New report on European higher education budgets

Higher Education

We always warn against reading too much into University league tables. They tend to be flawed, often controversial, and, at best, offer merely a useful snapshot. But they are very widely scrutinised – and when institutions do well they love to gloat about it ! So, here, we offer an update from four recent international league tables - focussing of course on just Europaeum partner members.

Perhaps illustrating the importance of the league tables, the University of Helsinki has announced its 2012-2016 strategy which calls for the active recruitment of more international students, researchers, and teachers to support its goal of solidifying its position as one of the top world universities. Already ranked within the top 100 universities in the world on the rankings with more complex methodologies, Helsinki aims to increase its prestige by breaking into the top 50 by developing its operations, management, communications and co-operation networks. The University will also increase young student exposure to top scholars and scientists. Click here to learn more.

The table below highlights the positions from the QS, Shanghai ; the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and the THE Reputation Rankings, a brand new evaluation from the Times Higher Education, each claiming to have the best modes and criterion of measurement. Please click on the various links for full tables and full explanations of methodology !

A note on the Graduate Institute of Geneva:
The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Geneva is not included in the University rankings, since it is not a full university. The University of Geneva, however, with which the Geneva Graduate Institute has ties, scored well. It came 130th in the THE World Rankings, 73rd in the Shanghai Rankings, and 69th in the QS Rankings.

A note on the different rankings (for more information, please press on the ranking headings):

THE Reputation Rankings: This “simply gathers academics' opinions on the quality of research and teaching in institutions within their disciplines and with which they are familiar”. The reputation table ranks institutions according to an overall measure of their esteem that combines data on their reputation for research and teaching.

THE World University Rankings: These rankings employ 13 separate performance indicators designed to assess the full spectrum of university activities. These 13 elements are brought together into five headline categories, namely: Teaching, Research, Citations, Industry income, International outlook.

Shanghai Rankings: Universities are ranked by several indicators of academic or research performance, including alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, papers published in Nature and Science, papers indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution.

QS Rankings: Six indicators are assessed, with the highest weighting going to the universities’ academic reputation, but also including the faculty-student ratio, academic citations, employer reputation, the proportion of international students, and the proportion of the faculty that is international.