Will There be a New Number One?

One reason why QS and Times Higher Education get more publicity than the Shanghai ARWU, HEEACT and other rankings is that they periodically produce interesting surprises. Last year Caltech replaced Harvard as number one in the THE rankings and Tokyo overtook Hong Kong as the best Asian university. Two years ago Cambridge pushed Harvard aside at the top of the QS rankings.

Will there be another change this year?

There is an intriguing interview with Les Ebdon, the UK government's "university access tsar", in the Daily Telegraph. Ebdon claims that leading British universities are in danger  of losing their world class status unless they start admitting more students from state schools who may be somewhat less academically qualified. Perhaps he knows something.

So if Cambridge slips and is replaced by Harvard, MIT or Yale as QS number one (if it is Oxford or Imperial QS will lose all credibility) we can expect comments that Cambridge should start listening to him before its too late.

I suspect that if there is a new number one it might have something to do with the QS employer review. Since this is a sign up survey and since the numbers are quite small it would not take many additional responses to push Harvard or MIT into first place.

With regard to THE, the problem there is that normalising everything by country, year and/or field is a potential source of instability. If there is a vigorous debate with lots of  citations about an obscure article by a Harvard researcher in a little cited field it could dramatically boost the score on the citations indicator.

Getting a good score in the THE rankings also depends on what a school is being compared to. Last year, Hong Kong universities slumped because they were taken out of China (with low average scores) and classified as a separate country (with high average scores), so that their relative scores were lower. If they are put back in China they will go up this year and there will be a new number one Asian university.

So anybody want to bet on Harvard making a come back this year? Or Hong Kong regaining the top Asian spot from Tokyo in the THE rankings?