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Tag: Shanghai ARWU

Rankings Round-up (1): The Shanghai Subject Rankings

It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at Global Rankings in any depth, so this week I am going to take a look at three sets of rankings which are either had notable methodological changes or contain data that is of particular interest to Canadians.  I’ll start with the Shanghai Rankings.  Not the Academic Rankings of World Universities, which is a bit boring from a Canadian point of view.  Nothing ever changes much on that front because ARWU, by design, is

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November 27, 2023 No Comments

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

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January 24, 2023 4 Comments

The Fracturing of Global Rankings

Interesting news out of China last week, as three major research universities – Lanzhou University, Renmin University and Nanjing University (the last of which is a genuine global player)  announced that they would stop participating in annual rankings conducted by overseas rankings agencies.  The purported reason?  Because, apparently, they wanted to focus more on delivering “education with Chinese characteristics,” echoing a recent call from Xi Jinping to universities to avoid “copy(ing) foreign standards and models when we build world-class universities

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May 19, 2022 No 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

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September 8, 2020 No Comments

Excellence Initiatives

Over the past couple of decades, countries have designed policies to improve their research universities and make them more “world-class”, largely on the assumption that this will pay some kind of economic dividend.  A lot of these policies involved what became known as “excellence initiatives” – projects that concentrated spending on a restricted number of institutions with the idea that these extra resources would propel these universities into some kind of global elite.  This raises the question: do they work?

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March 11, 2019 2 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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