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Category: Rankings

From the Shelves of HESA Towers (II)

To continue with the occasional post on random books on the shelves at HESA Towers, today I want to talk about this book pictured below.  It doesn’t look like much, but it’s one of the most intriguing things kicking around the office.  It dates from the summer of 1967 and is called “The Gourman Report” Most histories of university rankings will tell you that the first commercial ranking of undergraduate institutions was in a 1983 edition of US News &

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May 1, 2019 2 Comments

A New Set of International Rankings (II)

The Times Higher Education “Impact” Rankings (which I described yesterday) just dropped a couple of hours ago.  You can browse the results here.  The main news you readers need to know is that CANADA IS AWESOME (at least if you give any credence to these rankings).  McMaster came second overall, UBC third, U Montréal seventh, and five other institutions (Waterloo, York, Toronto, Laval and Ottawa) making the top 100. McMaster also came first overall in the category “decent work and economic growth”

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April 3, 2019 No Comments

A New Set of International Rankings (I)

Times Higher Education (THE) is putting out its brand spanking new “Impact Rankings” tomorrow morning in North America (it’s an evening launch at an event in Korea but timed to hit the papers at lunch time in Europe and for the early news cycle over here).  Today, I want to go through a little bit of background to these new rankings: tomorrow (Wednesday), the blog will be delayed a few hours so I can get you some analysis of the

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April 2, 2019 No Comments

Excellence Initiatives

Over the past couple of decades, countries have designed policies to improve their research universities and make them more “world-class”, largely on the assumption that this will pay some kind of economic dividend.  A lot of these policies involved what became known as “excellence initiatives” – projects that concentrated spending on a restricted number of institutions with the idea that these extra resources would propel these universities into some kind of global elite.  This raises the question: do they work?

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March 11, 2019 2 Comments

Universities and Universal Values

Morning all.  Happy New Year.  Welcome back.  I’m in Southeast Asia this week taking in some sights.  Travel in Asia always makes me think a lot about the ways in which different parts of the world conceive of higher education and the extent to which we both have and haven’t overcome these divisions today. Universities, as we understand them today, are a distinctively European invention.  They first appeared in Mediterranean countries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, usually under church

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January 7, 2019 2 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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