U-Multirank, the new international university ranking initiated by the European Commission, has exceeded its target of 500 registered higher education institutions ahead of schedule. To date 540 higher education institutions have registered for participation. Registration is still open, but space is limited, so interested institutions are encouraged to register now. Institutions in more than 60 countries will be represented in the initial listing, published for the first time early next year. U-Multirank differs from existing rankings by rating universities according to a broader range of performance factors, aimed at providing a more realistic and user-friendly guide to what they offer.
The currently registered institutions represent a balanced sample in different ways: In line with recruitment targets, about 75% are in the European Union and 25% in non-EU countries. Different profiles of higher education institutions will take part in the first round of U-Multirank, for instance universities of applied sciences and universities with a technical profile (around 12% each), comprehensive (around 50%) and specialized universities, etcetera. A large number of research intensive universities  are also represented. Read more...

Ukrainian National Ranking “Top 200 Ukraine released, for the seventh time, the results of the ranking of leading public and private higher education institutions in Ukraine. For the fourth consecutive year, the NTUU “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute” leads the ranking table. It received highest marks on quality of specialists training given by experts of domestic and international labor market. Kyiv Shevchenko National University came second followed by the Kharkiv Karazin National University.
In spite of  the top five positions are permanently being occupied by Kyiv National University named after Shevchenko (the second place), Kharkiv National University named after Karazin (the third place), National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (the fourth place), National Medical University named after Bogomolets (the fifh place) Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute has got closer to them. The last one is able to change the top charter by improving continuously the performance indicators.  National University “Lviv Polytechnics” confidently entered the top-10, having moved from 11th to 8th place. Read more...

4. Main conclusions - EUA Global University Rankings and Their Impact - Report II
1. There have been significant new developments since the publication of the first EUA Report in 2011, including the emergence of a new venture, the Universitas 21 Rankings of National Higher Education Systems, methodological changes made in a number of existing rankings and importantly a considerable diversification in the types of products offered by several rankings providers.
2. Global university rankings continue to focus principally on the research function of the university and are still not able to do justice to research carried out in the arts, humanities and the social sciences. Moreover, even bibliometric indicators still have strong biases and flaws. The limitations of rankings remain most apparent in efforts to measure teaching performance.
3. A welcome development is that the providers of the most popular global rankings have themselves started to draw attention to the biases and flaws in the data underpinning rankings and thus to the dangers of misusing rankings.
4. New multi-indicator tools for profiling, classifying or benchmarking higher education institutions offered by the rankings providers are proliferating. These increase the pressure on and the risk of overburdening universities, obliged to collect ever more data in order to maintain as high a profile as possible. The growing volume of information being gathered on universities, and the new “products” on offer also strengthen both the influence of the ranking providers and their potential impact.
5. Rankings are beginning to impact on public policy making as demonstrated by their influence in the development of immigration policies in some countries, in determining the choice of university partner institutions, or in which cases foreign qualifications are recognised. The attention paid to rankings is also reflected in discussions on university mergers in some countries.
6. A growing number of universities have started to use data compiled from rankings for the purpose of benchmarking exercises that in turn feed into institutional strategic planning.
7. Rankings are here to stay. Even if academics are aware that the results of rankings are biased and cannot satisfactorily measure institutional quality, on a more pragmatic level they also recognise that an impressive position in the rankings can be a key factor in securing additional resources, recruiting more students and attracting strong partner institutions. Therefore those universities not represented in global rankings are tempted to calculate their likely scores in order to assess their chances of entering the rankings; everyone should bear in mind that not all publication output consists of articles in journals, and many issues relevant to academic quality cannot be measured quantitatively at all...
PART II: Methodological changes and new developments in rankings since 2011
EUA’s 2011 Report analysed the major global rankings in existence at that time. The report covered the most popular university rankings, in particular: SRC ARWU and THE and QS rankings, rankings focused solely on research such as the Taiwanese HEEACT (since 2012 NTU Ranking) and the CWTS Leiden Ranking. Reference was also made to the outcomes of the EU Working Group on Assessment of University-Based Research (AUBR) which focused on the methodologies of research evaluation rather than on rankings and to the development of multi-indicator resources such as the EU-supported U-Map and U-Multirank, and the OECD AHELO feasibility study on student learning outcomes. This part of the present report covers both new developments in the global university rankings dealt with in the 2011 Report, and the methodologies of some rankings not covered in 2011 in further detail.
1. The SRC ARWU rankings
ARWU Ranking Lab and Global Research University Profiles (GRUP)
Macedonian University Rankings 29 Greater China Ranking
2. National Taiwan University Ranking: performance ranking of scientific papers for world universities
3. Times Higher Education
Times Higher Education World University Ranking
THE academic reputation surveys and THE World Reputation Ranking
THE 100 under 50 ranking
4. Thomson Reuters’ Global Institutional Profiles Project
5. Quacqarelli-Symmonds rankings
QS World University Ranking
Additional league table information
The QS classification
QS Stars
QS World University Rankings by subject
QS Best Student Cities Ranking 46 QS top-50-under-50 Ranking
6. CWTS Leiden Ranking
7. Webometrics Ranking of World Universities
8. U-Map
9. U-Multirank
10. U21 Rankings of National Higher Education Systems
11. SCImago Rankings
SCImago Institutional Rankings
Other SCImago rankings and visualisations
12. University Ranking by Academic Performance
13. EUMIDA
14. AHELO
15. IREG ranking audit. Download EUA Global University Rankings and Their Impact - Report II.

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.

Universitas 21, international organisation of research universities, annually publishes rankings of the best national education systems worldwide. They assess countries in four main categories: resources, environment, connectivity, and output.
Universitas 21, a worldwide consortium of leading research universities, has issued the rankings of countries, which offer higher education for international students. Second year in a row these rankings evaluated various criteria of national education systems as well as their progress and global impact.
Compared to last year result, in 2013 the Netherlands improved its overall position by 2 places and was ranked 7th with 78.2 points, ahead of United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, Germany, and France. United States and Sweden retained their first and second positions while Canada moved down by 1 place and let Switzerland to the 3rd place.
See the overall ranking list of the first 25 countries. Read more...

By Prashant K. Nanda. India is set to lobby international ranking agencies and seek their expertise on improving the poor showing of the country’s higher educational institutes in the global league tables.
The human resource development (HRD) ministry and the Planning Commission consider the absence of the country’s best institutions from the top 200 an embarrassment, especially for a country that’s supposed to be a knowledge economy.
As a first step, the HRD ministry and the plan panel will lobby London-based Times Higher Education (THE), which publishes the World University Rankings every year.
“You can call it a lobby or dialogue or engagement, but we want to engage with THE and other ranking agencies to improve our standing,” said an HRD ministry official, who did not want to be named.
In the THE World University Rankings of 2012-13, there were only three Indian institutes in the top 400 and the best of them was the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kharagpur, which was at 226-250. The other two were IIT Bombay and IIT Roorkee. In the Academic Ranking of World Universities conducted by China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University, only the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, figured in the top 500. Read more...