IREG Ranking News
The latest edition of the Times Higher Education (THE) Emerging Economies Rankings has been announced. This includes institutions in those countries that the London Stock Exchange considers advanced emerging, secondary emerging, or frontier.
The rankings use the same thirteen indicators in THE’s World University Rankings but with modified weightings to reflect the needs of emerging economies and to reduce some of the anomalies found there.
Mainland China continues to dominate these rankings while Hong Kong and Taiwan perform well. Some observers have suggested that China is no longer an emerging economy and should not be included. The top five universities are all Chinese: Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Top universities in selected countries are:
Russia: Lomonosov Moscow State University
Saudi Arabia: King Abdulaziz University
South Africa University of the Witwatersrand
India: Indian Institute of Science
Brazil; University of Sao Paulo
Turkey: Sabanci University
The top universities for the specific indicators are:
Overall; Peking University, China
Citations; An-Najah National University, Palestine
Industry income; Asia University, Taiwan
International Outlook; Qatar University
Research; Tsinghua University
Teaching; Peking University.
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The Carnegie classification system was first published in 1973 by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and is now administered by Indiana University. The classification was based on the insight that the missions of colleges and universities in the United States are very diverse and that they should not be judged by the same standards.
Institutions are classified as follows:
Doctorate Granting Universities, which comprise those with very high research activity (R1), those with high research activity (R2) and Doctoral/Professional Universities (DPU)
Master’s Colleges and Universities
Baccalaureate Colleges
Associate’s Colleges
Special focus Institutions
Tribal colleges.
Unfortunately, the classification has evolved into a hierarchy with university administrators struggling to climb into the top category of R1 institutions. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael M Crow and Jeffrey J Selingo of Arizona State University argues that the system has negative consequences for US higher education with universities shifting scarce resources to research and doctoral programmes.
Crow and Selingo suggest that the Carnegie system is now outdated and that a new one is needed. They report on a new classification system for four-year colleges based on 17 measures that “capture ways that colleges provide access to students, deliver education, and produce new knowledge to benefit society.”
The result is a system with 13 clusters of institutions with similar attributes, such as National Scale Research Universities and Community Scale Research Universities. There is, however, no hierarchy or ranking. The authors argue that this will provide a fairer and more accurate picture of the complexity of US higher education.
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QS has released a new edition of their Arab region rankings. These contain ten indicators, some original and some derived from the World University Rankings.
The latest edition of Maclean’s annual ranking of Canadian colleges and universities has been published. This ranking group colleges and universities into three categories:
- Medical doctoral schools which include institutions with doctoral programmes and medical schools
- Comprehensive schools which have a significant amount of research activity and offer postgraduate programmes including professional degrees
- Primarily undergraduate universities which have limited postgraduate programmes and relatively few graduate students.
The ranking criteria are Student Awards, Student/Faculty Ratio, Faculty Awards, Total Research Dollars, Scholarships and Bursaries, and Student Services.
The top five medical doctoral schools are:
- McGill University
- University of Toronto
- University of British Columbia
- McMaster University
- Queen’s University.
The top five comprehensive schools are:
- Simon Fraser University
- University of Victoria
- University of Waterloo
- Guelph University
- Carleton University.
The top five primarily undergraduate institutions are:
- University of Northern British Columbia
- Mount Allison University
- Trent University
- St Mary’s University
- Acadia University.
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CoinDesk has announced the second edition of its University Blockchain Ranking. The first edition was confined to the USA while the current ranking covers 230 international institutions. The ranking is “a holistic snapshot of the intersection between this transformative technology and institutions of higher education.”
The ranking is restricted to those universities in the top one hundred of the four popular world rankings, THE, QS, Shanghai, and US News or other “aggregating outside rankings,” and those that requested inclusion.
The methodology is based on five groups of indicators:
- Academic and research contributions
- Blockchain offerings such as classes and clubs
- Employment and industry outcomes
- Cost of attendance
- Overall academic reputation.
The National University of Singapore took the top place and other Asian universities performed well included Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Tsinghua University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and several others in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Mainland China.
RMIT University in Melbourne is second and the best European institution is the University of Zurich.
The top ten are:
- National University of Singapore
- Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia
- University of California Berkeley, USA
- University of Zurich, Switzerland
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
- Hong Kong Polytechnic University
- University College London, UK
- Tsinghua University, China
- Chinese University of Hong Kong
- ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
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The QS Graduate Employability Rankings, now in their fourth year of publication, are an effort to find the universities that produce the most employable graduates.
U-Multirank is a “multi-dimensional user driven” approach to global university ranking that provides comparative data on performance in teaching and learning, research, knowledge transfer, international orientation, and regional engagement.
It is run by a consortium that includes the Centre for Higher Education, Germany, the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Twente, Netherlands, the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Netherlands, and Fundación CYD, Spain. It is supported by the European Commission, the Bertelsmann Foundation, and Banco Santander.
The new edition contains a Cooperation Index that shows that European institutions do better than others in this respect and that this has many positive effects.
U-Multirank does not provide an overall ranking and allows users to construct their own tables. The Research and Research Linkages Ranking is led by thirteen universities, of which seven are in the European Union and four in the UK. The Economic Engagement Ranking is headed by ETH Zurich followed by the University of Montreal and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
There are a number of lists of best performing universities in various countries. For example, the best performers are:
Australia; University of South Australia
China; University of Macau
Japan; University of Osaka
EU; Centrale Nantes
UK; University of Cambridge
US; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Poland; SGH Warsaw School of Economics
Turkey; Ozyegin University.
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The latest edition of the US News Best Colleges has just been published. Now in its 37th year, it has long dominated the US ranking industry, although in recent years there has been debate over its validity and fairness.
Indian universities have never performed well in the major global rankings and there has been considerable concern over their validity and fairness, especially with the methodology of the Times Higher Education and QS world rankings.
Times Higher Education (THE) has completed its virtual summit, a “Festival of Data”, hosted by the University of Toronto. In addition to various sessions and masterclasses the results of the 2022 World University Rankings were revealed.
Luiz Costa, President of IREG Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence is a member of the THE Impact Ranking Advisory Board.
The “Three Missions” ranking assesses, for the first time the third — public — mission of a university, along with science and education.
The latest edition of the National Taiwan University Rankings (also known as the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities) has just appeared. The rankings are entirely research-based and measure three aspects: Productivity, Impact, and Excellence.
In recent years, a number of Arab universities have attempted to upgrade their research capabilities, attract international students, and rise in the major global rankings.
Elsevier has issued an updated (August 10) edition of its guide to university rankings for research leaders. It contains some basic information that might be helpful to university administrators and advisors responsible for international policy.