This paper examines three related puzzles: 1) Why do US universities dominate the global rankings? 2) Within US universities, why is Harvard University usually ranked at the top? 3) While most universities take centuries to acquire a global reputation how have many US universities leapfrogged to...

Educationalists are well able to find fault with rankings on numerous grounds and may reject them outright. However, given that they are here to stay, we could also try to improve them wherever possible. All currently published university rankings combine various measures to produce an overall...

When grades lose their informative value because the percentage of students receiving the best grade rises without any corresponding increase in ability, this is called grade inflation. Conventional wisdom says that such grade inflation is unavoidable since it is essentially costless to award...

In today’s data-filled society, institutions are abundant with information but lacking in the transformation of information to knowledge and further utilization of knowledge to support actionable change. The focus of the present study was to develop an instrument to gauge institutional...

On September 30, 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held in O’Bannon v. National Collegiate Athletic Association that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (“NCAA”) violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by prohibiting member colleges from offering their...

How can colleges find successful applicants? Criteria such as GPA, interviews, essays, and tests provide information about candidates, but which work and why? We shed light on these questions using unique data on the universe of objective and subjective rankings of all college applicants in...

Is the strength of favoritism from social ties gender-dependent? Collecting election data of the most distinguished Chinese scientific academies over a decade, we find favoritism from some social connections, such as sharing a hometown, college, or employer, between recruiters and candidates can...

When funding public goods, resources are often allocated via mechanisms that resemble contests, especially in the case of scientific grants. A common critique of these contests is that they induce “too much” effort from participants working on applications. However, this paper emphasizes the...

Does increasing diversity in university-intake require sacrificing academic performance, and if so, by how much? We develop an empirical framework to explore this trade-off ex-post, using admissions-data matched with post-admission academic outcomes. We propose a simple, theoretical model of...

This paper explores the determinants of different channels of knowledge transfer and their inter-linkages with academic and applied research. We use the longitudinal HE-BCI survey data juxtaposed against multiple rounds of research evaluation results in the UK higher education sector to estimate...