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Category: Rankings

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

The Fracturing of Global Rankings

Interesting news out of China last week, as three major research universities – Lanzhou University, Renmin University and Nanjing University (the last of which is a genuine global player)  announced that they would stop participating in annual rankings conducted by overseas rankings agencies.  The purported reason?  Because, apparently, they wanted to focus more on delivering “education with Chinese characteristics,” echoing a recent call from Xi Jinping to universities to avoid “copy(ing) foreign standards and models when we build world-class universities

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May 19, 2022 No Comments

Two Rankings Stories You May Have Missed

Today I want to discuss two interesting developments in rankings, one purely American and the other intriguingly transatlantic. The first is a new set of rankings published by Third Way, a vaguely centre-left Foundation based in Washington DC under the direction of Michael Itzkowitz, an Obama administration appointee who directed the creation of the College Scorecard. Suffice to say Itzkowitz has spent a long time thinking about how to use data to compare colleges’ efforts with respect to public policy

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February 2, 2022 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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