Category: Rankings

Why we should – and shouldn’t – pay attention to World Rankings

The father of modern university rankings is James McKeen Cattell, a well-known early 20th-century psychologist, scientific editor (he ran the journals Science and Psychological Review) and eugenecist.  In 1903, he began publishing American Men of Science, a semi-regular rating of the country’s top scientists, as rated by university department chairs.  He then hit on the idea of counting how many of these scientists were graduates of the nation’s various universities.  Being a baseball enthusiast, it seemed completely natural to arrange these results top to

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Canada’s Rankings Run-up

Canada did quite well out of a couple of university rankings which have come out in the last month or so: the Times Higher education’s “Most International Universities” ranking, and the QS “Best Student Cities” ranking.  But there’s actually less to this success than meets the eye.  Let me explain. Let’s start with the THE’s “Most International” ranking.  I have written about this before, saying it does not pass the “fall-down-laughing” test which is really the only method of testing a ranking’s

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The New WSJ/Times Higher Education Rankings

Almost the moment I hit send on my last post about rankings, the inaugural Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education rankings of US universities hit the stands.  It didn’t make a huge splash mainly because the WSJ inexplicably decided to put the results behind their paywall (which is, you know, BANANAS) but it’s worth looking at because I think in many ways it points the way to the future of rankings in many countries. So the main idea behind these rankings is

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Measuring Innovation

Yesterday, I described how the key sources of institutional prestige were beginning to shift away from pure research & publication towards research & collaboration with industry.  Or, to put it another way, the kudos now come not from solely doing research, but rather in participating in the process of turning discoveries into meaningful and commercially viable products.  Innovation, in other words (though that term is not unproblematic).  But while we all have a pretty good grasp on the various ways

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International Rankings Round-Up

So, the international rankings season is now more or less at an end.  What should everyone take away from it?  Well, here’s how Canadian Universities did in the three main rankings (the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities, the QS Rankings and the Times Higher Rankings). Basically, you can paint any picture you want out of that.  Two rankings say UBC is better than last year and one says it is worse.  At McGill and Toronto, its 2-1 the other

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