U-Multirank, a new university ranking system was launched under the Irish EU Presidency in Dublin by Ruairí Quinn, TD, Minister for Education and Skills and European Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou.
U-Multirank will measure the performance and excellence of HEIs across a variety of dimensions.  Five areas are measured: reputation for research, quality of teaching and learning, international orientation, success in knowledge transfer (such as partnerships with business and start-ups), and contribution to regional growth.Some 500 universities are expected to sign up to take part, with the first rankings results expected in early 2014.
Three organizations, members of IREG Observatory will work on U-Multirank: CHE Centre for Higher Education (Germany) the lead of the of the project together with Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS), Observatoire des Sciences et des Techniques - OST (France), Fundación CYD (Spain) and Perspektywy Education Foundation (Poland).
Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth said in Dublin: "The new ranking proposed by the European Commission will, above all, enable young people to make better informed decisions about where to study; it will also allow universities to compare themselves in a more transparent and useful way. The new listing will differ from existing international rankings by rating universities according to a broad range of performance factors, which will provide a more accurate, comparable and user-friendly guide to university quality. As well as its added value for students and universities, I believe the new ranking will be an indispensable tool for political decision makers, in the context of our joint efforts at EU level to encourage the much-needed modernisation of higher education institutions,”. more...

The 2013 QS World University Rankings by Subject, published today on www.topuniversities.com, reveals the top 200 universities in the world for 30 disciplines including degree subjects such as economics, civil engineering, physics, law and others.
Computer science is the most popular table of the rankings on www.topuniversities.com since their inception. It received over 600,000 views in the past six months and attracts three times as many readers as the average subject ranked by QS.
The second and third most popular subjects are mechanical engineering , followed by medicine . The trend reflects the finding of a recent study of global demand for IT analysts, developers, programmers and engineers. These occupations were found on the national skills shortage lists of 21 OECD and BRICS countries.
The 2013 QS World University Rankings by Subject evaluated 2,858 universities and ranked 678 institutions in total. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was once again crowned the top university in the world for computer science, for the third year in a row.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21938085. Read more...

For the second time, the international network of 24 research universities called Universitas 21 has published an overview of national higher education systems across the world. Rather than assessing individual universities, the U21 ranking brings in indicators that are seldom used in other rankings in an attempt to highlight the importance of a strong higher education environment. It is thus fighting the main criticism against global rankings, i.e. that the research output of elite universities cannot reflect the contribution of education to a country’s social and economic development.
Similar to the European Commission’s U-Multirank, the U21 ranking uses a large variety of criteria, divided into four broad measures: Resources, Environment, Connectivity and Output. In an holistic approach, it provides data on tertiary enrolment rates, the proportion of international students, international research collaboration, public and private funding, investment in research and development, output of research journal articles (per country and per head of population), ratio of researchers in the economy, etc. However, these criteria cannot be combined or singled out.
In the 2013 U21 ranking, some 48 countries’ higher education systems were ranked according to those criteria. The top 1 country is the United States, followed by Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom. These results are very similar to the 2012 U21 ranking (with the exception of Singapore replacing Norway, which now ranks 12th) and do not tell us much more than other rankings have been telling us.
One major flaw of the ranking, which Universitas 21 willingly admits, is the lack of a variable on the quality of teaching measures, due to the difficulty to collect data allowing a comparison across countries. Last year’s ranking also showed they had some problems measuring connectivity (see ACA Newsletter – Education Europe, May 2012). One could also deplore the small amount of countries analysed (50 out of a database of approximately 200), as developing countries in Africa or Latin America could benefit from the information withheld in such a ranking.

Universitas 21

By David Matthews. Eastern institutions slow to make inroads into Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities table.
View the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The long-heralded shift of global academic power towards Asia appears to be happening at a glacial pace, if at all, according to this year’s Shanghai Jiao Tong university rankings.
Both the US and the UK have one fewer institution in the top 500 this year, but there was a better performance by some North American and European countries and little evidence of more Asian representation in the Academic Ranking of World Universities 2013.
There are now no Asian universities in the top 20 after the University of Tokyo was displaced by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich at number 20. Read more...

By Andy Henion, Brendan Cantwell. A study led by a Michigan State University scholar questions whether higher education ranking systems are creating competition simply for the sake of competition at a time when universities are struggling financially. Global rankings that emphasize science and technology research – such as the Academic Rankings of World Universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University – have become increasingly popular and influential during the past decade, said Brendan Cantwell, lead author and assistant professor of educational administration. As a result, researchers have begun to examine whether the rankings are creating increased inequality between and within universities. Cantwell’s study suggests higher education policies to achieve “world class” status are channeling more state and federal money to a select group of large research universities and away from efforts such as President’s Obama’s college completion agenda that aim to make a college degree achievable for all Americans. Read more...

World's top 100 universities 2013: their reputations ranked by Times Higher Education 
Harvard has topped a reputation ranking of worldwide universities, with US institutions taking more than 40 places on the top 100 list complied by Times Higher Education.
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Harvard university has once again topped the Times Higher Education's world reputation ranking of universities. The 2013 rankings, show the US dominating the list with more than 40 institutions in the top 100. Read more...