The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Rankings

2020 Rankings Round-up

The three big global ranking outfits – The QS World University Rankings, the THE World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (aka Shanghai Rankings) have all released their rankings in the last few weeks, so it’s time to check in and see what if anything has changed.  (A couple of preliminaries: the Shanghai rankings go by the calendar year in which they are released, so this year’s the 2020 edition, while the other two are more like automobile manufacturers and have their date

Read More »
September 8, 2020 No Comments

Polish Higher Education Reforms

I was briefly in Warsaw last week talking about university rankings and how to improve overall institutional performance.  Poland is one of the most interesting higher education systems in the world right now, so I thought it would be worth talking about what’s going on there. Among the former socialist states that were not part of the Soviet Union, Poland is the largest, has the longest history as an independent state, and has the longest history of mass opposition to

Read More »
December 9, 2019 No Comments

Competition, Markets and the Persistence of Hegemonic Institutions

Competition metaphors abound in higher education.  We talk about competition for students, competition for academics.  Since the introduction of rankings – particularly the global ones about fifteen years ago – we talk about “moving up the tables”, in a squash-ladder kind of way. (There are some sumo metaphors with which I could regale you here but using my incredible powers of self-control, I will spare you, even though the Kyushu basho is currently bumming me out, what with all the top dudes

Read More »
November 19, 2019 2 Comments

Who Are Canada’s Research Powerhouses?

Yesterday, the good folks at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University released their 2019 world ranking of university research output.  This is – in my opinion – the best bibliometric ranking out there: it is complete, nuanced and the people putting it out have thought hard and responsibly about what it means to use quantitatively evaluate research.  I thought it was time to have a quick look at the research landscape across Canada. Let’s start with raw

Read More »
May 16, 2019 4 Comments

Moneyball

I was at a conference last week in Italy, much of which focused around the use of data in institutional decision-making (technically it was a conference on rankings, but increasingly rankings are being seen as a data source for institutional benchmarking and strategizing rather than as a consumer tool, so there was a lot of overlap). One of the most interesting presentations involved a lot of discussion on the sheer amount of data now available on institutional performance (which, depending

Read More »
May 14, 2019 2 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...