It was a bit of a surprise when US News & World Report (USNWR) announced that they were going global but perhaps it shouldn't have been. The USNWR has been ranking American colleges since the early 80s, making even the Shanghai Centre for World Class Universities or QS look like novices. Also, with the advance of globalisation of higher education and research there is now a market for comparisons of US universities and their international competitors.
The Best Global Universities rankings are research based, except for two indicators, each with a 5% weighting, that count Ph D degrees. They are also heavily citation oriented, with a huge 42.5% weighting going to citations. However, the US News staff have used their common sense and included four measures of citations, normalized citation impact, total citations, number of highly cited papers and percentage of highly cited papers.
The result of this is that many of the high fliers in this year's THE rankings are absent. Bogazici University in Turkey, 14th best in Asia according to THE, is absent, So is Federico Santa Maria Technical University in Chile, according to THE second best in Latin America and Panjab University, supposedly the second best in India.
The reason for this contrast is simply that THE and Thomson Reuters rewarded these institutions for a few physics papers with hundreds of participating institutions by using a very inappropriate methodology and giving it a 30% weighting. USNWR have trimmed this indicator to 10% and so the high fliers have been grounded.
Friday, October 31, 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
The university rankings business gets bigger and bigger
US News is going global. There are three different Arab/ MENA rankings on the way. Now, QS is getting ready for further growth. This is from Education Investor.
Posted on: 16/10/2014
| Exclusive: QS seeks £10m investment
The university rankings provider QS is looking to sell a £10 million stake in its business, EducationInvestorunderstands.
According to its website, QS runs websites and events that connect graduates and employers. But it is best known for its World University Rankings, which it claims are “the most widely read university comparison of their kind”.
Three sources close to the matter said a deal was on the table, and one said that first round bids had already been submitted. QS wants to raise the cash “half to buy out an existing shareholding and half to use as growth capital”.
However, Nunzio Quacquatelli, managing director and majority shareholder of QS, told EducationInvestorthat the firm was “looking at all options, both debt and possibly structured finance”.
“We are looking for some external funding to support our rapid growth. Our vision is to be a leading information company in the higher education sector with global ambitions and [with this funding] we aim to continue on this path.”
QS operates in over 70 countries, and has more than 200 staff and 1,200 clients. Its valuation hasn’t been publicised, but the firm is understood to have an ebitda of £3.3 million and revenue of £19.8 million.
According to one source, the deal is expected to complete later in the fourth quarter.
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Posted on: 16/10/2014
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Shanghai without the Awards
Updated. The link to the site is here.
The Center for World-Class Universities (CWU) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University has produced an interesting new ranking by removing the Alumni and Awards indicators from its Academic Ranking of World Universities. These indicators have been criticised for allowing western universities to live off their intellectual capital and ignoring the rise of newcomers in Asia.
So what would ARWU look like without the Nobel and Fields awards?
At the very top things are the same. Harvard is still first and Stanford second. But Cambridge goes down and Oxford goes up.
Universities that would benefit significantly from deleting these indicators include Michigan, rising from 23rd to 13th, Pennsylvania State University from 58th to 35th, University of Florida, Tsinghua University, Alberta, Peking, Sao Paul, Tel Aviv, Zhejiang and Scuola Normale Pisa, which would rise to the 201-300 band.
CWU have calculated the ratio between places in ARWU and the Alternative Ranking. The higher the score the greater the benefit from the Awards and Alumni indicators. The biggest gainers from Nobel and Fields laureates are Princeton, Moscow State University and Paris Sud (11).
The countries that have benefited most from these indicators are the USA, France, Germany.
It looks as though the ARWU has favoured the Ivy League, continental European universities and Cambridge at the expense of American public universities and the rising stars of Asia.
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The Center for World-Class Universities (CWU) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University has produced an interesting new ranking by removing the Alumni and Awards indicators from its Academic Ranking of World Universities. These indicators have been criticised for allowing western universities to live off their intellectual capital and ignoring the rise of newcomers in Asia.
So what would ARWU look like without the Nobel and Fields awards?
At the very top things are the same. Harvard is still first and Stanford second. But Cambridge goes down and Oxford goes up.
Universities that would benefit significantly from deleting these indicators include Michigan, rising from 23rd to 13th, Pennsylvania State University from 58th to 35th, University of Florida, Tsinghua University, Alberta, Peking, Sao Paul, Tel Aviv, Zhejiang and Scuola Normale Pisa, which would rise to the 201-300 band.
CWU have calculated the ratio between places in ARWU and the Alternative Ranking. The higher the score the greater the benefit from the Awards and Alumni indicators. The biggest gainers from Nobel and Fields laureates are Princeton, Moscow State University and Paris Sud (11).
The countries that have benefited most from these indicators are the USA, France, Germany.
It looks as though the ARWU has favoured the Ivy League, continental European universities and Cambridge at the expense of American public universities and the rising stars of Asia.
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Saturday, October 11, 2014
Another Global Ranking
Just when you thought you could stop reading about rankings.
For several years the US News & World Report (USNWR), publishers of America's Best Colleges, repackaged the QS World University Rankings and just put its own stamp on them for the American public.
Now, the USNWR has announced that it is going into the global rankings business. It seems that this time that they will produce completely new rankings that have nothing to do with the Times Higher Education (THE) rankings. There will also be regional, country and subject rankings.
The data, however,will come from Thomson Reuters (TR), who are also the data providers for the THE world rankings and two of the indicators, Highly Cited Researchers and Publications, in the Shanghai ARWU rankings. It is definitely unhealthy if TR are going to supply the data or some of it for three out of four well known world rankings.
Bob Morse says that the new rankings will be "powered by Thomson Reuters InCitesTM research analytics solutions". Does this mean that universities who do not join InCites will not be ranked? Will universities be allowed to opt in or opt out? Will all data come from TR? Will the survey be shared with THE or will there be another one?
For several years the US News & World Report (USNWR), publishers of America's Best Colleges, repackaged the QS World University Rankings and just put its own stamp on them for the American public.
Now, the USNWR has announced that it is going into the global rankings business. It seems that this time that they will produce completely new rankings that have nothing to do with the Times Higher Education (THE) rankings. There will also be regional, country and subject rankings.
The data, however,will come from Thomson Reuters (TR), who are also the data providers for the THE world rankings and two of the indicators, Highly Cited Researchers and Publications, in the Shanghai ARWU rankings. It is definitely unhealthy if TR are going to supply the data or some of it for three out of four well known world rankings.
Bob Morse says that the new rankings will be "powered by Thomson Reuters InCitesTM research analytics solutions". Does this mean that universities who do not join InCites will not be ranked? Will universities be allowed to opt in or opt out? Will all data come from TR? Will the survey be shared with THE or will there be another one?
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