On Ranking Improvement, Redux: Putting Things Into Perspective

 

Vladimiro Sassone, a friend of Anna Ingólfsdóttir's and mine, is the director of the PhD school at the University of Southampton (UK), which is a top school in, amongst others, science and engineering. That university has 317 PhD students, which is substantially more than the full time members of staff at Reykjavík University.  That university achieved outstanding recognition in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), where 24 out of 34 subject areas were awarded 5 and 5* ratings – the highest awards possible. Southampton is one of the top 10 UK research universities, and is ranked 141 in the world in the World University rankings published in the Times Higher Education Supplement in October 2006. This puts the aim of any Icelandic university to be a university in the top 100 into perspective, and further highlights the futility of ranking improvement as an aim. 

 An interesting piece of information. Britain has more new entrants than any other country, with 29 universities in the top 200, up from 23 last year.