From the Chronicle of Higher Education

An article by Aishah Laby contains this news that I have not heard anywhere else:

Quacquarelli Symonds has continued to produce those rankings, now called the QS World University Rankings, and is partnering with U.S. News and World Report for their publication in the United States.

The relationship between the former collaborators has deteriorated into
barely veiled animosity. QS has accused Times Higher Education of unfairly
disparaging the tables they once published together. This week the company
threatened legal action against the magazine over what Simona Bizzozero, a QS
spokeswoman, described as "factually inaccurate" and misleading statements by
representatives of Times Higher Education. She said THE's role in the
collaboration was limited to publishing the rankings based on a methodology that
QS had developed. "What they're producing now is a brand-new exercise. A totally
brand-new exercise, with absolutely no links whatsoever to what QS produced and
is producing," she said. "So when they refer to their old methodology, that is
not correct."

Phil Baty, editor of the rankings for Times Higher Education, declined to respond to QS's complaints: "We are now looking forward, not looking backward."

I didn't know that the animosty was veiled, even barely.

There are some comments from Ellen Hazelkorn

"Really, nothing has changed," said Ellen Hazelkorn, executive director of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit at the Dublin Institute of Technology, whose book "Rankings and the Battle for Worldclass Excellence: The Reshaping of Higher Education" is due to be published in March.

Despite Times Higher Education's assurances that the new tables represent a much more rigorous and reliable guide than the previous rankings, the indicators on which the new rankings are based are as problematic in their own way, she believes. The heavily weighted measure of teaching, which she described as subjective and based on reputation, introduces a new element of
unreliability.

Gauging research impact through a subjective, reputation-based measure is troublesome enough, and "the reputational aspect is even more problematic once you extend it to teaching," she said.

Ms. Hazelkorn is also troubled by the role Thomson Reuters is playing through its
Global Institutional Profiles Project, to which institutions provide the data
used in the tables. She dislikes the fact that institutions are going to great
effort and expense to compile data that the company could then sell in various
ways.

"This is the monetarization of university data, like Bloomberg
made money out of financial data," she said.