U.S. Slips in Global Ranking

U.S. research universities have seen a drop in citation impact and academic reputation as institutions in East Asia and the Middle East have been gaining ground

University rankings rightly cause rancor for reducing the glorious complexities of higher education institutions into a crude, composite number--and for having far too much influence over students' choices. But some rankings provide rich data insights that it would be wrong--indeed, dangerous--to ignore. This is the case with the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, which released its 19th annual edition Tuesday.

The THE world rankings were established in 2004, not as a student consumer guide, sitting alongside rankings of best cars and best hospitals, but as a rigorous tool to help academics, administrators and policy makers in higher education make sense of their changing world. Indeed, THE devised the rankings in open consultation with the sector after a 2003 U.K. government report (the Lambert Review of University-Business Collaboration) lamented that the nation's leading research universities were too focused on benchmarking themselves against each other--"failing to recognize that in a global marketplace what counts is how they stand up against the best in the world."

The rankings rapidly became a closely watched barometer of the shifts in the global knowledge and innovation economy, as well as a resource for would-be students. The newly released edition examines the performance of 1,799 institutions from 104 countries, based on an analysis of more than 15 million research publications and 121 million citations to those publications, as well as 40,000 responses to a global academic reputation survey on top of data on institutional income and faculty demographics, including international talent recruitment and research collaboration.

China improves from 2 to 7 ... the Netherlands too has 7 in the top 100. Mark (Rutte) gladly will join Joe to add sanctions on China to stay ahead in rankings. Inequality pop. 18 million vs. 1.5 billion.

'Sapere aude'