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Times Higher Education (THE) has published an article by Devin Stewart that refers to a crisis of Japanese universities. He says: "After Japan’s prestigious  University of Tokyo  fell from its number one spot to number seven in  Times Higher Education’s  Asia University Rankings  earlier this year , I had a chance to travel to Tokyo to interview more than 40 people involved with various parts of the country’s education system. Students, academics and professionals told me they felt a blow to their national pride from the news of the rankings drop. I found that the  THE  rankings result underscored the complex problems plaguing the country’s institutions of higher learning. " If Japanese academics and university administrators do actually believe that the fall of the University of Tokyo (aka Todai) in the THE Asian rankings is an indicator of complex problems and if they do feel that it is a blow to their national pride then there is indeed a crisis i...

University rankings have become extremely influential over the last few years. This is not entirely a bad thing. The initial publication of the Shanghai rankings in 2003, for example, exposed the pretensions of many European universities revealing just how far behind they had fallen in scientific research.  It also showed China how far it had to go to achieve scientific parity with the West. Unfortunately, rankings have also had malign effects. The THE and QS world rankings have acquired a great deal of respect, trust, even reverence that may not be entirely deserved. Both introduced significant methodological changes in 2015 and THE has made further changes in 2016 and the consequence of this is that there have been some remarkable rises and falls within the rankings that have had a lot of publicity but have little to do with any real change in quality. In addition, both QS and THE have increased the number of ranked universities which can affect the mean score for indicators from...

Over the last few years, elite universities have become increasingly concerned with their status in the global rankings. A decade ago university heads were inclined to ignore rankings or to regard them as insignificant, biased or limited. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, did not take part in the 2010 Times Higher Education  (THE) rankings although it relented and submitted data in 2011 after learning that other US public institutions had done so and had scored better than in the preceding THES-QS rankings It seems that things are changing. Around the world there excellence initiatives, one element of which is often improving the position of aspiring universities in international rankings, are proliferating. It should be a major concern that higher education policies and priorities are influenced or even determined by publications that are problematic and incomplete in several ways. Rankings count what can be counted and that usually means a strong emphasis on researc...