Ranking CountriesUniversitas 21, a global alliance of research intensive universities, has produced a ranking of higher education systems. The US is top but the UK performs less well in tenth place. Muslim countries do particularly badly. What might be interesting would be to compare resources with output and produce an index of efficiency."A nation’s economic development depends crucially on the

Oxford and CambridgeFollowing on from the last post, can anyone explain why Cambridge can't produce Prime Ministers and Oxford can't produce comedians, at least not professional ones?

And now for something a little bit differentTimes Higher Education has announced that it will publish a ranking of new universities (less than fifty years old).The Times Higher Education 100 Under 50 will – as its name suggests – rank the world’s top 100 universities under the age of 50. The table and analysis will be published online and as a special supplement to the magazine on 31 May, 2012

Deja Vu All Over AgainMalaysia's love-hate affair with international rankings has taken another twist. The official target now is get one university in the top 50 and three in the top 100 in the QS rankings. That basically means that a Malaysian university will have to be the equal of New South Wales, Tsinghua or Warwick.Last year Universiti Malaya got into the top 500 in the Shanghai ARWU

What have I done?I was recently in a public library somewhere in Southeast Asia. While browsing around I discovered that access to this blog was blocked because of  "other adult material". I thought that perhaps someone was upset with university rankings in general, which is entirely understandable, but the THE, QS, ARWU, Webometrics and HEEACT sites were all unblocked.My best guess is that the

Is this what they meant by diversity?On December 1st. of last year I commented on proposals that the US News Law School Rankings should include an indicator for diversity.Such proposals are based on the increasing globalisation of the world economy and the need to understand other cultures. It is obvious that middle class white Americans who support abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action,