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Category: Rankings

Rankings Round-up (3): The Evolution of QS Rankings

Today, I will round out our rankings week by looking at the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Rankings.  These rankings have always been similar to the THE World University Rankings, because they spring from the same source: QS was the organization that actually ran the THE rankings for a few years, and when THE decided to bring the data operation in-house, QS just kept producing its rankings.  Like THE, its indicators for university rankings used are mostly a mix of field-normalized bibliometrics

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November 29, 2023 No Comments

THE Impact Rankings: A Tale of Canadian Dominance

Yesterday, we talked about the Shanghai Subject rankings.  Today I want to switch over to the Times Higher Rankings.  Not their flagship World University Rankings, because those are basically a slightly more sophisticated version of ARWU’s bibliometrics with a popularity survey attached (plus a little bit of institutionally-supplied data about research income and internationalization).  And from a Canadian perspective they always provide pretty much the same story: Toronto 1, UBC 2, McGill 3.    I want to focus on a more

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November 28, 2023 No Comments

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

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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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