Formation Continue du Supérieur

The time of the year has come. Shanghai Jiao Tong University has published its much awaited Academic Ranking of World Universities 2013 (ARWU), presenting this year’s top 500 universities worldwide. 
To nobody’s surprise, the lion’s share goes to the United States, with 17 universities in the top 20 and 149 in the top 500 (one fewer than last year). Harvard University continues to take the first position, followed by Stanford University (2nd) and the University of California, Berkeley (3rd), which jumped ahead of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (4th).
Besides the United States, Great Britain and Switzerland also make it into the top 20, with Cambridge coming in 5th, Oxford 10th and ETH Zurich 20th, the latter being the first university in Continental Europe to ever enter the top 20 in the history of ARWU. With 75 institutions among the top 200, Europe scores well overall, although the distribution between countries remains quite unbalanced. In the Asia-Pacific region, which counts 30 institutions among the first-ranked 200, the University of Tokyo takes the crown (21st), followed by Kyoto University (26th) and the University of Melbourne (56th). Africa, with only four universities in the top 500 and none of them in the top 200, makes a sad ‘bottom of the barrel’.
Although the rise of Asia in the ‘official top 200’ is not solely driven by China as many a man has feared, China does have the second largest number of universities in the overall top 500 (42, with seven of them in the top 200) ranking higher than Germany (38) and, surprisingly, the United Kingdom (37), which lost a place compared to 2012.
Overall, the 2013 Shanghai ranking of universities holds only few surprises. Like many other rankings, ARWU links university scores to academic and research performances. This heavy reliance on research has earned it some serious criticism over the past, contributing to the present proliferation of global rankings wishing to ‘do things differently’ (e.g. U-Multirank, see ACA Newsletter – Education Europe, February 2013). But despite the on-going debate on the usefulness and accuracy of big international rankings, countries like Russia, China and Japan, to name only a few, are investing great amounts of money to increase their number of universities in the top 100.

Please welcome the new U-Map website which has been publicly launched this month. U-Map functions as a university classification instrument, and is intended to facilitate comparison between universities. The U-Map project was elaborated by the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) and has been co-financed by the European Commission since 2004. Since then, U-Map has gone through six different development stages. After its implementation in 2010-2011 and its launch for the universities of the Nordic states and the Netherlands in the same period, the U-Map tool will now be implemented across Europe and beyond.
Are you wondering which universities offer the most career-oriented programmes with direct links to the demands of the labour market? Would you like to know which universities have the highest percentage of international students? Are you looking for information on universities’ revenue from knowledge exchange activities? If so, U-Map might provide you with some useful answers byidentifying university profiles according to a variety of indicators. In fact, whereas its companion project U-Multirank (see ACA Newsletter - Education Europe, February 2013 and June 2013) aims at offering a multidimensional and user-driven approach to establish university rankings based on the selection of available indicators (research, teaching and learning, international orientation, knowledge transfer and regional engagement) chosen by the user him or herself, U-Map does not intend to rank but rather to profile universities. This means that U-Map illustrates universities on the basis of 29 separate indicators grouped together in six categories (teaching and learning profile, student profile, research involvement, regional involvement, involvement in knowledge exchange and international orientation).
U-Map is a useful tool which helps to indicate the strengths of universities according to different fields. Comparably to U-Multirank, U-Map allows to establish a more nuanced approach towards the higher education sector, but does not put emphasis on a hierarchical ranking as such.

U-Multirank

U-Map.

The Institute of International Education (IIE) announced in August that more than 300 companies across the United States are hosting summer internships for Brazilian students as part of the Brazil Scientific Mobility Program. This scholarship program, administered by IIE in the United States, is funded by the government of Brazil to strengthen science and technology skills and foster innovation and international cooperationin the country’s future workforce. Several leading U.S. corporations are supporting the program by offering scholarships and internships. The companies are providing students with practical experience in their fields, while also building relationships with the students, universities and future innovators in Brazil.
These students are among the approximately 1 500 Brazilian undergraduates who are studying at one of more than two hundred colleges and universities across the United States for one year prior to returning to Brazil to complete their degrees. Thirteen U.S. companies are hosting more than five interns each, including The Boeing Company and General Electric. The 300+ companies across the United States that are also hosting up to four interns each represent a wide range of businesses. Brazil Scientific Mobility Program

The ACA Newsletter – Education Europe team hopes you had a pleasant summer break and that you are prepared for a new academic year full of high-quality ACA events. Registrations for our European Policy Seminar dedicated to MOOCs are open and coming in at a frantic pace. So hurry up and be sure to secure a place. The seminar, organised in cooperation with the European University Association (EUA), will take place in Brussels on 10 October. It will be followed by a seminar dedicated to ‘mobility windows’ and the internationalisation of the curriculum, to happen on 5 December. Registrations will open soon. And to finish the year, on 13 December we will close our 2013 Policy Seminar series with an event devoted to higher education in Africa. This will be a co-production with EAIE, VLIR-OUS and EUA.
The 2014 programme is also beginning to take shape. On 30 January we will welcome you with our ACA classic What’s new in Brussels? But the highlight of the year will be the ACA Annual Conference 2014, to take place in lovely Bordeaux and hosted by one of ACA’s French members, 2e2f. Entitled Europe in the world. Higher education developments across the globe, this event will be staged between 15 and 17 June. Please block the dates.