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Congratulations to the Institute of Excellence and Higher Education (IEHE) in Bhopal, India, which has managed to maintain its 'A' grade from the National Assessment and Accreditation Council. If you are wondering how they did it, see the story in the Hindustan Times .  "The Institute of Excellence and Higher Education (IEHE) in Bhopal improved its teacher and student ratio from 1:47 to 1:24 a day before the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) team was scheduled to visit to retain the institute’s Grade ‘A’. A three-member NAAC team, led by former vice chancellor SK Singh, will reach on Monday and inspect the institute in 24 sessions. IEHE, which was facing hardships due to shortage of teachers, appointed 54 guest faculties in a week. The strength of teachers increased from 58 to 112." There is nothing very unusual about this sort of thing. There have been, for example, suspicions about some British universities offering "relatively short- term co...

You can tell a few things about universities from their names. If, for example, a university has a direction in its name then it is usually not ranked very highly: University of East London, Southern Illinois University. Those that are named after long dead people -- Yale, Duke -- are often but not always -- Bishop Grosseteste -- very prestigious. It might be an idea to have a ranking of institutions with the most interesting or strangest names. After all nearly everything else about higher education is ranked somewhere or other. California University of Pennsylvania should be near the top. And of course there is Hamburger University and Butler University. Or, from a few years ago, The Universal Institute of Food Management and Hotel Administration I was Called by the Almighty and I Said Yes My Lord, which was actually a restaurant somewhere along the road from Maiduguri to Kano in Nigeria. Another high flier might be the Lovely Professional University , a "semi-residential univer...

Video Salvatore Babones, Gaming the Rankings Game: University Rankings and the Future of the University

An interesting tweet from  qwertzuiop    reports that the average change in rank position in this year's Shanghai rankings was 32 compared to 11.7 between 2014 and 2015. Changes in methodology, even simple ones, can lead to a lot of churning. Meanwhile, here are the correlations between the various indicators in the ranking. In general, it seems that the indicators are not measuring exactly the same thing and they do not raise red flags by showing a low or zero association with each other. The lowest correlations are between publications and alumni and award (alumni and faculty winning Nobel and Fields awards). Publications are papers in the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index in 2015 while the alumni and award indicators go back several decades. Time makes a difference and as a measure of contemporary research excellence Nobel and Fields awards may be losing their relevance.  alumni  award highly cited Nature & Science ...

The Shanghai rankings are usually the most stable and therefore the least interesting (for journalists, politicians and bureaucrat) of the current array. This year, however, they are quite volatile. The reason for that is that the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy has completed the transition from the old to the new lists of highly cited researchers supplied by Thomson Reuters. In 2014 and 2015 they used both lists with an equal weighting which has reduced the abruptness of the transition. In addition, the rankings now count only primary affiliations. As a result there have been enough ascents and descents to gladden the hearts of higher education journalists and experts. It should be noted that the effect of this is largely to accelerate trends that were in progress anyway. The old list was clearly out of date and it was time for a new one. First, to my predictions. Harvard is still number one. Wisconsin at Madison, Rutgers and Virginia Polytechnic Institute have all fallen. Aalborg, Nanya...

Watch this Nate Silver. In the latest edition of the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) to be announced on Monday, the first place will go to Harvard. The methodology for this prediction is based on an extremely complex and sophisticated algorithm that incorporates a large number of variables and will remain a secret for the moment. Now for some easier predictions. The Shanghai rankings are generally famous for their stability and consistency which makes them rather boring for journalists and naive administrators. No shocking headlines about catastrophic plunges in the rankings after the latest vandalism by government Scrooges. But the Shanghai rankers have had problems with their highly cited researchers indicator. Thomson Reuters have stopped adding to their old list of highly cited researchers and have published a new one. The Shanghai Ranking Consultancy combined the two lists in 2014 and 2015 and have said that this year only the new list will be used in calcu...

There has been a lot of talk about ranking universities by factors other than the usual mix of contributions to research and innovation, reputation surveys and inputs such as spending, teaching resources or student quality. The emerging idea is that universities should be assessed according to their ability to teach students or to inculcate desirable skills or attributes. Much of this is powered by the growing awareness that American and European secondary schools are failing to produce sufficient numbers of students with the ability  to undertake and complete anything that could realistically be called a university education. It is unlikely that this is the fault of the schools. The unavoidable  verdict of recent research is that the problem with schools has very little to do with institutional racism, a lack of grit, resilience or the current X factor or  the failure to adopt Finnish, Chinese or Singaporean teaching methods . It is simply that students entering the scho...

Searching for the Gold Standard: The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, 2010-2014 Richard Holmes ABSTRACT This paper analyses the global university rankings introduced by Times Higher Education (THE) in partnership with Thomson Reuters in 2010 after the magazine ended its association with its former data provider Quacquarelli Symonds. T he distinctive features of the new rankings included a new procedure for determining the choice and weighting of the various indicators, new criteria for inclusion in and exclusion from the rankings, a revised academic reputation survey, the introduction of an indicator that attempted to measure innovation, the addition of a third measure of internationalization, the use of several indicators related to teaching, the bundling of indicators into groups, and, most significantly, the employment of a very distinctive measure of research impact with an unprecedentedly large weighting. The rankings met with little enthusiasm in 2010 but by 2...