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U.S. News and World Report has announced that it will release its first global ranking of universities on Oct. 28. U.S. News plans to publish a global ranking of the top 500 universities across 49 countries, as well as four regional, 11 country-level, and 21 subject area-specific rankings.
The Best Global Universities ranking will be based on reputational data, bibliometric indicators of academic research performance, and data on faculty and Ph.D. graduates. Robert Morse, U.S. News’s chief data strategist, said that there will be no cross-over of data between the publication's longstanding ranking of American colleges and the new global ranking, which will rely on data from Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters also provides data for the global university ranking compiled by Times Higher Education (THE).
“What we’re doing is completely, 100 percent independent from THE,” Morse said. “It’s our methodology, our choice of variables, our choice of weights, our choice of how the calculations are done, our choice of how the data’s going to be presented.”
U.S. News is entering into territory dominated by three major global university rankings: those produced by Times Higher, the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, and QS. “I think it’s natural for U.S. News to get into this space,” Morse said. “We’re well-known in the field for doing academic rankings so we thought it was a natural extension of the other rankings that we’re doing."
Morse pointed out that U.S. News will also be the first American publisher to enter the global rankings space (Times Higher and QS are both British, while the Shanghai rankings originate in China). Noting that to date there hasn’t been much interest among the general American public in global university rankings (as opposed to U.S.-specific ones), Morse said, “maybe people will pay more attention to the ones we do.”
