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Category: Rankings

2003-04: The Historical Hinge of International Rankings

Cast your minds back, if you will, by about 15 years.  Paul Martin had yet to show us why great finance ministers make lousy Prime Ministers.  The ghastly CROCS fad was still three years away.  And in China, Professor Nian Cai Liu had just released the inaugural Academic Ranking of World Universities, known more colloquially as the Shanghai Rankings. While national rankings were old hat, the Shanghai Rankings’ global nature was something genuinely new.  The sadly-defunct magazine Asiaweek had tried

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December 6, 2018 2 Comments

Update from India: The National Institutional Ranking Framework

Yesterday, I discussed the need to change culture in Indian universities to make them a bit more focused on output and less focused on the employment privileges of their faculty.  There is one trick the Modi government has used in this respect, the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF).  That’s right – in India, the government ranks its institutions.  And not for funding purposes – just to rank them and give them a kick in the tail to pay attention to performance.

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November 13, 2018 No Comments

League-Table Rankings, Sumo Style

Most university rankings (U-Multirank is the big exception) take a league table format originally used by esteemed psychologist, eugenicist and baseball enthusiast James McKeen Cattell in his early rankings early 20th century (for more on Cattell see back here).  One effects of borrowing league tables as a metaphor is that there is an implicit assumption that the inhabitants of that table are able to move up and down the league table as baseball or football teams do.  If a team can crash

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September 28, 2018 4 Comments

The Economics of Rankings

One of the greatest misapprehensions about rankings – and there are a lot, believe me – is that rankers are “just doing it for the money”.  For the most part, this is wrong.  It’s really hard to make money at rankings. To start with, at a rough guess, only about half of all rankings are done for commercial reasons.  Many get carried out by academic institutions or institutions affiliated thereto, and they have no intention whatsoever of making money.  Maybe the most

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November 28, 2017 No Comments

The Finances of World Class Universities (part 3)

One of the knocks against the whole idea of “world-class universities” is that it tends to reinforce institutional privilege; that it’s mostly about big universities with big reputations aiming to expand their financial advantage over everyone else.  Without speaking to motive, it is possible to use the financial data I’ve been writing about these last couple of days to examine empirically whether it is true the top dogs are gaining on everyone else or not.  And what the data tell us

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November 9, 2017 3 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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