Forbes: America's Best Colleges

In case you missed it, Forbes magazine came in early August with its list of "America's Best Colleges" "from the students' point of view." In addition to the listings, there are brief essays and opinion pieces, like Hana R. Alberts's "How West Point Beat the Ivy League"; Louis Menard's "The Marketplace of Ideas," and Jill Biden's "Consider Community College." You should probably take a quick look.

The Easiest Way to Boost Rankings: Kill the Humanities?

An interesting OECD look at college and university rankings around the world:

Exhortations to become world class have tucked universities into a Procrustean bed of indicators. Presidents anxiously cut back programmes, reorient their university’s mission, swell application numbers to tighten student selectivity, and seek mergers with higher-ranking institutions–conversely, those higher up jealously guard their hard-won reputations and shy away from collaborating with anyone but their peers. Deep excisions may be made into the social sciences and humanities to leave more room for the natural sciences and research. Speaking at the biennial conference of the OECD’s Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) in September, Ellen Hazelkorn of the Dublin Institute of Technology, cited a respondent to an international survey which said that “the easiest way to boost rankings is to kill the Humanities”. Clearly not a realistic proposition, though another survey told her that “reputation, unfortunately, is always based on research, and research attracts the best talent”.

But rankings are not going to go away. After all, they can provoke useful questions, such as “why exactly are we not in the top group?”, or indeed, “how can we maintain this lead?”. Governments and universities will still use them, as fierce competition between universities induces copycat behaviour unless policy encourages diversity. Whether they serve as an accurate guide to higher education is therefore strictly academic.

World Rankings Provoke Global Reaction

See the listing of the current top 200 universities, worldwide. Does this list matter? Some have suggested that few pay attention to world rankings. However, the media is paying more and more attention. The latest "Top 50" list has been published and here are some of the reactions by the top leaders at those schools. As well, Times Higher Education is exploring the reactions from the international higher education community:

In the US, which once again dominates the top of the league table, the Chronicle of Higher Education highlighted that 37 of the top 100 institutions are American, including six of the top ten, while the Ann Arbor News noted that the University of Michigan, placed 18th in the table, was the highest-ranked public university in the country.

Meanwhile, the news agency Bloomberg calculated that US universities occupy 20 of the top 50 slots and British institutions eight.

In Canada, much was made of McGill University’s appearance at 20th spot in the rankings, a fall of eight places for the country’s best-rated institution.

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.

Rankings, Diversity, and Excellence: A European Policy Challenge?

In International Higher Education, Ellen Hazelkorn takes a global look at international rankings of higher education institutions.

Worldwide higher education rankings, of which the Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities is now a leading example, have highlighted research intensity as the defining characteristic of higher education. Around the world, governments and higher education institutions are responding, and these developments are forcing changes in higher education systems. This trend is especially true in Europe where efforts to establish the European Higher Education Area and the European Research Area are challenging traditional assumptions about higher education systems and the balance between equity, diversity, and excellence.

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The details in each country vary but do represent a growing urgency to reform Europe's higher education institutions for competitiveness, while acknowledging that traditional universities can no longer meet all the geopolitical demands for research, development, and innovation. As part of this process, the European Commission is funding the development of a European "Carnegie Classification" with emphasis on broadening both horizontal and vertical differentiation.