... the new tables from People & Planet are much more colourful.
I see that the usual suspects have done reasonably well again, and that many of those that do well in everything else, have all done equally badly. My own institution would no doubt take pleasure to be clustered with Imperial, Oxford, and Cambridge, were it ever to take any notice at all of what P & P gets up to. I have written before on the disparities between success in the P&P world, and in the one that matters to most universities.
The winner this year, and by a distance, was Plymouth, whose success seems to owe a lot to its carbon reduction score. This, at 80%, is way ahead of others near the top. Mind you, other institutions scored 100%, which leads you to wonder, 100% of what, exactly. There is small print somewhere, I guess, but it would be taking all this nonsense too seriously to hunt it down. Plymouth will, no doubt, hope that such a good news story will take the public mind off the waste of money and energy that accrued from having recently quite carelessly misplaced a VC.
If you want some detailed background on university league tables, then two recent posts from the Greenwich VC might be of interest. The second post concludes:
"... league tables ... continue to be based on what we can easily measure and what we have always measured, rather than on what counts and what should be counted."
Rather like assessment and evaluation in general, then. It will be quite a challenge to overcome these tendencies, and not just because they are so entrenched.
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