Ranking News

The European Union is planning on introducing a rival to the Shanghai and THES-QS rankings. This is a good idea in principle but who is going to get the contract? It is a pity that "internationalisation" is going to be an indicator and what exactly does "community outreach" mean?

Odile Quintin, the European Commission's director-general for education, told the HES that the Shanghai Jiao Tong was "firmly concentrated on research", anchored to the production of Nobel laureates, and narrow in scope.

"We think that universities have a strong role in research but also in teaching and employability so we are promoting an alternative ranking to measure all these dimensions," she said.

The ranking would be handled by a consortium working independently of the EC, and work would begin after the results of a tendering process were revealed next week.

The plan is to develop the ranking throughout 2009 and 2010, for implementation a
year later. The project will have a budget of E1.1 million ($1.9m).

Ms Quintin said the new ranking, while based in Europe, would have a global reach.
She added that the new European survey would be focused much more on
disciplinary strength, "because you can be the best university in nanotechnology
but not in psychology".

She said the alternative world ranking system would be independent, run neither by governments nor universities and provide a multidimensional measure of education, research, innovation, internationalisation and community outreach.