The main global rankings of universities have been published recently and with them, the predictable news headlines. However, over the years, the headlines have taken on a more geopolitical edge: An opinion article in The Wall Street Journal asks “Can U.S. Universities Stay on Top?” Public Affairs Ireland claims, “Irish Universities Lose Ground in World Rankings.” ABS-CBN News in the Philippines says, “Budget Cuts Blamed for Low University Rankings.” And The Telegraph celebrates, “British Universities on the Rise.”

It seems clear that it’s not just university “insiders,” as my colleague Michael Bastedo suggests, who are interested in the rankings. National competitiveness and a country’s ability to attract investment and talent are now bound up in the prestige associated with global rankings.

The pervasive focus on the top 100 can obscure the changing geography …

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The university rankings debate is heating up – again. Hopefully, this time it will be different and with better outcomes for everyone.

At a time when many nations are experiencing high levels of public and private debt and higher education is in great demand, university rankings have encouraged a preoccupation with the trials and tribulations of a handful of “world class” universities. This is having a profound–and perverse–effect on higher-education policy making, universities, and public opinion.

Rankings privilege the most resource-intensive and expensive universities on the assumption that such universities offer the best panacea for success in the global economy and world science. Thus, governments worry their institutions are not elite or selective enough, while university leaders say too much attention has been directed at widening participation. As a result, many …

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As I watch the deluge of press releases and media reports reacting to the latest rankings, I am reaching the point of despair. At a superficial level, we can all join in the ridiculous state-of-affairs as governments and universities vie with each other to promote their institutions and—in reality—their country as a place worthy of investment and talent recruitment. But there are more insidious currents at work.

A confluence of factors has heightened policy, public and student interest in higher education—at the organizational level, and also at the level of the individual faculty member and student. In the post global financial crisis world, calls for greater accountability and transparency are driving change across systems and institutions, in academic contracts, in service-level agreements with students, and with society at large. While higher education yearned for the time…

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It’s that time of year again. Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, the QS Top University Ranking, and U.S. News & World Report’s annual list have just been published, and will shortly be followed by the Times Higher Education world rankings. Despite pages of critique, rankings still have the capacity to create fear and loathing in the higher-education and policy worlds – even before the ink is dry. Surely no one really believes that universities can move up or down the rankings scale in any meaningful way, on an annual basis – so why such hysteria?

It seems to me that the common denominator is status and wealth. Rankings bring vital visibility to nations and universities in an increasingly competitive world. The more globalization drives a single market in education, as it does in most goods and services, the more higher education is a…

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Ranking academic journals is one of the more contentious aspects of research assessment, and a foundation stone for university rankings. Because people’s careers and aspirations are on the line, it was only a matter of time before someone challenged the findings. Their implications go far beyond recent events in Australia.

Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science, Elsevier’s Scopus, and Google Scholar have become dominant players in a rapidly expanding and lucrative global intelligence information business. The first has identified another opportunity, the Global Institute Profile Project: collecting institutional profile information, and then monetarizing it by selling it back to the institutions for strategic planning purposes or on to third-parties to underpin policy/decision-making or classification systems – similar to the way in which financial data was turn into a commodity by …

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