Some predictions for the THE rankings and summit

Some predictions for the THE rankings and summit

Here are my predictions for the THE rankings on the 21st and academic summit on the 26th -28th.

• Donald Trump will not be invited to give a keynote address.

• The decline of US public universities will be blamed on government spending cuts.

• British universities will be found to be in mortal danger from Brexit and visa controls.

• Phil Baty will give a rankings "masterclass" but will have to apologise to feminists because he couldn't think of anything else to call it.

• The words 'prestige' and 'prestigious' will be used more times than in the novel by Christopher Priest or the film by Christopher Nolan

• The counting of books will help British universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, but they will still be threatened by Brexit.

• The partial reinclusion of citations of papers with 1,000+ authors, mainly in physics, will lead to a modest recovery of some universities in France, Korea, Japan and Turkey. The rise of Asia will resume.

• Since the host city or university of THE summits somehow manages to get in the top ten, Berkeley will recover from last year's fall to 13th place. 

• Last year the percentage of survey responses from the arts and humanities fell to 9% from 16%. I suspect that this year the fall might be reversed and that the reason THE are combining the reputation survey results for this year and 2015 is to reduce the swing back to UK universities, which are suffering because of visa controls and Brexit.

• At least one of the above will be wrong..

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