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Category: Rankings

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

The Future of Rankings is Excellent

I‘ve been in Europe for most of the past two weeks on a number of rankings-related projects.  And as a result of these travels, I’m more optimistic about international rankings than I have been for a long time.  Here’s why. First of all, we are getting a lot of new data at the international level.  There are two primary sources for this. The first is the THE rankings – in particular their new European Teaching Rankings, which use surveys to look at

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December 7, 2018 No Comments

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

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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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