One Way of Rising in the Rankings

One way of rising in the rankings is to amalgamate. Watch out for Paris-Saclay in next year's Shanghai rankings.

From BBC Online News:

"Dominique Vernay, the president of this new university, says that within a decade he wants Paris-Saclay to be among the top ranking world universities.

"My goal is to be a top 10 institution," he says. In Europe, he wants Paris-Saclay to be in the "top two or three".

In university rankings, big is beautiful, and the Paris-Saclay will have 70,000 students and 10,000 researchers. There will be an emphasis on graduate courses and recruiting more international students and staff.

The idea of bringing together individual colleges into a "federal university" has been borrowed from the UK.

"Our model isn't that far from the Oxbridge model," he says.

To put it into scale, Mr Vernay says Paris-Saclay is going to be twice the size of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the flagships of the US university system."