I must admit just over a year ago when I started this blog, I didn’t expect the experience would be quite so rewarding and enjoyable and I certainly didn’t expect to still be going over a year later. This is the 100th post since that date and I therefore thought it fitting to celebrate the maiden century with The Times Top 100 University Rankings.
The Times Higher Education – QS World University Rankings exist to give students, academics, funders, politicians and policymakers, a broad view of the top institutions in world higher education.
This graphic from Brent Eades illustrates the rather limited geographical spread of those top 100 universities rather nicely. I can see another version of this, weighted by population coming soon…
Rankings are an emotive mechanism, as Times Higher Education Deputy Editor Phil Baty would no doubt be acutely aware. I’ve come to realise this also just of late with some quite strong reaction to simple measurements that we are producing with our BI/DW platform.
You can find out more and download all the University Rankings for the last 6 years here.
You only have to review the comments on Baty’s Talking Points post to see that everyone has a view on this. There is also a very interesting article from Jamil Salmi and Roberta Malee Bassett called Measures Matter that eloquently raises some great points and in summary, notes
As acceptance - begrudging or otherwise - of rankings has settled into the tertiary education environment, the debate has moved on to how to improve their methodology to provide more useful and legitimate data on which to base well-informed decisions.
That pretty much sums up my stance on the use of measurement in Higher Education. We’re still finding our way and discovering how best to combine the discipline of statistics with the powerful number crunching and visualisation capabilities of BI/DW platforms to serve both business and academic imperatives. Yes, we have a long way to go and we can refine and improve what we do, but right now we operate in an era where we can enjoy timely access to information previously only dreamed of. Surely we all have a responsibility to embrace that opportunity and collectively pursue the information-led transformation of our organisations.
Do you use measurement in your organisation? Does your organisation appear in the one of the world rankings? What is the general perception of these rankings and is there a correlation between ranking and perception?
I see you link to my Guardian “Top 100 Universities” infographic, which is much appreciated.
I withdrew my orginal graphic after realizing I’d made a couple of errors in computing its values.
The revised version is here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/59355637@N00/4014561865/
Regards,
PS The errrors were minor — I short-changed a couple of countries a top university here and there. The overall trend of the original graphic is still quite accurate.