(Shanghai, July 22) The Academic Ranking of World Universities 2008 will be officially published on August 15, 2008 by the Graduate School of Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University on its ranking website http://www.arwu.org/

(Toronto, July 18) Alex Usher, Vice President of the Educational Policy Institute in his Commentary at the Institute’s Week in Review wonders why universities unlike cities are so critical of rankings.

Prestige is the coin of the academic realm.  We can sort of measure it through things like bibliometrics, but academics don’t really need those kinds of things to know who’s doing well and who’s not in the profession.  Just from reading each other’s work (and from reading reviews of each other’s work), an informal pecking order develops naturally.

Here’s where it gets interesting, though.

Bratislava (June 30, 2008). The Academic Ranking and Rating Agency (ARRA) was established in 2004 by two distinguished members of the Slovak academia – Professor Ján Pišút, who served as a Minister of Education of Slovakia in 1991-1992, and Professor Ferdinand Devínsky, former Vice-Rector and Rector of the Comenius University in Bratislava (1990-2003) – together with two former student leaders, Renáta Králiková and Juraj Barta.

The main goal of ARRA is to regularly issue a quality assessment of Slovak public higher education institutions. Since December 2005, ARRA has published three such ranking reports on quality of research and teaching of the Slovak public universities and their faculties.

Creation of the IREG–International Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence 

Warsaw – On April 18, 2008 an important decision was reached by the International Ranking Expert Group (IREG) to consolidate its partnership arrangement with the   creation of the IREG-International Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence. 

This proposal was previously discussed at a meeting of IREG held at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in October 2007 when a concept for continuing the work of IREG in a more structured format received the overall support of those associated with this partnership – representing major national and international rankings together with leading analysts. The creation of the IREG-International Observatory reflects the accomplishments achieved by IREG since it was first formed in 2004 in Washington D.C. as an informal on-going arrangement.  In this regard a significant development has been the adoption in May 2006 of the Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions which articulated 16 standards of good practice. Consequently, IREG has become an internationally recognized platform for dialogue on various aspects of ranking in higher education.