QS World University Rankings 2011/2012 Publication Date Announced
This year’s edition of the QS World University Rankings will be published next week on Monday 5th September 2011 – 00.01 (GMT+1). The pre-press release is available here:
QS World University Rankings 2011/2012 Pre-Press Release
It has been a long, hard road, but the results look compelling, feature more institutions than ever and draw upon the most extensive survey and data collection exercises yet conducted.
Watch this space.
New methodology pages live
by Ben Sowter
We have been working hard on improving and developing the depth of methodological information available online. The decision has been taken to keep the information alongside the results as simple and straightforward as possible designed to provide our principally student audience with waht they need to know quickly. As a result the mthodology pages on www.topuniversities.com will be radically simplified and the detailed information will be found here on www.iu.qs.com.
There will also be a detailed FAQ section which we have begun work on.
Current methodology pages available…
- QS World University Rankings®
- QS World University Rankings® by Subject
- QS SAFE – National System Strength Analysis
- QS Classifications
Enjoy! We will be in touch very soon with information on the release and what you can expect from us in the next couple of weeks.
Using rankings to set policy and funding criteria
by Ben Sowter
I recently received an email from a professor at a Spanish university. In a nutshell, his university had revised its funding policy guidelines to include the criterion that PhD students should have taken their undergraduate program at a university within the top 500 in Webometrics in order to be eligible for funding. Before applying this criterion, he had a PhD candidate from the University of Mumbai that was placed 3rd, introducing it dropped her to 7th and ineligible for a grant. The professor pointed out the University of Mumbai’s position of 155 in our ranking but this was dismissed by the committee due to the fact that QS is a commercial entity and thus our observations somehow invalid.
Our response (below) may make for interesting reading – it’s not just about promoting the strengths of the QS approach to ranking but also about how rankings might more responsibly be applied to this kind of context.
UK revised university fees – the full list…
The BBC have posted a pretty comprehensive list of the current fees proposals for UK universities. It’s available here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12880840
The vast majority of universities have either opted for the top level (or not far off) or have proposed a range that gets towards the top end of the scale. There certainly doesn’t seem to be the normal distribution that David Willetts and his team had projected.
QS World University Rankings by Subject: Philosophy
Click here to see more results in the Arts & Humanities.
| Rank | Title | Country | Academic | Employer | Citations | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Harvard University | United States | 99.6 | 96.3 | 50.3 | 94.3 |
| 2 | University of Oxford | United Kingdom | 100.0 | 95.4 | 41.0 | 93.6 |
| 3 | University of Cambridge | United Kingdom | 94.5 | 100.0 | 51.9 | 90.8 |
| 4 | University of California, Berkeley (UCB) | United States | 88.4 | 65.4 | 73.3 | 84.6 |
| 5 | Princeton University | United States | 80.1 | 39.7 | 81.6 | 76.2 |
| 6 | Australian National University | Australia | 73.8 | 52.8 | 95.1 | 73.8 |
| 7 | University of Toronto | Canada | 77.1 | 60.6 | 36.1 | 71.4 |
| 8 | Stanford University | United States | 74.8 | 46.0 | 56.7 | 70.1 |
| 9 | Yale University | United States | 73.2 | 64.4 | 22.1 | 67.2 |
| 10 | University of Chicago | United States | 71.1 | 50.4 | 13.8 | 63.3 |
| 11 | New York University (NYU) | United States | 64.7 | 50.9 | 60.0 | 62.9 |
| 12 | Columbia University | United States | 64.4 | 60.4 | 41.3 | 61.7 |
| 13 | University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) | United States | 60.6 | 59.9 | 61.0 | 60.6 |
| 14 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | United States | 53.4 | 78.4 | 90.8 | 59.6 |
| 15 | The University of Melbourne | Australia | 55.1 | 53.3 | 95.5 | 59.0 |
| 16 | University of British Columbia | Canada | 59.1 | 45.2 | 52.9 | 57.1 |
| 17 | University of Michigan | United States | 55.9 | 39.6 | 80.1 | 56.7 |
| 18 | McGill University | Canada | 57.3 | 53.9 | 26.5 | 53.9 |
| 19 | London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) | United Kingdom | 55.2 | 55.7 | 39.2 | 53.7 |
| 20 | The University of Sydney | Australia | 55.2 | 53.6 | 30.6 | 52.6 |
Honorary doctorates boldly go where no doctorate has gone before
by Ben Sowter
Widespread coverage in Canada regarding McGill University awarding William “Captain Kirk” Shatner with an honorary doctorate. Here he gives a pretty respectable acceptance speech, and this award may be well justified – after all this man has saved mankind on several occasions, but it did pique my curiosity as to other honorary doctorate recipients that perhaps may or may not be so deserving.
Financial measures tricky for international university rankings
by Ben Sowter
For the most stalwart followers of our posts who have been with since the very beginning, you may remember an early post discussing the relationship between exchange rates and ranking performance when financial measures have been involved. If not you can refresh your memory here.
Well we recently had cause to update that analysis. We have not been able to look at 10 years of the Financial Times Global Full-Time MBA Rankings, rather than taking a snapshot of January exchange rates, we have taken the average exchange rate from the preceding year (since almost all rankings measures are at least somewhat retrospective) and plotted that against the number of British business schools in the top 50.
More on the subject rankings…
Nice to see some positive reaction already for our new subject tables. This from…
We’ve also written up the detailed methodology in a friendlier linked format on a page on the blog – find it here. More to come.
Subject Rankings by Geography?
by Ben Sowter
With the QS World University Rankings® – Engineering & Technology 2011 dues to emerge on Tuesday, I have been experimenting with some new tools to help visualize our data, this chart shows the relative representation by (European) country in the first cluster of subjects as a whole (size of pie chart) and the corresponding proportion of representation from each of the component subjects. Useful? Interesting? Comments appreciated.
European Representation in Engineering & Technology Subject Rankings
Subject rankings provide visualization of institutions’ strengths by discipline
by Ben Sowter
The diagram below is an anonymous example of an institution’s competency map by discipline based on the forthcoming results of the QS World University Rankings® by Subject. This particular university has key strengths in Architecture, Education, Metallurgy and Chemistry and perform solidly in the Engineering & Technology area. Any guesses?
Subject rankings provide competency maps across disciplines
The subject rankings draw upon citations data from Scopus as well as Academic and Employer opinion and facilitate a very easy to interpret visual map of an institution’s relative competence map in an international context. This level of detail will certainly be feasible though our customized reports and we are investigating ways to deliver them online.
The subject rankings will be launched between April 5th and May 31st at events in Malaysia, Dubai, France and Canada and will be followed up with a publication compiling the complete set of 33 disciplines.
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