QS Paper 

Here are the links to a paper and presentation slides by Ben Sowter of QS that discusses the spin-offs: subject, regional and best student city rankings.

What about the Kindergarten Rankings?

US News will be publishing the Best High Schools rankings on May 1st.

Does Not Compute

London Metropolitan University seems to be getting rather desperate in its attempts to attract students. On the one hand:

"A London university is considering establishing alcohol-free zones on its campuses because so many of its students consider drinking to be immoral.
Professor Malcolm Gillies, vice-chancellor of London Metropolitan University, said the selling of alcohol was an issue of "cultural sensitivity" at his institution where a fifth of students are Muslim.
Speaking to a conference of university administrators in Manchester, he said that for many students, drinking alcohol was "an immoral experience".
"Because there is no majority ethnic group [at London Metropolitan], I think [selling alcohol] is playing to particular parts of our society much more [than to others]," he was reported as saying in the Times Higher Education magazine."

On the other:

"As part of a master's course in events experience management, London Metropolitan University will offer a module in partnership with Chillisauce, known for organising custom stag dos across Europe.
The firm's website lists options including mud-wrestling with scantily clad women in Budapest, a "spa with strippers" in Riga, or the option to be "punished" at a Tallinn "lap dancing dreamland".
The link has drawn criticism from unions, although students will be involved only in the company's more straightforward commercial activities - including corporate dinners and conferences.
Participants on the course will be asked to create a Guinness World Record attempt that doubles as a PR event for a consumer brand. They will devise a "creative concept" and pitch it to Chillisauce executives, who will attend seminars and lectures during the module.
But a University and College Union spokesman questioned "how employing a company that specialises in stag weekends offering wrestling with scantily clad women in jelly is likely to do much for a university's reputation"."

Opening the Black Box

I have just seen an article by Mu-Hsuang Huan of National Taiwan University published by Research Evaluation, an Oxford University Press journal. Here is the abstract:

"In the era of globalization, the trend of university rankings gradually shifts from country-wide analyses to world-wide analyses. Relatively high analytical weightings on reputational surveys have led Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings to criticisms over the years. This study provides a comprehensive discussion of the indicators and weightings adopted in the QS survey. The article discusses several debates stirred in the academia on QS. Debates on this ranking system are presented in the study. Firstly, problems of return rate, as well as unequal distribution of returned questionnaires, have incurred regional bias. Secondly, some universities are listed in both domestic and international reputation questionnaires, but some others are listed only in the domestic part. Some universities were evaluated only by domestic respondents, limiting their performance of the ranking results. Thirdly, quite a few universities exhibit the same indicator scores or even full scores, rendering the assessment questionable. Lastly, enormous changes of single indicator scores suggest that the statistic data adopted by QS Rankings should be further questioned."

The article is useful and interesting, especially the table of rates of return for different countries. But it does not seem to go beyond what this blog and others have been saying for a long time.

This seems to be another case of mainstream academia lagging behind the mass media which in turn  is way behind the blogosphere.