In addition to its Best Global Universities rankings, the US News & World Report (USNWR) has issued research based rankings for 21 subjects. Harvard dominates but Asia is rising in engineering and materials science.

The US News & World Report is famous for its rankings of American universities and colleges. It has now ventured into the global ranking scene and produced a list of the top 500 global universities. These are research based rankings that do not attempt to assess anything to do with teaching apart from two indicators that count PhDs...
Overall, the USA remains dominant with 134 universities in the top 500. Germany comes second with 42 in the top 500 followed by the United Kingdom with 38 and France with 22. Once again Russia’s performance is poor, only two universities, less than Ireland, Israel or Hong Kong. Among Asian countries, China has 28 universities in the top 500, Japan 17 and India four.

By Terri Macdonald. News that Australia has slipped in the international rankings for the latest global gender gap index is disappointing but predicatable.
Australia is now 24th on the gender gap index, a major increase from 2006 when it was ranked 15th.
The World Economic Forum's annual index measures gender equality across four areas: economic participation, education, health and political empowerment.  While Australia ranked well in health and education in the index, in terms of political representation Australia did poorly compared to previous years. More...

Press release: 6 November 2014.
For EUA, this study has been a follow-up to its two previous reports on rankings, published respectively in 2011 and 2013, which analysed the methodologies used by the main international rankings. These reports outlined a number of EUA’s concerns with regard to the shortcomings of some of the methodologies used and the potential impact of the rankings. Given that rankings are firmly established in the higher education landscape and their number has risen in recent years, the RISP project set out take EUA’s work on this topic forward by studying in more detail the way rankings are used by universities. It also sought to provide some guidance for universities on how they can constructively use rankings to promote institutional development while also at the same time avoiding certain potential pitfalls that had previously been outlined by EUA. More...

EUA today publishes a new report entitled “Rankings in Institutional Strategies and Processes (RISP): Impact or Illusion?”. The publication, presented at an event in Brussels, is the outcome of a 2.5 year EUA-led project* which has carried out the first pan-European study of the impact and influence of rankings on European higher education institutions.
The study consisted of three steps, an online survey followed by a series of site visits to institutions and a roundtable with senior university managers and stakeholders. The online survey, which gathered responses from 171 higher education institutions in 39 European countries, confirmed that rankings have an impact on institutions and their activities albeit in a number of different ways.
The report ends with a series of questions that are designed to help university leaders in developing institutional responses with regard to rankings.
The full report can be downloaded here. More...

By Steve Maharey. Better funding and organisation in a demanding world essential if we are to maintain our global reputation. There are about 17,600 universities in the world, with new ones added every year. New Zealand universities consistently rank in the top 3 per cent and are well-respected in the international community. More...

Par Fériel Boudjelal. Le pre­mier pal­ma­rès mon­dial des uni­ver­si­tés réa­lisé par le maga­zine amé­ri­cain US News and World report a été publié le 28 octobre 2014. Deux uni­ver­si­tés fran­çaises atteignent le top 100. L’objectif est d’informer les étudiants en leur per­met­tant de mieux connaître le monde de l’enseignement supé­rieur et de com­pa­rer les ins­ti­tu­tions qui pour­raient les intéresser. Voir l'article...