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Category: Rankings

Rankings Round-up (1): The Shanghai Subject Rankings

It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at Global Rankings in any depth, so this week I am going to take a look at three sets of rankings which are either had notable methodological changes or contain data that is of particular interest to Canadians.  I’ll start with the Shanghai Rankings.  Not the Academic Rankings of World Universities, which is a bit boring from a Canadian point of view.  Nothing ever changes much on that front because ARWU, by design, is

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November 27, 2023 No Comments

Visa Caps “Lite”

Last week, it was revealed that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is trending towards using “Trusted Institution Status” instead of caps on visas.*  The idea is not to decrease the number of visas overall, but to allow “trusted” institutions to access expedited visa processing.  Why is this important?  One, visa processing isn’t really a 12-month thing. Processing clusters during certain points of the year and IRCC doesn’t want to hire seasonal staff to compensate for these points. Two, several

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September 18, 2023 2 Comments

Rankings Discourses: West, East and South

As I mentioned yesterday, I was at a conference of the International Rankings Expert Group (IREG) in Tashkent last week, hosted at the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers.  I’ve been going to these meetings for close to 20 years now (I even had a minor role in drafting the “Berlin Principles on Rankings” in 2006) and I highly recommend them.  One learns a great deal about the differences in how rankings work, ways that higher education works

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May 3, 2023 No Comments

Budgets, Control, Incentives, Rankings

Hi everyone.  Just a quick one today, an incomplete follow-up to Tuesday’s blog on rankings. One of the points I made on Tuesday was that several universities – and specifically, nearly all of the Australian ones apart from ANU – have made enormous strides in the rankings over the past 20 years, and this had been done largely in the absence of any funding boost.  A few of you were quick to point out that in fact there has been

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January 27, 2023 No Comments

What 20 Years of Rankings Tells Us About Institutional Performance

It occurred to me the other day that the oldest set of international rankings – that is the Academic Rankings of World-class Universities (ARWU), also known as the Shanghai Rankings – have now gone through 20 iterations.  I’m not one who believes that year-to-year changes in rankings mean much (too much noise, not enough signal), but twenty years of data?  As an old colleague of mine once said, if a research result is strong enough, even a weak methodology will

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January 24, 2023 4 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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