University rankings sell a lot of newspapers and magazines. But how seriously should teachers, students and, importantly, policy makers take them?
While there are many national rankings of higher education institutions, it is the small number of international rankings that attract the greatest media attention. Of these, the annual Academic Ranking of World Universities (known as the “Shanghai ranking”) is arguably the best known, although the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the QS World University Rankings® also create a stir when they are published each year.
While based on different criteria, all three have at least 15 US research universities in the top 25 and there are five institutions– Cambridge, Chicago, Harvard, MIT and Oxford–that appear in the top ten positions in all three. The most heavily weighted factors in each ranking are related to the institution’s research output rather than to how well they teach.
This may be one drawback to watch out for in trying to make a complete assessment. Indeed, the effect of these rankings has been to focus attention on both the “best” universities and how to create and sustain them, rather than on how to improve the quality of higher education more broadly. UNESCO has been sufficiently concerned about this development that it co-organised, along with the OECD and the World Bank, an international Forum on Rankings and Accountability in Higher Education in May 2011.
It is increasingly recognised that research output is not the only, or even the best, measure, and that the other activities in which universities are involved–notably teaching, but also technology transfer and community engagement–matter just as much, if not more, to the quality of the education provided. But as of now, there is no way to measure the quality and impact of these activities comparably.
In the meantime, the OECD’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) initiative is showing that graduate learning outcomes can be evaluated. And the European Commission is developing a tool that will enable users to rank institutions according to six aspects, and against a number of indicators, depending on the users’ priorities and preferences. Visit www.oecd.org/edu/ahelo.
See also:
The Academic Ranking of World Universities.
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings
The QS World University Rankings
The Global Forum on Rankings and Accountability in Higher Education: Uses and Misuses, Paris, 16-17 May 2011.

One of the greatest strengths of the higher education world is its diversity - and this shone through in a competition asking filmmakers to describe what it is that makes their institution world class.
The competition, set up to mark the launch of the 2012-13 Times Higher Education World University Rankings on 3 October 2012, attracted dozens of entries from all around the world. Some 14 videos which made the final long-list represented institutions in Australia, Canada, China, Estonia, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, the US and UK.
The videos, which were restricted to just ten seconds, had collectively accumulated almost 25,000 views on the video sharing website You Tube as Times Higher Education went to press. Read more...

By Jacey Fortin. A new report has ranked Finland as the best educational performer on Earth. At first glance, the findings are a bit odd. You might expect the best performers – or the worst, for that matter – to come from the same general region.
Finland in first place? That’s no surprise -- those northern European countries always seem to do well on lists like these. But the next four countries are worlds away; No. 2 is South Korea. Then comes Hong Kong-China, then Japan, and then Singapore.
With a gang of Asian powerhouses in ascendancy, Finland is looking pretty lonely at the top. As for global superpowers, the United Kingdom comes in 6th. The United States is in 17th place. Russia snagged 20th; France, 25th. And of the 40 ranked, the three worst countries were Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia. The report, called “The Learning Curve,” was produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit, or EIU, and published by Pearson, an educational firm. It ranks countries according to various criteria, including standardized test scores, matriculation and literacy rates. More...

By William Patrick Leonard. Parents and students assessing tertiary institution options undertake a significant challenge. When their consideration includes foreign institutions, the process becomes significantly more challenging. A foreign degree may lead to life-changing opportunities and often drastically higher expenses.
These searchers may rely on the personal experience of family members and friends, augmented by institutional reputation assessments offered by the major ranking systems: QS, Shanghai Jiao Tong and Times Higher Education. Those considering US institutions are also likely to consult US News’ Best Colleges.
Family and friends consultation, which is based on trust, is second only to first-hand experience. The responders’ familiarity with the unique characteristics of both the prospective student and the institution(s) under consideration may be helpful in isolating the best fit. More...

By Karen MacGregor, Global Editor. Professor Max Price has led Africa's top-ranked university for four years. The University of Cape Town's vision is to be 'Afropolitan' and it is also highly international, with nearly 20% of students and 25% of academics from outside South Africa. Price told University World News what the institution is doing right.
The ‘Afropolitan’ idea has become the hallmark of Price’s leadership, and is the concept framing the university’s development drive into the future, even though how it would transpire was entirely unclear in the early years.
The ‘Afro’, he explained, is obviously a reference to the university’s focus on the continent. ‘Politan’ signifies “that it is not a retrospective look, a sort of naive subsidy economy, safari economy view of the continent, but rather a cosmopolitan and metropolitan view of a continent that is developing fast and is involved with the future". More...

By Graeme Paton. Colleges should be ranked by the number of students getting jobs amid continuing concerns over unemployment rates among teenagers, according to Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills).
The Government should use “destination data” to make sure institutions are properly preparing 16- to 19-year-olds for the workplace, it was claimed. In a report, the education watchdog said the best colleges placed a strong emphasis on developing students’ employment skills such as problem-solving, working as a team, applying literacy and numeracy, computing and managing their time properly. But it was feared that most lecturers failed to track teenagers’ progress to make sure courses actually led to jobs.
The disclosure comes amid continuing concerns over unemployment rates among young people who have been hardest hit by the economic downturn. Data released in the summer showed that 968,000 16- to 24-year-olds were not in education, employment or training (NEET) during the second quarter of 2012 – one-in-six of the age group. This included some 875,000 people aged 18-to-24. More...

By Kris Olds. I've often wondered if the term 'World University Rankings' -- the one deployed by the firm QS in its QS World University Rankings®, or TSL Education Ltd along with Thomson Reuters, in their Times Higher Education World University Rankings, is an accurate and indeed ethical one to use.
My concern over the term was heightened during visit to Jamaica last week where I attended the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) Conference of Executive Heads. I was invited by the ACU, the world's oldest international consortia with 500+ member institutions in 37 countries, to engage in a debate about rankings with Ms. Zia Batool (Director General, Quality Assurance and Statistics, Higher Education Commission, Pakistan) and Mr. Phil Baty (Editor, Times Higher Education). Link here for a copy of the conference agenda. The event was very well organized, and Professor Nigel Harris, Chair of the ACU Council and Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, was a wonderful host.
My concern about the term 'World University Rankings' relates to the very small number of universities that are ranked relative to the total number of universities around the world that have combined research and teaching mandates. World University Rankings is a term that implies there is a unified field of universities that can be legitimately compared and ranked in an ordinal hierarchical fashion on the basis of some common metrics. More...

By Richard Holmes. A depressing thing about the international university ranking business is the gullibility of university administrators and academic commentators.
A case in point is the reaction to the recent Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, which appeared to show some Asian and continental European universities rising over the past year at the expense of their Anglo-Saxon competitors.
In fact, much of the improvement of many universities was just the result of a change in the method of calculating the scores for the ranking’s two reputational surveys, which boosted the scores of those with modest reputations.
Also, some universities received implausibly high scores for the research impact indicator, which is measured by normalised citations and which THE considers to be the flagship of the rankings.
I have calculated the world's top universities for research impact according to this indicator in this year's THE World University Rankings. The indicator, which was prepared by Thomson Reuters, accounts for 30% of the total ranking, a lot more than any other. The data is from the profiles that can be accessed by clicking on the top 400 universities.
Here are the top 20.
1- Rice University
1- Moscow (State) Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI)
3- University of California Santa Cruz
3- MIT
5- Princeton University
6- Caltech
7- University of California Santa Barbara
7- Stanford University
9- University of California Berkeley
10- Harvard University
11- Royal Holloway London
12- University of Chicago
13- Northwestern University
14- Tokyo Metropolitan University
14- University of Colorado Boulder
16- University of Washington Seattle
16- Duke University
18- University of California San Diego
18- University of Pennsylvania
18- Cambridge University. More...