Category: Worldwide PSE

What 20 Years of Rankings Tells Us About Institutional Performance

It occurred to me the other day that the oldest set of international rankings – that is the Academic Rankings of World-class Universities (ARWU), also known as the Shanghai Rankings – have now gone through 20 iterations.  I’m not one who believes that year-to-year changes in rankings mean much (too much noise, not enough signal), but twenty years of data?  As an old colleague of mine once said, if a research result is strong enough, even a weak methodology will

Read More »

Mexican Higher Education and the Lopez Obrador Presidency

Welcome to the first podcast episode of 2023. As you read in Monday’s blog, the format of the podcast will be changing over the next few weeks. We are excited to bring you more stories of higher education from around the globe, including the countries highlighted the World Higher Education Review. While the formatting and branding will be changing, the quality insight our guests bring will not. This week we’re joined by Alma Maldonado-Maldonado of Mexico’s CINEVSTAV as we discuss

Read More »

Book(s) of The Year, 2022

Morning everyone.  Y’all know the drill: every December I come along and tell you what I’ve read in the world of higher education, let you know the stars and dogs, as well as give out a “book of the year prize”.  Two reminders: first, that I did a summary of my (considerable) reading from the first half of the year back here, and not everything I read is something that came out this year, so “books of the year” aren’t

Read More »

One Podcast to Start Your Day-United Kingdom

On this episode of One Podcast to Start Your Day, we’re hopping overseas to chat with our friends from Wonkhe for a year-in-review on higher education in the United Kingdom. David Kernohan (Acting Editor), Jim Dickinson (Associate Editor), and Sunday Blake (Associate Editor) join us to talk about some of the UK’s most pressing issues in higher education. The full podcast can be found with a full transcript here, along with the past episodes of OPTSYD.  Thanks to our producers Tiffany MacLennan

Read More »

Study Gods and Leading Universities

Morning all.  There are two recent books of note I want to highlight: Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition by Yi-Lin Chiang, and Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University System from Germany to American to China by William C. Kirby. Study Gods is basically an ethnography of students at a couple of “top” high schools in the Beijing area.  It follows a number of students – both successful and unsuccessful – from early in

Read More »