Rankings & Metrics
Ranking and Benchmarking Systems
The following overview relates to university ranking and benchmarking systems, particularly those representing the most prominent Canadian and international systems. The University of Regina participates with and provides data for several of these, while other systems do not require us to directly submit data.
The Office of Institutional Research has been working with various rankings since 2015. Largely the impetus for involving ourselves in the rankings was meant to “change the channel” on the Maclean’s rankings which were the only Canadian ranking in which we participated – largely because we ignored it at our peril. What caused the most concern is that the impression was that "reputation" was a problem and by participating in global rankings we would provide a boost to our reputational standing, as well as divert attention from Maclean’s.
Data used in the rankings include citation metrics (weighted differently by each ranking), and institutional data supplied by institutions or otherwise publicly available (Shanghai, CWUR, Leiden, US News). Some employ reputational surveys of academics and business leaders, while still others surveyed students. We facilitate both participation in reputational surveys and Maclean’s student survey (although this was suspended most recently because of reliability issues). Of all the rankings the University of Regina participates in, Maclean’s is the least nuanced in that it is not driven by citation metrics.
What rankings were chosen and why?
The list of rankings has evolved over time. Our current roster is based on criteria such as: 1) rankings that are well publicized, and 2) maximization of global coverage for recruitment purposes (often targeting rankings from regions we recruit undergraduate and graduate students from). The following is our current roster:
Times Higher Education (UK)
QS (UK)
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai)
Centre for Science and Technology Studies (Saudi Arabia)
Centre for World University Ranking (Leiden)
U.S. News (USA)
Maclean’s (Canada)
THE, QS and Maclean’s require us to submit data at various times of the year. In the case of THE we submit data multiple times per year. THE, QS and Maclean’s also include reputational surveys.
Benchmarking Systems
We also contribute to a number of quasi-rankings, also referred to as League Tables or Benchmarking systems. These are not “true rankings” in the sense that there is a single large list of all ranked universities, rather they are grouped by “type of institution”, most commonly distinguished by groupings based on research intensity. Maclean’s most notably does this by grouping institutions with a “medical school” (U15 institutions), comprehensive (a mix of research and undergraduate teaching), and primarily “undergraduate.
Clarivate and GRUP are separate but drive the subject rankings for Shanghai and U.S. News and are not a ranking system. These are mainly institutional profiles, but they allow Clarivate and Shanghai the information needed to develop “subject rankings”.
Peterson’s (U.S.A)
Clarivate (U.K)
GRUP (Shanghai)
Rankings by Subject
In his initial blog posting from November 27th, Alex Usher points to the Shanghai Rankings (AWRU) rankings by subject. While the University of Regina’s global rankings put the university in a band of something resembling the Top 25 to Top 30ish in the world, the University of Regina has programs that rank closer to the Top 100. For example, we rank highly in “mineral engineering” despite not having a dedicated “mining engineering” department. In the category of Psychology, the University of Regina ranks in the Top 200 globally, but “clinical psychology” would rank much higher if we drill down into the broad category of general “psychology”. It’s by virtue of their publication of subject rankings that we monitor the results of Shanghai, CWTS (Saudi Arabia), Leiden and U.S. News. Shanghai tends to be especially kind to University of Regina when it comes to subject rankings. Times Higher Education and Quacqarelli Simmonds (QS) also produces a ranking based on subject. Maclean’s is the only ranking we continue to submit data to that does not produce a ranking by subject.
Sustainability and Impact Rankings
Currently, THE Impact rankings and QS Sustainability rankings produce metrics related to the sustainability of a given university. Generally, Canada and Australia/New Zealand dominate the sustainability rankings. For example, in our first iteration of QS Sustainability rankings the University of Regina placed #341 globally out of 1000 global institutions. Again, this places the University of Regina in the Top third percentile globally.