The THE Reputation Rankings
Times Higher Education have published their reputation rankings based on data collected from the World University Rankings of 2012.
They are not very interesting. Which is exactly what they should be. When rankings show massive changes from one year to another a certain amount of scepticism is required.
The same six, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Oxford and Cambridge are well ahead of everybody else as they were in 2012 and in 2011.
Taking a quick look at the top fifty, there is little movement between 2011 and 2013. Four universities for the US, Japan, Netherlands and Germany have dropped out. In their place there is one more from Korea and from the the UK and two more from Australia.
I was under the impression that Australian universities were facing savage cuts in research funding and were going to be deserted by international students and researchers..
Maybe it is the other universities that are being cut. or maybe a bit of blood letting is good for the health.
I also noticed that the number of respondents went down a bit in 2012. It could be that the academic world is beginning to suffer from ranking fatigue.
Richard,
ReplyDeleteThe budget cuts referred to in the article from The Australian were eventually no-where near as severe as speculated. The reality for university research in Australia is that the research glass is three-quarters full but we would all like to see it full, with froth! That will not happen irrespective of a change of government, and even with moderate cuts shared across the sector, the impact has not been as significant as in some other nations.
Tony Sheil