By Ruth A Pagell (31 Oct 2025) The two issues addressed in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s September webinar were international students and academic freedom. Both topics continue to be in the higher education news, and both topics are covered in Ruth’s Rankings. INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS: Fees paid by international students are important to many…
By Ruth A Pagell* (22 Sept 2025) What changes are Times Higher Education making? How does QS describe quality control for its Reputation Rankings? What marks the end of an era at U.S. News? I have been struggling with this article since rankings seem trivial compared to what I read in my national…
(25 Aug 2025) I apologize for being so far behind on my current Ruth’s Rankings article on Impact, but every morning’s news brings more discouraging postings from my government on its involvement in education and research. It makes rankings seem trivial and it makes my colleagues and I feel helpless. By the time I finished…
“75% of US scientists who answered Nature poll consider leaving”(the United States) (Witze) “Like a six-year old dropped on Mars without parents”(Aydogan, Izmir, & Shahin) (30 Jun 2025) The 2025 international education marketplace is undergoing changes in reaction to the new higher education landscape in the United States. Scholars are losing their funding. The fate…
By Ruth A Pagell* (21 Apr 2025) Living in the United States and writing about higher education has been challenging so far this year. I keep getting distracted from my topic for the month—which is reputation—by all of the other news read and heard every day. It makes university rankings seem trivial. Times Higher Education…
By Ruth A Pagell* (2 Jan 2025) Many decades ago, when I began working in academia, before global rankings, researchers were expected to write articles on their own. Today’s articles may be written by one author or a hundred authors, in the same or different departments, universities, or anywhere in the world, with or…
By Ruth A Pagell* (26 Nov 2024) When the new Singapore Management University hired me as its first University Librarian, I tried to draft a strategic plan before officially starting work. I always had data for US libraries, such as detailed library acquisition data found in the Library and Book Trade Almanac (Bayer;…
By Ruth A Pagell* (30 Sep 2024) Several rankings were released while I relived the past, writing RR 60. Changes include: Webometrics adding ROR (Research Organizations Registry) identity records to thousands of institutions and revising its university citation rankings SIR (Scimago Institutions Rankings) adding three new metrics to its Societal Factors US News Global modifying…
By Ruth A Pagell* (30 Jul 2024) The first part of my retrospective (RR60) is personal. It focuses on the broader picture of university rankings, their role in higher education, and the current criticisms of their shortcomings. This Addendum examines the data. It tracks the first two world rankings, the Academic Ranking of World…
By Ruth A Pagell* (29 Jul 2024) Ruth’s Rankings started in the middle of the current history of world university rankings. This is the story of how I became a player in the rankings game and the concerns I have about the future. I have tried to be a reporter rather than a critic,…