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Category: Rankings

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

Jumping to Conclusions on Rankings

You may have seen stories in Inside Higher Ed and University World News about the QS World Rankings, and specifically, a claim by a Senior Researcher at Berkeley named Igor Chirikov that QS’s conflicts of interest “may produce significant distortions in global university rankings”.  Cue much clucking on the interwebs about issues with rankings. All I can say, having read the paper, and having some idea of what QS does, is that the word “may” is doing a fair bit of work in that

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May 12, 2021 3 Comments

Taking Your Marbles and Going Home

A couple of years ago in a blog post I noted a tendency among western academics to assume that the Western view of the university was the only possible one, and specifically that universities which existed in illiberal or autocratic settings were not “real” universities.   At the time, I said: There are other university traditions, not all of which require liberal democracy to flourish: Lord knows the continual ascent of Tsinghua, National University of Singapore and others in international rankings is

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April 26, 2021 1 Comment

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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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