Ranking News

There has been a lot news from the rankosphere over the last week.

On the 8th of March QS World University Rankings announced that they were launching their 2010 Research.


"largest review of international universities ever conducted

* Over 2000 participating universities from more than 130 countries

* Over 200,000 university selections by academics, for excellence in research quality*

* 5000 participating employers"

If the response is similar to last year when the average academic reviewer listed 12 universities, then 200,000 university selections would mean about 17,000 respondents, quite a big jump. Two thousand participating universities would mean more than doubling the number of universities assessed, a very good idea in principle, although there could be logistical problems and, of course, the chances of embarassing errors will increase.

Meanwhile, QS have started a new newsletter QS Rankings & Global Higher Education Trends and also started a question and answer page.

On the 11th of March, Times Higher Education announced:


"The biggest and most ambitious project to measure universities' academic reputation for the Times Higher Education World University Rankings was launched this week.

Thomson Reuters, the exclusive data supplier and analyst for the THE rankings in 2010 and beyond, unveiled its Academic Reputation Survey in Philadelphia on 11 March.

Over the coming weeks, thousands of academics around the world, who have been carefully selected as being statistically representative of the global academic workforce, will be asked to complete a short, invitation-only survey to state which in their opinion are the strongest universities in their fields of expertise.

In a major new development, the survey will gather opinions on the standards of both research and teaching, raising the prospect of the first worldwide reputation-based measure of teaching quality in higher education. "

It sounds like THE are going to draw much of their survey sample from the database of Thomson Reuters. In other words they will survey only or mainly published researchers, which is highly appropriate if research quality is the only thing that is being assessed. Now that THE are going to ask about teaching quality, it might be worth thinking about also surveying teaching-only university staff and undergraduate and postgraduate students.

So we are going to have the largest review ever conducted versus the biggest and most ambitious project. Whatever happened to that British gift for understatement?