10 May 2020  Issue No: 597

Times Higher Education’s 2020 Impact Rankings show variability in the type of institutions ranking and in the goals that they focus on, and offer valuable information for benchmarking as well as a way for different universities to gain global visibility. The University of Auckland ranked first overall for the second consecutive year.

The United Kingdom government has announced measures to protect students and universities from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic – but immediately faced criticism for failing to plug a funding gap of billions of pounds left by the loss of domestic and international tuition fees.

The social sciences and humanities have a crucial role to play during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond in answering the basic question of how we respond to living in a changed world. There are three broad approaches that might help academics in diverse contexts to re-think and re-imagine the future.

A partnership in East Africa is helping lecturers to teach in ways that ensure graduates leave university not just with subject knowledge but also the wider skills they need for their own employment, to make a positive difference in the wider world and to be better equipped to adapt to change.

The United States is top of the ninth and final ranking of national higher education systems by Universitas 21, a global network of research-intensive universities, followed by Switzerland and Denmark. Universitas 21 says the ranking has revealed which countries “are making the greatest improvements in higher education outcomes” over time.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created urgency around consultations on shared values and principles that would hasten global access to data, research, publications and technological innovations.