The new U-Multirank is out, making it a big chance in this year’s Franz awards* for bureaucratically-sound but practically-impossible university comparators. 

U-Multirank is designed to be what the commercial rankings aren’t, awash with information for comparing universities on specific attributes in specific disciplines. It is definitely, decisively, definitively not a league table –a great deal of effort appears to have gone into stopping anybody using it as the basis of a top-to-bottom ranking.

The result is a product which addresses the concerns of critics of commercial ratings, who warn a university’s teaching and research performance and the way it compares to similar institutions cannot be meaningfully reduced to a single score.

And for people with the time and interest in how universities across the world compare U- Multirank will surely be useful indeed. But they will need oceans of time and acres of interest because the website is slow and user-frenemy – CMM tried comparing individual Aus universities teaching computer science with EU unis and failed.

U-Multirank describes its function “Universities compared. Your way.” Which is certainly true if you think “cumbersome” is a compliment.

* which CMM just made up.