Rankings Go Global!

Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Kevin Carey notes that even as we cope with national rankings, there is an onslaught of international rankings in development:

Once a purely American innovation — or problem, depending on how you look at it — lists of “best colleges” are everywhere. Even as the Times Higher is competing to establish the definitive worldwide college rankings, scores of nations from Kazakhstan to Peru are fast developing new systems to evaluate and publicly rank their institutions of higher education. College rankings have gone global. To observers of international higher education, this should come as no surprise. Widely cited statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) suggest that many nations are closing in on the United States’ decades-old lead in college attainment.