshly – that if we had fewer observations, the denominator would

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September 6, 2012 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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