Brussels, June 2, 2009. European Commission awarded a contract to design and test a new multi-dimensional global university ranking system to CHERPA – the Consortium for Higher Education and Research Performance Assessment.

European countries have long been concerned about the performance of their universities in the world's two major rankings. They place part of the blame on the ranking systems themselves, which they complain put too much emphasis on research and institutional size, and too little on teaching and subject disciplines.

The European ranking system will be independent, "robust" and measure higher education's core functions of research, teaching and outreach, says the tender's terms of reference. It will cover all types of higher education institutions in and outside Europe - particularly in North America, Asia and Australia - and will enable comparisons and benchmarking of similar institutions at the institutional and field levels.

The new edition of the popular Ranking Web of World Universities (http://www.webometrics.info ) has been published at the end January 2009. With more than three million visitors per year this public independent academic Ranking is beating again competitors for providing the largest and updated classification of Higher Education Institutions worldwide. The coverage includes institutions beyond position 200 or 500 that means many developing countries institutions are now ranked.

In this edition a special effort has been made to better reflect the performance and impact of the Universities through their Web presence, a crown indicator that takes into account not only research results, but academic excellence and community engagement.

(Warsaw-Astana, January 23, 2009) The organizers of the 4th Conference of the International Rankings Expert Group (IREG-4) are pleased to inform that registration is now open. The topic of the conference is International and National Academic Ranking: Commonalities and Differences. The conference will take place in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan on 14-16 June 2009. It will be the fourth time leading world experts on university ranking will meet to discus various topics concerning national, regional and global university rankings and their impact on academic world, society and policy makers.

(Brussels, December 11, 2008) Unhappy with the existing university rankings that place European universities way behind their American and British counterparts the French Presidency urged the European Commission to respond to the challenge, and the Commission obliged by launching a call for tenders for the design and testing of a new multi- dimensional, global university ranking system.

(Shanghai, August 15) The 2008 Academic Ranking of World Universities by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University has been officially released on 15 August 2008. The 2008 results do not differ significantly from the 2007 results. American institutions continue to dominate the top, with 54 out of the top 100 universities being in the United States. Only the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Tokyo manage to break the lines of the US institutions in the top 20. The first continental European university on the list is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology on place 24, followed by the University Paris 06 on place 42.

(Toronto, July 18) Alex Usher, Vice President of the Educational Policy Institute in his Commentary at the Institute’s Week in Review wonders why universities unlike cities are so critical of rankings.

Prestige is the coin of the academic realm.  We can sort of measure it through things like bibliometrics, but academics don’t really need those kinds of things to know who’s doing well and who’s not in the profession.  Just from reading each other’s work (and from reading reviews of each other’s work), an informal pecking order develops naturally.

Here’s where it gets interesting, though.

Bratislava (June 30, 2008) The Academic Ranking and Rating Agency (ARRA) was established in 2004 by two distinguished members of the Slovak academia – Professor Ján Pišút, who served as a Minister of Education of Slovakia in 1991-1992, and Professor Ferdinand Devínsky, former Vice-Rector and Rector of the Comenius University in Bratislava (1990-2003) – together with two former student leaders, Renáta Králiková and Juraj Barta.

The main goal of ARRA is to regularly issue a quality assessment of Slovak public higher education institutions. Since December 2005, ARRA has published three such ranking reports on quality of research and teaching of the Slovak public universities and their faculties.

Creation of the IREG–International Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence 

Warsaw – On April 18, 2008 an important decision was reached by the International Ranking Expert Group (IREG) to consolidate its partnership arrangement with the   creation of the IREG-International Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence. 

This proposal was previously discussed at a meeting of IREG held at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in October 2007 when a concept for continuing the work of IREG in a more structured format received the overall support of those associated with this partnership – representing major national and international rankings together with leading analysts. The creation of the IREG-International Observatory reflects the accomplishments achieved by IREG since it was first formed in 2004 in Washington D.C. as an informal on-going arrangement.  In this regard a significant development has been the adoption in May 2006 of the Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions which articulated 16 standards of good practice. Consequently, IREG has become an internationally recognized platform for dialogue on various aspects of ranking in higher education.