Article in the Chronicle

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a substantial article on world rankings by Aisha Labi. She describes a number of recent developments

• The European Union "began moving ahead in the development of a nuanced and more complex rankings system". No doubt it will soon start moving as fast as Concorde.
• A Russian ranking was met with derision, even in Russia.
• THE and QS "had an acrimonious split, with each now promising to produce a superior product."

There are some comments from Phil Baty of THE who describes the old rankings as "no longer fit for purpose". He indicates that the new THE rankings will see two improvements. One is a new academic survey that will be larger, better targeted and more representative. The other is some sort of extra weighting for the social science citations.

Meanwhile Ben Sowter of QS defends

"its [QS] continuing emphasis on a peer-review component, adding that it seeks increased input from academics and aims to increase response numbers through measures such as translated surveys for academics in non-English-speaking institutions.

"Of all the measures that different rankings are using at a global level, from my perspective peer review is the one that is fairest to universities with different disciplines," he says. The use of peer reviews "enables institutions with great strengths in the arts and humanities to shine in a way that they are not able to in other measures." "

So it looks like there will be a survey war with THE flaunting the size of its sample and QS stressing the diversity of theirs.

Of course, the last word goes to Nian Cai Liu of Shanghai Jiao Tong University: "We think that more and diversified rankings are good for the higher-education community and the general public in general,"