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From Mansion Global   Six High-End Homes Near America’s Top-Ranked University Who needs dorms at Stanford when you can live in one of these? Stanford is, in case you haven't noticed, top of the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education US college ranking  [subscription required for full results] and, more significantly, the world's 100 most innovative universities .

If ever somebody does get round to doing a ranking of university rankings and if entertainment value is an indicator the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings (WUR) stand a good chance of being at the top. The latest global rankings contain many items that academics would be advised not to read in public places lest they embarrass the family by sniggering to themselves in Starbucks or Nandos. THE would, for example, have us believe that St. George's, University of London is the top university in the world for research impact as measured by citations. This institution specialises in medicine, biomedical science and healthcare sciences. It does not do research in the physical sciences, the social sciences, or the arts and humanities and makes no claim that it does. To suggest that it is the best in the world across the range of scientific and academic research is ridiculous. There are several other universities with scores for citations that are disproportionately ...

but we can still have some fun reading the latest post at ROARS by Guiseppe de Nicolao. Times Higher Education still changes the rules: a little help at Oxford and Cambridge?  And the Italian?

The reputation data used by THE in the 2016 world rankings, for which the world is breathlessly waiting, is that which was used in their reputation rankings   released last May and collected between January and March. Therefore, the distribution of responses from disciplinary groups this year was 9% for the arts and humanities and 15% for social sciences and 13% for business (28% for the last two combined). In 2015 it was 16% for the arts and humanities and 19% for the social sciences (which then included business). Since UK universities are relatively strong in the humanities and Asian universities relatively strong in business studies the result of this was a shift in the reputation rankings away from the UK and towards Asian universities. Oxford fell from 3rd (score 80.4) to 5th  (score 69.1) in the reputation rankings and Bristol and Durham dropped out of the top 100 while Tsinghua University rose from 26th place to 18th, Peking University from 32nd to 21st and Seoul Nati...

Here are my predictions for the THE rankings on the 21st and academic summit on the 26th -28th. Donald Trump will not be invited to give a keynote address. The decline of US public universities will be blamed on government spending cuts. British universities will be found to be in mortal danger from Brexit and visa controls. Phil Baty will give a rankings "masterclass" but will have to apologise to feminists because he couldn't think of anything else to call it. The words 'prestige' and 'prestigious' will be used more times than in the novel by Christopher Priest or the film by Christopher Nolan The counting of books will help British universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, but they will still be threatened by Brexit. The partial reinclusion of citations of papers with 1,000+ authors, mainly in physics, will lead to a modest recovery of some universities in France, Korea, Japan and Turkey. The rise of Asia will resume. Since the host city or univers...

The world, having recovered from the shocks of the Shanghai, QS and RUR rankings, now waits for the T HE world rankings , especially the research impact indicator measured by field normalised citations. It might be helpful to show the top 5 universities for this criterion since 2010-11. 2010-11 1. Caltech 2. MIT 3. Princeton 4. Alexandria University 5. UC Santa Cruz 2011-12 1. Princeton 2. MIT 3. Caltech 4. UC Santa Barbara 5. Rice University 2012-13 1. Rice University 2. National Research Nuclear University MePhI 3. MIT 4. UC Santa Cruz 5. Princeton 2013-14 1. MIT 2. Tokyo Metropolitan University 3. Rice University 4. UC Santa Cruz 5. Caltech 2014-15 1. MIT 2. UC Santa Cruz 3. Tokyo Metropolitan University 4. Rice University 5. Caltech 2015-16 1. St George's, University of London 2. Stanford University 3. UC Santa Cruz 4  Caltech 5. Harvard Notice that no university has been in the top five for citations in every year. Last year THE introduced some changes to this indicator, one o...

John Field, an expert on lifelong learning and a small Scotswoman, comments on the growing Brexit hysteria blowing through academia. Professor Field quotes the Vice Chancellor of the University of York: "York, along with many other British universities, appears to have fallen in the QS league table because of concerns about the impact of Brexit; specifically, this has been attributed to worries about future access to research funding and whether we will be able to recruit excellent academic staff and students from all over the world."

The western chattering and scribbling classes sometimes like to reflect on their superiority to the pre-scientific attitudes of the local peasantry, astrology, nationalism and religion and things like that. But it seems that the credentialled elite of Britain are now in the grip of a great fear of an all pervading spirit called Brexit whose malign power is unlimited in time and space. Thus the Independent tells us that university rankings (QS in this case) show that "post Brexit uncertainty and long-term funding issues" have hit UK higher education. The Guardian implies that Brexit has something to do with the decline of British universities in the rankings without actually saying so. "British universities have taken a tumble in the  latest international rankings , as concern persists about the potential impact of Brexit on the country’s  higher education  sector.  " Many British universities have fallen in the QS rankings this year but the idea that Brexit has an...

Trigger warning If you're triggered by just about anything, don't read this. Those who dislike inherited privilege will be entertained by this account of the last days of Charles II. it is from a post by Gregory Cochran at the blog, West Hunter.   It seems that there has been a little bit of progress over the centuries. The future Charles III has a thing about homeopathy, expensive pseudoscientific rubbish but at least it's harmless. I can't help wondering whether the malign spirit of pseudoscience has now taken refuge in university faculties of social science with their endless crises of irreproducible research. "Back in the good old days, Charles II, age 53, had a fit one Sunday evening, while fondling two of his mistresses. Monday they bled him (cupping and scarifying) of eight ounces of blood. Followed by an antimony emetic, vitriol in peony water, purgative pills, and a clyster. Followed by another clyster after two hours. Then syrup of blackthorn, more anti...

Ranking fans have a busy week ahead of them. On Tuesday the QS world rankings will be announced and results will probably start leaking on Sunday or Monday. Then there will be the Shanghai broad subject rankings. Times Higher Education have promised a major revelation on Monday. I suspect that this might just be the top ten or twenty of the world rankings or a preview of their new US college rankings.  But this ranking might be more important. Hackerrank , "a platform that ranks engineers based on their coding skills and helps companies discover talent faster", has just published a ranking of countries according to the speed and accuracy with which developers can solve a variety of coding challenges.  China is first and Russia second. The USA is 28th and the UK 29th. Eastern Europe and East Asia generally perform well. For once, there is some fairly good news for Africa and the Muslim world: Turkey is 30th, Egypt 42nd, Bangladesh 44th and Nigeria 48th.  The top ten are ...