The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Research

Prizes for Excellence

I wrote recently about using prizes as a way to distribute research money. More generally, though, prizes have a lot of potential as a way for governments to influence institutional behavior and create a more diverse higher education sector, and deserve to be given a lot more thought by policymakers. The reason for this is that we desperately need a more diverse set of incentives in our system. When politicians moan about how universities “aren’t responsive,” they are getting it precisely backwards;

Read More »
September 19, 2012 No Comments

A Response to Critics

So, we’ve been hearing a number of criticisms – both directly and via the grapevine – of the research rankings we released last week. (Warning: if you’re not entranced by bibliometric methodology, you can safely skip today’s post). The main point at issue is that at some schools, our staff counts appear to be on the high side. Based on this, some schools have inferred that we are judging them too harshly – that if we had fewer observations, the denominator would

Read More »
September 6, 2012 No Comments

Too Much Peer Review?

One way in which Canada stands out internationally in higher education is our ultra-reliance on individual peer review as a means of allocating research funding. While peer review is in many ways the “gold standard” of research assessment mechanisms, it has the drawback of being incredibly time-consuming, both for the applicant and for the assessors. What’s the alternative, though? Well, as Paula Stephan points out in her quite excellent book How Economics Shape Science, there are a number of ways that

Read More »
September 4, 2012 No Comments

Who’s Not in the U-15 (But Could Be)

One of the interesting things about our new research rankings – which unlike previous attempts at such things are fully field-normalized – is that it shines a very different light on who the “leaders” are in terms of research. Back in the day, the ten “leading” research institutions in the country (Laval, McGil, Montreal, Queen’s, Toronto, McMaster, Waterloo, Western, Alberta and UBC) created the “G-10.” It was a talking-shop, mostly: a forum where big universities could exchange data quietly amongst themselves. Around

Read More »
August 31, 2012 3 Comments

Research Rankings: Burning Questions

We understand that some results from our research rankings are causing some head-scratching. We thought we’d give you some insight into some of the key puzzles. Q: Why isn’t U of T first? U of T is always first. The fact that we didn’t include medical research is a big reason; had we done so, the results might have been quite different. But part of it also is that Toronto’s best subjects tend to be ones with high research costs and high

Read More »
August 30, 2012 5 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...