The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Tag: QS

Rankings Round-up (3): The Evolution of QS Rankings

Today, I will round out our rankings week by looking at the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Rankings.  These rankings have always been similar to the THE World University Rankings, because they spring from the same source: QS was the organization that actually ran the THE rankings for a few years, and when THE decided to bring the data operation in-house, QS just kept producing its rankings.  Like THE, its indicators for university rankings used are mostly a mix of field-normalized bibliometrics

Read More »
November 29, 2023 No Comments

Jumping to Conclusions on Rankings

You may have seen stories in Inside Higher Ed and University World News about the QS World Rankings, and specifically, a claim by a Senior Researcher at Berkeley named Igor Chirikov that QS’s conflicts of interest “may produce significant distortions in global university rankings”.  Cue much clucking on the interwebs about issues with rankings. All I can say, having read the paper, and having some idea of what QS does, is that the word “may” is doing a fair bit of work in that

Read More »
May 12, 2021 3 Comments

2020 Rankings Round-up

The three big global ranking outfits – The QS World University Rankings, the THE World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (aka Shanghai Rankings) have all released their rankings in the last few weeks, so it’s time to check in and see what if anything has changed.  (A couple of preliminaries: the Shanghai rankings go by the calendar year in which they are released, so this year’s the 2020 edition, while the other two are more like automobile manufacturers and have their date

Read More »
September 8, 2020 No 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

Read More »
November 28, 2017 No Comments

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

Read More »
February 20, 2017 1 Comment

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...