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Tag: Shanghai ARWU

2003-04: The Historical Hinge of International Rankings

Cast your minds back, if you will, by about 15 years.  Paul Martin had yet to show us why great finance ministers make lousy Prime Ministers.  The ghastly CROCS fad was still three years away.  And in China, Professor Nian Cai Liu had just released the inaugural Academic Ranking of World Universities, known more colloquially as the Shanghai Rankings. While national rankings were old hat, the Shanghai Rankings’ global nature was something genuinely new.  The sadly-defunct magazine Asiaweek had tried

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December 6, 2018 2 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

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November 28, 2017 No Comments

The Finances of World Class Universities (Part 4)

Over the past few days, I’ve been providing a lot of data on how well global “world-class universities” are faring (briefly: most of them are doing pretty well, the ones in Canada much less so).  But to some degree the real question is: does any of this matter?  Do higher expenditures per student actually result in greater academic output?  And if not, why not? To answer this question requires a quick detour into the issue of bibliometrics.  If you try

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November 10, 2017 No Comments

The Finances of World Class Universities (part 3)

One of the knocks against the whole idea of “world-class universities” is that it tends to reinforce institutional privilege; that it’s mostly about big universities with big reputations aiming to expand their financial advantage over everyone else.  Without speaking to motive, it is possible to use the financial data I’ve been writing about these last couple of days to examine empirically whether it is true the top dogs are gaining on everyone else or not.  And what the data tell us

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November 9, 2017 3 Comments

The Finances of World Class Universities (Part 2)

Yesterday we looked at the absolute incomes of world-class universities; that is institutions in the top 200 of the 2017 Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities (ARWU). Today, I want to look at the question of whether things are getting better or worse for these institutions. Of the 174 top-200 ARWU universities for which we have financial data for 2015 or 2016, 155 have data on finances and students going back to 2006. For another 11 institutions, we have data going back

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November 8, 2017 No Comments

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