IREG Ranking News
Around the world, private institutions account for a large and growing part of the higher education sector. Unfortunately, most of them have been neglected by the mainstream global rankings which have tended to focus on large research-orientated universities.
Over the last two decades, the quality and quantity of scientific research in China has expanded rapidly, a trend that has been reflected in all the major global university rankings.
The volume and quality of publications and citations have been standard elements in the assessment of research for many years and are usually among the metrics in global university ranking systems.
The University of New South Wales, Sydney, has created an aggregate ranking that combines the results of three well-known global rankings to create an aggregate score, or Aggregate Ranking of Top Universities (ARTU).
Edward Elgar has published the Research Handbook on University Rankings: Theory, Methodology, Influence and Impact, edited by Ellen Hazelkorn, Professor Emerita Dublin Technological University, and Georgiana Mihut, University of Warwick.
The latest world rankings from the Ranking Web of Universities (Webometrics) have just been announced. These are produced by the Cybermetrics Lab, a group that is part of the Spanish Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), and have the unique distinction of ranking anything with the slightest claim to being a university or college.
It seems there are growing concerns about the negative influence of international rankings in many parts of the world.
The business education site, Poets and Quants, recently published the latest edition of its ranking of US MBA programmes. An article by John Byrne notes that this came at the end of a turbulent year for business school rankings.
Academics have long been concerned about the proliferation of predatory journals that publish substandard papers with little or no review in return for a substantial fee. In recent years a number of predatory conferences have made their appearance.
The latest edition of University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) provides more evidence that Harvard’s international research dominance is slipping.
The latest edition of Best Global Universities has just been published by US News. This is a research-based ranking that uses data derived from InCites and Web of Science.
The latest Financial Times (FT) ranking Executive MBA programmes indicate that the global center of gravity for business education is moving eastwards.
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.