The news will scarcely be surprising to anyone who keeps an eye on international higher education, but it was reported this week that 11 big Canadian universities have pulled out of the annual university rankings survey conducted by Macleans magazine, writes David Cohen.
To put it another way, yet another academic ranking exercise has itself been ranked - and found wanting. Everything academic gets ranked these days, so it seems natural that some of these international exercises should themselves fall under scrutiny.
In the US, it is an open question whether anticipation is higher in some quarters for the looming US News
and World Report university survey, which started ranking colleges in 1987 and is now generally regarded as the country's league table leader, or for the coming Princeton Review of America's "best" party schools.
In China, there is the "Shanghai ranking" of the world's 500 "best" universities, although that survey has recently found itself
under scrutiny, too: a complementary survey, whose findings are not exactly complimentary to the original, has been published by the Slovenian Institute Jozef Stefan, in Ljubljana.
Another recent global ranking exercise, Webometrics, runs a computer over the various websites of the world's universities in order to "show the commitment of institutions to web publication and to the worldwide open access to knowledge". The ranking weighs the volume of an institution's published material on the web and the visibility of those webpages, measured by links from other cites, visits and citations.
If that approach seems a bit clinical, another international site offers a guide to the quality of various institutions of higher learning, in the US and beyond, as measured by the size, health and behaviour of the squirrel population on campus. The method directly links the prestige of an institution with the number of its squirrels. Nutty, right?
More sober is the College Ranking Service, whose method takes into account some "629 independent factors contributing to the quality of a college". No, don't ask. Because rankings are inherently dynamic, the compilers explain, each time the "refresh" button is clicked, the survey "will recompute the rankings based on the most up-to-the-nanosecond data".
The website calls itself "a non-profit organisation dedicated to providing rankings of colleges in a manner suitable for students, university leaders, and tuition paying parents ... Each college is painstakingly analysed, as if under a microscope, for its flaws and degree of polish." The rankings therefore "represent thousands of hours of research and are updated annually or at the discretion of the director".
Who is this director? Like the entire board, which is described as being composed entirely of unidentified Nobel prize winners and captains of industry, his or her identity remains anonymous - to "ensure the integrity of the rankings". A joke or a serious point? Ask the Canadian vice-chancellors.
