2003-04: The Historical Hinge of International Rankings

By Alex Usher. While national rankings were old hat, the Shanghai Rankings’ global nature was something genuinely new.  The sadly-defunct magazine Asiaweek had tried doing a regional ranking in the late 1990s but it failed because – like US News and Maclean’s – they relied on a methodology which required institutional participation and once a few big institutions say no, the whole thing fell apart. More...