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The website efinancialcareers has a list of the top twenty data scientists in finance and banking. This looks like a subjective list and another writer might come up with a different set of experts. Even so it is quite interesting. Their degrees are mainly in things like engineering, computer science and maths. There is only one each in business, economics and finance. The institutions where they studied are: Stanford (three) University College London (three) Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble Oxford Leonard Stern School of Business, New York University University of Mexico Universite Paris Dauphine Ecole Polytechnique Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) California State University Indian Institute of Science Johns Hopkins University Institute of Management Development and Research, India University of Illinois University of Pittsburgh Indian Institute of Technology. Harvard, MIT and Cambridge are absent but there are three Indian Institutes,  three French schools and some non-...

For the last couple of years the higher education media has tried to present any blip in the fortunes of UK universities as one of the malign effects of Brexit, whose toxic rays are unlimited by space, time or logic. Similarly, if anything unpleasant happens to US institutions, it is often linked to the evil spell of the great orange devil, who is scaring away international students, preventing the recruitment of the scientific elites of the world, or even being insufficiently credulous of the latest settled science. So what is the explanation for the remarkable renaissance of US higher education apparently revealed by the THE reputation survey published today? Is Trump working his magic to make American colleges great again? UCLA is up four places, Carnegie Mellon seven, Cornell six, University of Washington six, Pennsylvania three. In contrast, several European and Asian institutions have fallen, University College London and the University of Kyoto by two places, Munich by seven, a...

THE h ave just published details of their reputation rankings which will be published on May 30th, just ahead, no doubt coincidentally, of the QS World University Rankings. The number of responses has gone down a bit, from 10,566 last year to  10,162, possibly reflecting growing survey fatigue among academics. In surveys of this kind the distribution of responses is crucial. The more responses from engineers the better for universities in Asia. The more from scholars in the humanities the better for  Western Europe.  I have noted in a previous blog that the fortunes of Oxford in this ranking are tied to the percentage of responses from the arts and humanities. This year there have been modest or small reductions in the percentage of responses from the clinical and health sciences, the life sciences, the social sciences, education and psychology and  large ones for business and economics and the arts and humanities. The number of responses in engineering and compute...

As the world waits for the coming round of global rankings -- will Harvard still be number one in the Shanghai rankings? -- I am starting to update my list of smart rankings . One of favorites was 'the Campus Squirrel Listings." A candidate for inclusion in the next edition is 'The Top 10 Colleges for Dog Lovers ' Number one in the USA is Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.

The Fortunate 500 rankings use a sophisticated and innovative methodology to rank global universities. The 2018 edition puts the University of Alberta in first place in the world displacing Savitribai Phule Pune University which has mysteriously dropped out of the top 500. The top British university is the University of Reading and number one in the USA is Caldwell University. None of these universities have made any official comment. These rankings have received almost no interest in the international media. Perhaps the rankers should start announcing the results at a prestigious summit in a spectacular setting along with networking brunches and masterclasses. I have selected a venue for them using an equally sophisticated methodology , North Korea. Perhaps the summit could be combined with with the groundbreaking ceremony for the Pyongyang Trump Tower.

The ranking industry is expanding and new rankings appear all the time. Most global rankings measure research publications and citations. Others try to add to the mix indicators that might have something to do with teaching and learning. There is now a  ranking that tries to capture various third missions. The Round University Rankings published in Russia are in the tradition  of  holistic rankings. They give a 40 % weighting to research, 40 % to teaching, 10% to international diversity and 10% to financial sustainability. Each group contains five equally weighted indicators. The data is derived from Clarivate Analytics who also contribute to the US News Best Global Universities Rankings. These rankings are similar to the THE rankings in that they attempt to assess quality rather than quantity but they have 20 indicators instead of 13 and assign sensible weightings. Unfortunately, they receive only a fraction of the attention given to the THE rankings. They are, howeve...

The International Rankings Expert Group (IREG) has produced an inventory of international rankings that is testimony to the enormous interest in comparing and classifying universities around the world. In addition to those rankings that were included there are several "also rans", rankings that were not counted because they included only one indicator, had been published only once or provided insufficient  information about methodology . One of  these is the World Top 20 Project whose Executive Director and founder is Albert N Mitchell II. The website claims to rank 500 universities according to seven criteria and to use data from institutional databases and educational publications to construct eight regional rankings. The scores are then compared with those from the US News Best Global Universities, the THE World University Rankings, the QS World University Rankings, and the Center for World University Rankings to select the global top twenty. The top five universities i...