The THE New University Rankings

Times Higher Education have produced their ranking of 100 universities founded in the last fifty years. Here are the top ten:

1. Pohang University of Science and Technology
2. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
3. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
4. University of California, Irvine
5. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
6. Université Pierre et Marie Curie
7. University of California, Santa Cruz
8. University of York
9. Lancaster University
10. University of East Anglia

The list looks rather different from the QS new university ranking published two days ago. That is unsurprising since the QS table is heavily weighted towards two reputation surveys while the THE rankings are influences by various measures of income and by normalised citations.

QS Asian University Rankings

QS have just published their 2012 Asian University Rankings. I will comment in a bit more detail later.

The top ten are:

1.  The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2.  National University of Singapore
3.  University of Hong Kong
4.  Seoul National University
5.  Chinese University of Hong Kong
6.  Peking University
7.  Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
8.  University of Tokyo
9.  Pohang University of Science and Technology
10. Kyoto University

The QS Under 50 Top 50

Early this month, Times Higher Education announced that they would publish a ranking of the top 100 universities less than 50 years old. The date for publication was May 31.

Now QS have just announced their ranking of new universities. The top ten are

1.  Chinese University of Hong Kong
2.  Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
3.  Warwick
4.  Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
5.  Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
6.  University of York, UK
7.  Pohang University of Science and Technology
8.  Maastricht University
9.  City University of Hong Kong
10. University of California Irvine

East Asia, especially Hong Kong and Korea, make a strong showing although there are no Mainland Chinese universities in the top 50.

No doubt there will be quiet smirks around the QS offices. And no doubt THE will say something about originality on Thursday.

Exaggerated Metaphor Alert

Bloomberg has an interesting article by Mark C. Taylor, claiming that competition is killing higher education in the US.  I think that, like the Roman soldier in Night at the Museum, he is speaking metaphorically.

There are some amusing points about the craze for buildings and programs of every conceivable variety.

"It’s about “keeping up with the Joneses,” an official at Wright State University said in a Dayton Daily News article last fall detailing why colleges in Ohio were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on student centers and other nonacademic attractions in a down economy. In Georgia, state legislators arereviewing questionable practices used to fund 173 projects to build student housing, parking garages, stadiums and recreation centers.
Private universities with large endowments often start the cycle. Schools such as Harvard University and New York University, for example, take on billion-dollar debts. In a trickle-down effect, less affluent schools also feel pressure to borrow and spend -- money they do not have.  "

Then he describes how some schools have been gaming the rankings by reclassifying tutorials in order to decrease class size or by creating superfluous and expensive doctoral programs.

'Second- and third-tier universities often create unneeded doctoral programs to become eligible for additional federal support and to increase their global profile. For example, the University of North Texas has 36,000 students and advertisesitself as “a student-focused public research university”offering “97 bachelor’s, 82 master’s and 35 doctoral degree programs.”
Even this is not enough. Although severe budget shortfallshave led to cuts of as much as 90 percent for some programs, the university is adding new doctoral programs in a quest for the elusive top-tier status. This makes no educational sense and violates basic market principles. If successful, the University of North Texas will join too many other schools that are spending large amounts for unneeded programs that turn out products -- doctoral graduates -- for which the supply far outweighs the demand. This is a national issue, as pointed out in an article this month in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps.” '

Ranking Countries

Universitas 21, a global alliance of research intensive universities, has produced a ranking of higher education systems. The US is top but the UK performs less well in tenth place. Muslim countries do particularly badly.

What might be interesting would be to compare resources with output and produce an index of efficiency.


"A nation’s economic development depends crucially on the presence of an educated and skilled workforce and on technological improvements that raise productivity. The higher education sector contributes to both these needs: it educates and trains; it undertakes pure and applied research. Furthermore, in a globalised world, a quality higher education system that is well-connected internationally facilitates the introduction of new ideas, and fosters trade and other links with foreign countries, through the movement of students and researchers across national frontiers.

Given the importance of higher education, a nation needs a comprehensive set of indicators in order to evaluate the quality and worth of its higher education system. A good higher education system is well-resourced and operates in a favourable regulatory environment. Domestic and international connectivity are also important. The success of the system is measured by output variables such as research performance, participation rates and employment. We use such indicators to derive a ranking of national higher education systems. The measures are grouped under four main headings: Resources, Environment, Connectivity and Output.

The resource measures we use relate to government expenditure, total expenditure, and R&D expenditure in tertiary institutions. The environment variable comprises the gender balance in students and academic staff, a data quality variable and a quantitative index of the policy and regulatory environment based on survey results. We surveyed the following attributes of national systems of higher education: degree of monitoring (and its transparency), freedom of employment conditions and in the choice of the CEO, and diversity of funding. Our survey results are combined with those from the World Economic Forum. Data limitations restrict the connectivity variables to numbers of international students and articles written jointly with international collaborators.

Nine output measures are included and cover research output and its impact, the presence of world-class universities, participation rates and the qualifications of the workforce. The appropriateness of training is measured by relative unemployment rates. The measures are constructed for 48 countries and territories at various stages of development.

The top ten countries, in rank order, are the United States, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. "

Oxford and Cambridge

Following on from the last post, can anyone explain why Cambridge can't produce Prime Ministers and Oxford can't produce comedians, at least not professional ones?

And now for something a little bit different

Times Higher Education has announced that it will publish a ranking of new universities (less than fifty years old).

The Times Higher Education 100 Under 50 will – as its name suggests – rank the world’s top 100 universities under the age of 50. The table and analysis will be published online and as a special supplement to the magazine on 31 May, 2012.
The vast majority of the world’s top research-led universities have at least one thing in common: they are old. Building upon centuries of scholarly tradition, institutions such as the University of Oxford, which can trace its origins back to 1096, can draw on endowment income generated over many years and have been able to cultivate rich networks of loyal and successful alumni (including in Oxford’s case a string of British Prime Ministers) to help build enduring brands.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Malaysia's love-hate affair with international rankings has taken another twist. The official target now is get one university in the top 50 and three in the top 100 in the QS rankings. That basically means that a Malaysian university will have to be the equal of New South Wales, Tsinghua or Warwick.

Last year Universiti Malaya got into the top 500 in the Shanghai ARWU ranking. That is a solid achievement and it might mean more  if Malaysia could get another university there.

This is as part of its efforts to have a local university ranked among the world's top 50 universities by 2020.
Deputy Higher Education Minister Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah said the National Higher Education Strategic Plan also called for at least three local universities to be ranked among the world's top 100 universities.
To achieve this, he told the house that it needed to continuously recruit international students and participate in international education fairs to promote the "Education Malaysia" brand.
He was replying to Senator Mohd Khalid Ahmad who wanted to know why no local universities had been ranked among the world's top 200.
Saifuddin said the ministry was also intensifying promotional activities on the Internet and introducing student mobility programmes. This will allow them to take short-term courses with credits, and have better staff and student exchange programmes with foreign universities.
He said they were also having better scholarship coordination with foreign agencies and other bodies to facilitate the intake of foreign students at local universities.
He said the QS World University Ranking (QS WUR) was the preferred benchmark used to gauge a university.

What have I done?

I was recently in a public library somewhere in Southeast Asia. While browsing around I discovered that access to this blog was blocked because of  "other adult material".

I thought that perhaps someone was upset with university rankings in general, which is entirely understandable, but the THE, QS, ARWU, Webometrics and HEEACT sites were all unblocked.

My best guess is that the filter software interprets anything with "watch" in it as something to do with voyeurism. Or perhaps the post about "does size really matter?" was misunderstood.

Or perhaps it just means that this blog is very mature and sophisticated.

Is this what they meant by diversity?

On December 1st. of last year I commented on proposals that the US News Law School Rankings should include an indicator for diversity.

Such proposals are based on the increasing globalisation of the world economy and the need to understand other cultures. It is obvious that middle class white Americans who support abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, feminism and Obama must sit in classes with middle class African Americans who support abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, feminism and Obama if they wish to communicate effectively with North Korean bureaucrats, supporters of Boko Haram who will soon control most of Nigeria, the Muslim  Brotherhood or the Haredim who will soon control Israel.

The story of Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School who claims 1/32 Native American ancestry (which is not necessarily the same as Native American identity)  shows the importance of diversity in law education. Were it not for her Cherokee great-great-great grandmother she would obviously be teaching something quite different to her students and so would render them unfit to compete in our diverse multicultural world.

Student Experience Survey

From Times Higher Education, the top ten British universities from the students' viewpoint.

1.   Dundee
2.   Loughborough
3    Sheffield
4.   Oxford
5.   Cambridge
6.   East Anglia
7.   Southampton
8.   Aberystwyth
9.   Glasgow
10.  Leeds

Thomson Reuters in Trouble?

The online financial newsletter StreetAuthority has published a list of 12 companies that are at risk because of a looming debt problem.

Among them is Thomson Reuters who, among other things, run the Web of Science database and provide the data for the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Their data is also used by Shanghai Jiao Tong University's rankings to construct their Highly Cited Researchers and Publications indicators.

Thomson Reuters will not of course go bankrupt tomorrow. But if they are in trouble, then there could be implications for international university rankings.

During the past generation, a reasonable level of debt has always been seen as appropriate, because balance sheets were able to withstand a typical recession. Yet all that changed in 2008. GM's (NYSE: GM) debt load crashed the company, forcing it into bankruptcy, while many other companies such as GE (NYSE: GE), Ford Motor (NYSE: F), Hertz (NYSE: HTZ) and Domino's Pizza (NYSE: DPZ) saw their stocks plunge on fears a bankruptcy filing would be necessary if economic conditions worsened.

Thankfully, many companies wised up and have been taking steps to strengthen their balance sheets. But not everyone got the message. Some companies still carry too much debt and might run into trouble if the U.S. economy slips back into recession. These companies will need to make large payments to handle their debt, and right now they are at risk of not having enough cash to meet potential obligations. Typically, a company can simply roll over that debt and push out the time frame when debts come due. But a weak economy would make this task much harder as lenders grow skittish.

That's why it's so important to pay attention to balance sheets. Lots of debt is only a problem if the debts are soon coming due. For example, mattress maker Sealy Corp. (NYSE: ZZ) has a very weak balance sheet, with almost $800 million in debt and less than $100 million in cash. But management wisely rolled over its debt while it could, and now the company faces no major repayments until 2014.

But if a company's "current portion of long-term debt" -- that is, debts due within the next 12 months -- exceeds cash on hand, you need to listen to how management plans to address the problem because these companies could be at risk of failing. I went in search of companies that may have just such a problem (less cash than near-term loan obligations). I also added Canadian media firm Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI) to the mix because its weak balance sheet is just above that threshold. The table below highlights a group of companies that are at risk of having to declare bankruptcy in 2012 if their lenders are in no mood to extend them more loans.

LSE overtakes Oxford in British Ranking

The Complete University Guide has just published its rankings of British universities. According to Brendan O'Malley in University World News.

It is the first time since 2000 that Oxford and Cambridge have not shared the top two spots – in that year Imperial College London knocked Oxford into third place.


In separate listings for the leading universities and higher education institutions covering 62 subjects, Cambridge is in the top 10 for all 46 subjects it offers, and top in 30. Oxford is in the top 10 for all 32 of its subjects, and is placed first in 12. The LSE is in the top 10 for all 12 subjects offered, and top for three.


There are two new entrants to the Top 20 – the University of Glasgow (17th) and Leicester (19th). They have replaced Sussex, which just missed out in 21st place, and the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, which fell from 15th to 30th position.

O'Malley continues:

The interactive guide ranks universities on nine factors: student satisfaction; research assessment; entry standards; student-to-staff ratio; spending on academic services; spending on student facilities; good honours degrees achieved; graduate prospects; and completion.

The subject tables are based on four factors: student satisfaction; research assessment; entry standards; and graduate prospects.

When LSE offers 12 subjects and still beats Oxford with 32 subjects, these results need to be approached with caution. Bernard Kingston is honest enough to issue a health warning.

The good degrees and completion rates indicator are obvious incentives to game the system.

London Met Update

It seems that the proposal to ban alchohol from one campus was not quite what was reported. Apparently the vice-chancellor was looking for an excuse to save money. The latest report is that Muslim students are disassociating themselves from his plan.

Another Quality Initiative

Every so often education bureaucrats come up with bright ideas to boost quality and raise standards and proclaim their faith that students and teachers at all levels can perform as well as anybody anywhere.

A recent example is the decree by the the Director General of Higher Education at the Indonesian Education and Culture Ministry, that in order to graduate undergraduate students must publish a paper in a scientific journal, master's students in a national scientific journal and doctoral students in an international scientific journal.

It is easy to predict what will happen if this idea survives. Every university will set up a website and call it an  online journal to which  an essay, term paper or thought paper by every undergraduate or group of undergraduates will be uploaded, after running it through turnitin.

It would be almost as easy to set up national websites and call them national online scientific journals and publish term papers by masters students.

But getting papers into international journals will be another matter if the term international has any meaning and if the papers are to be single-author papers. We can expect a lot of creative workarounds here.

QS Paper 

Here are the links to a paper and presentation slides by Ben Sowter of QS that discusses the spin-offs: subject, regional and best student city rankings.

What about the Kindergarten Rankings?

US News will be publishing the Best High Schools rankings on May 1st.

Does Not Compute

London Metropolitan University seems to be getting rather desperate in its attempts to attract students. On the one hand:

"A London university is considering establishing alcohol-free zones on its campuses because so many of its students consider drinking to be immoral.
Professor Malcolm Gillies, vice-chancellor of London Metropolitan University, said the selling of alcohol was an issue of "cultural sensitivity" at his institution where a fifth of students are Muslim.
Speaking to a conference of university administrators in Manchester, he said that for many students, drinking alcohol was "an immoral experience".
"Because there is no majority ethnic group [at London Metropolitan], I think [selling alcohol] is playing to particular parts of our society much more [than to others]," he was reported as saying in the Times Higher Education magazine."

On the other:

"As part of a master's course in events experience management, London Metropolitan University will offer a module in partnership with Chillisauce, known for organising custom stag dos across Europe.
The firm's website lists options including mud-wrestling with scantily clad women in Budapest, a "spa with strippers" in Riga, or the option to be "punished" at a Tallinn "lap dancing dreamland".
The link has drawn criticism from unions, although students will be involved only in the company's more straightforward commercial activities - including corporate dinners and conferences.
Participants on the course will be asked to create a Guinness World Record attempt that doubles as a PR event for a consumer brand. They will devise a "creative concept" and pitch it to Chillisauce executives, who will attend seminars and lectures during the module.
But a University and College Union spokesman questioned "how employing a company that specialises in stag weekends offering wrestling with scantily clad women in jelly is likely to do much for a university's reputation"."

Opening the Black Box

I have just seen an article by Mu-Hsuang Huan of National Taiwan University published by Research Evaluation, an Oxford University Press journal. Here is the abstract:

"In the era of globalization, the trend of university rankings gradually shifts from country-wide analyses to world-wide analyses. Relatively high analytical weightings on reputational surveys have led Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings to criticisms over the years. This study provides a comprehensive discussion of the indicators and weightings adopted in the QS survey. The article discusses several debates stirred in the academia on QS. Debates on this ranking system are presented in the study. Firstly, problems of return rate, as well as unequal distribution of returned questionnaires, have incurred regional bias. Secondly, some universities are listed in both domestic and international reputation questionnaires, but some others are listed only in the domestic part. Some universities were evaluated only by domestic respondents, limiting their performance of the ranking results. Thirdly, quite a few universities exhibit the same indicator scores or even full scores, rendering the assessment questionable. Lastly, enormous changes of single indicator scores suggest that the statistic data adopted by QS Rankings should be further questioned."

The article is useful and interesting, especially the table of rates of return for different countries. But it does not seem to go beyond what this blog and others have been saying for a long time.

This seems to be another case of mainstream academia lagging behind the mass media which in turn  is way behind the blogosphere.

The Euro-Rankings

The U-Multirank project has slowly crept past the feasibility study stage. While any attempt to undermine the triopoly of the big three global rankers, ARWU (Shanghai), QS, Times Higher Education, is welcome, it does seem to be taking a long time. One wonders whether it will get going before the Eurozone disintegrates. Still the project does have its defenders.

"Jordi Curell, director of lifelong learning, higher education and international affairs at the directorate general for education and culture, conceded that there was opposition to its development.

"When we started working on the project of U-Multirank, many people from the higher education community were opposed to it,” he told an international symposium on university rankings and quality assurance in Brussels on 12 April.

But the system had intrinsic value, he said, because it would provide an evidence-based measure of the performance of European universities that would help them improve.

According to Curell, if higher education is to help Europe emerge from its current financial and economic crisis, the EU needs to know how its universities are performing and universities need to know how they are doing.
"Rankings which are carefully thought out are the only transparency tools which can give a comparative picture of higher education institutions at a national, European and global level," he told the symposium."

There are critics of course. One of them is a committee of the British House of Lords which has argued that U-Multirank is a waste of money. Four million Euros sounds rather a lot but considering what the EU has spent money on, it is trivial.

And as for wasting the taxpayer's money, well, the committee could look at the other house and think about a  floating duck island, pantyliners, nappies, soundproofed bedrooms and so on and so on.

The Ranking Business

In INSIDE HIGHER ED, Kris Olds comments on the growing commercialisation of university rankings.

US Faculty Salaries

The Chronicle of Higher Education features a report from the AAUP on faculty salaries, along with data on student faculty ratio. Predictably, Harvard, where the average fill professors gets $198,000 per annum, is at the top.

If anyone ever has the time, it ought to be  possible to work out the productivity of faculty with regard to publications, citations , students taught and graduated.

News from Australia

There is now a website MyUniversity that allows anyone to compare Australian public universities for  attributes such as staff qualifications, student to staff ratio, graduate employment and so on.

Of course, the value of the site will be little better than the quality of the information uploaded. Perhaps someone could take a look at the site and see how accurate the data is.

According to University World News , the Australian faculty staff union is not happy.

'Rea said that if students were looking to base their choice of institution on whether a campus had an automatic teller machine, the site might be useful. But if they wanted an indication of the quality of teaching and research at any given institution, the information provided relied on a set of indicators that had been under question for many years.

The union had been critical for some time of the misuse of statistical data, such as graduate employment outcomes and student satisfaction results, in determining the quality of learning and teaching. Yet these were included as measurable indicators of quality by the website.

“The use of student satisfaction scores in particular is prone to manipulation and does not reflect quality in teaching. Indeed, if institutions based their courses on whether students liked their subjects, which is essentially what these metrics capture, they would risk driving down the quality of degrees from Australian universities.

“There is always a danger of teaching to the test – or the survey, in this case,” Rea said.

She said the diversity of Australian universities made it difficult to attempt any comparisons. Although the union believed students should be able to make an informed choice of where best to study, it should be just that – an informed choice based on accurate, clear and transparent information.

“This can only happen if the indicators or measures used to create this information are specific, widely understood and agreed, and incapable of institutional manipulation.” '

Ranking News: QS World University  Rankings

Like many others, I have just received an invitation to take in the QS academic survey which contributes 40 per cent to their World University Rankings. If I understand it correctly, QS now get the majority of their respondents from the Mardev mailing lists. That means that subscribing to an academic journal is sufficient qualification to rank the research capabilities of universities around the world.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings also have a reputation survey. It is a little more difficult to join this club. To be a respondent it is necessary to have written (or co-written or perhaps "co-written" (these days the concept of authorship is getting quite blurred) an article in an ISI-indexed journal. On balance, the THE survey is likely to more reliable although I think QS could argue that those who read academic journals but do little research are a constituency whose views should be considered.

Ranking News: US News

Robert Morse has announced that US News has begun to collect data for the 2013 US college rankings.

"We recently started collecting the statistical data that will be used for the 2013 edition of our college rankings, which will be published later this year. Data collection for the three U.S. News statistical surveys—the main one, financial aid, and finance—began on March 27.

These surveys gather information on such factors as enrollment, faculty, tuition, room and board, SAT and ACT scores, admissions criteria, graduation and retention rates, college majors, faculty, school finances, activities, sports, and financial aid. This data is used in the Best Colleges rankings that will be published on usnews.com and in the print guidebook that will be available on newsstands."

The University Challenge Rankings

The  quiz show, University Challenge, provides a plausible supplement to the established British league tables. If we award 2 points for winning and one for being runner up (I confess this is from Wikipedia) then we get this ranking:

1.      Oxford                                                             39
2.      Cambridge                                                       21
3.      Manchester                                                        8
4=.    Imperial College London                                  5
4=.    Open University                                                5
6=.    Durham                                                             4
6=.    Sussex                                                               4
8=.    St. Andrews                                                      3
8=.    Birkbeck College, University of London         3
10=.  Bradford                                                            2
10=.  Dundee                                                              2
10=.  Keele                                                                 2
10=.  Leicester                                                            2
10=.  Belfast                                                               2
10=.  Warwick                                                            2   
16 =  Lancaster                                                           2
16=.  LSE                                                                   1
16=.  Cranfield                                                           1
16=.  Sheffield                                                            1
16=.  York                                                                   1

Bristol, Edinburgh and University College are not there at all and LSE does not perform very well.

The show inspired an Indian version and in one memorable "cup winners' cup" final Sardar Patel College of Engineering beat Gonville and Caius, Cambridge.

Apologies for the weird spacing. I am looking up how to do tables in blogspot.

Comments on the THE Reputation Rankings

 From Kris Olds at GlobalHigherEd

The 2012 Times Higher Education (THE) World Reputation Rankings were released at 00.01 on 15 March by Times Higher Education via its website. It was intensely promoted via Twitter by the ‘Energizer Bunny’ of rankings, Phil Baty, and will be circulated in hard copy format to the magazine’s subscribers. As someone who thinks there are more cons than pros related to the rankings phenomenon, I could not resist examining the outcome, of course! See below and to the right for a screen grab of the Top 20, with Harvard demolishing the others in the reputation standings.

I do have to give Phil Baty and his colleagues at Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters credit for enhancing the reputation rankings methodology. Each year their methodology gets better and better.

From Alex Usher at Higher Education Strategy Associates

There actually is a respectable argument to be made for polling academics about “best” universities. Gero Federkeil of the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung in Gütersloh noted a few years ago that if you ask professors which institution in their country is “the best” in their field of study, you get a .8 correlation with scholarly publication output. Why bother with tedious mucking around with bibliometrics when a survey can get you the same thing?

Two reasons, actually. One is that there’s no evidence this effect carries over to the international arena (could you name the best Chinese university in your discipline?) and second is that there’s no evidence it carries over beyond an academic’s field of study (could you name the best Canadian university for mechanical engineering?).

So, while the Times makes a big deal about having a globally-balanced sample frame of academics (and of having translated the instrument into nine languages), the fact that it doesn’t bother to tell us who actually answered the questionnaire is a problem. Does the fact that McGill and UBC do better on this survey than on more quantitatively-oriented research measures have to do with abnormally high participation rates among Canadian academics? Does the fact that Waterloo fell out of the top 100 have to do with the fact that fewer computer scientists, engineers and mathematicians responded this year? In neither case can we know for sure.

The THE Reputation Rankings

Times Higher Education has produced its third reputation ranking based on a survey of researchers published in ISI indexed journals. The top ten are:

1.  Harvard
2.  MIT
3.  Cambridge
4.  Stanford
5.  UC Berkeley
6.  Oxford
7.  Princeton
8.  Tokyo
9.  UCLA
10. Yale

This does not look all that dissimilar to the academic survey indicator in the  2011 QS World University Rankings. The top ten there is as follows:

1.  Harvard
2.  Cambridge
3.  Oxford
4.  UC Berkeley
5.  Stanford
6.  MIT
7.  Tokyo
8.  UCLA
9. Princeton
10. Yale

Once we step outside the top ten there are some differences. The National University of Singapore is 23rd in these rankings but 11th in the QS academic survey, possibly because QS still has respondents on its list from the time when it used World scientific, a Singapore based publishing company.

The Middle East Technical University in Ankara is in the top 100 (In the QS academic survey it is not even in the top 300), sharing the 90-100 band with Ecole Polytechnique, Bristol and Rutgers. At first glance this seems surprising since its research output is exceeded by other universities in the Middle East. But the technical excellence of its University Ranking by Academic Performance suggests that its research might be of a high quality.

Law School Rankings

Anyone interested in the current arguments about American law school rankings might visit the blog of Lawyers against the Law School Scam.

University Ranking in Pakistan

University World News has an article on the ranking of Pakistani universities by the country's Higher Education Commission (HEC). According to Ameen Amjad Khan:

According to the Higher Education Commission (HEC) ranking, Islamabad’s Quaid-e-Azam University tops 136 public and private sector institutions, followed by the Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences, with Karachi’s Agha Khan University in third place.

Academics from the University of Karachi and the University of Peshawar have rejected the ranking, which does not place either institution in the top 10.

They have accused the HEC of tampering with the standard formula to favour some institutions and have demanded that their vice-chancellors formally convey their disapproval to HEC bosses.

Faculty members of Hyderabad’s Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences have even warned that they will take the matter to the court if the ranking is not revoked. They said in a statement on 29 February: “The HEC announced the rankings in haste and caused chaos in both public and private higher education institutions.”

It seems that the rankings were based on a modified of the QS World University Rankings. Among the modifications were the introduction of indicators based on the number of journals published and the number of grants from the HEC. 

International Patent Filing

The World International Property Organization has issued a report on the filing of patents. The top university is the University of California followed by MIT, University of Texas, Johns Hopkins and the Korea Institute of Advanced Technology.

O, My Felony is Rank

The Social Science  Research Network has just produced a paper by Morgan Cloud and George Shepherd, 'Law Deans in Jail'. Notice the absence of a question mark. Here is the abstract:

A most unlikely collection of suspects - law schools, their deans, U.S. News
& World Report and its employees - may have committed felonies by publishing
false information as part of U.S. News' ranking of law schools. The possible
federal felonies include mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and
making false statements. Employees of law schools and U.S. News who
committed these crimes can be punished as individuals, and under federal law
the schools and U.S. News would likely be criminally liable for their agents'
crimes. Some law schools and their deans submitted false information about the
schools' expenditures and their students' undergraduate grades and LSAT
scores. Others submitted information that may have been literally true but was
misleading. Examples include misleading statistics about recent graduates'
employment rates and students' undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. U.S.
News itself may have committed mail and wire fraud. It has republished, and
sold for profit, data submitted by law schools without verifying the data's
accuracy, despite being aware that at least some schools were submitting false
and misleading data. U.S. News refused to correct incorrect data and rankings
errors and continued to sell that information even after individual schools
confessed that they had submitted false information. In addition, U.S. News
marketed its surveys and rankings as valid although they were riddled with
fundamental methodological errors.

It is unlikely that we will ever see law school deans in jail. It seems that it would be necessary to show that there is a connection between the submission or publication (or failure to retract publication) of false or misleading information and monetary gain and that might be rather difficult to prove.

Also, the authors of the paper are from Emory University, a middling institution. If it ever did come to criminal proceedings you can bet that the big law schools would be lined up behind the rankings.

Best Student Cities

QS has just announced its Best Student Cities ranking. The criteria are performance in the QS World university rankings, student mix, quality of living, employer activity and affordability.

To be included a city must have a population of at least 250,000 and at least two institutions in the QS rankings That explains why Oxford and Cambridge are not on the list but Cairo and Santiago are. 
The top five are:

1.  Paris
2.  London
3.  Boston
4.  Melbourne
5.  Vienna

Light Posting Ahead

For the next few weeks posting will be light as I am attending to family matters.

Eight years of ranking: What have we learned?

My post at the University World News World Blog can be viewed here.

University Ranking by Academic Performance

Perhaps too much attention is given to the big three international rankings -- ARWU (the Shanghai Rankings), the QS World University Rankings and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

So, here is what I hope will be the first of  a number of posts about the other rankings that have appeared recently.

The University Ranking of Academic Performance is produced by the Informatics Institute of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara.

The indicators are as follows:

Number of articles -- measures current scientific productivity
Google scholar results -- measures long term overall productivity
Citations -- measures research impact
Cumulative Journal Impact -- measures scientific impact
H- index --- measures research quality
International collaboration -- measures international acceptance


These are the top ten:

1.  Harvard
2.  Toronto
3.  Johns Hopkins
4.  Stanford

5.  UC Berkeley
6.  Tokyo
7.  Michigan, Ann Arbor
8.  Washington, Seattle
9.  UCLA
10. Oxford

Think Tank Ranking

There seems to be little that cannot be ranked these days. In the UK there are primary school league tables although nowhere in the world is there a kindergarten ranking. Yet.

The University of Pennsylvania has produced a report on think tanks. These are apparently flourishing everywhere: even Andorra has one.

Here are the top five world wide:

1.  Brookings Institution, USA

2.  Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs, UK

3.  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, USA

4.  Council on Foreign Relations, USA

5.  Center for Strategic and International Studies, USA

Guest Post

Today's post is by Masturah Alatas. It is in response to a comment in the Kuala Lumpur New Straits Times by James Campbell that begins:

"Any discussion of Malaysian tertiary educational policy needs to take into account the needs of national development in a specific and historical context. Recent debates in regard to the competitive position of Malaysian higher education globally is one area where the pressures of competition and liberalisation must be balanced by the interests of inclusion and social sustainability."

Over the last few years there has been an ongoing debate between those Malaysian academics who accept the challenge of globalisation  and those who more concerned with, as Campbell puts it, "ensuring national values, addressing horizontal social inequality, rural disadvantage and looking into the needs of sustainable and inclusive economic and social development".

The comment continued by invoking the name of Syed Hussein Alatas, a Malaysian social and political theorist who had considerable  international influence, being cited by, among others, Edward Said.

"The discourse of neo-liberal globalisation is itself still arguably beholden to what Syed Hussein Alatas critiqued as the discourse of “The Lazy Native”. Higher educational institutions’ commitment to inclusion and social justice is central to their merit in society."

The following is a response to this comment by the daughter and biographer of Alatas.

Finding the clarity

by Masturah Alatas

As biographer of late Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas (1928 – 2007), I do not consider his life story to end with the end of his life. Any continuing narrative about Alatas also has to take into account how, for example, he is talked about in the media today.

As a case in point, I refer to the article Finding the Balance (Learning Curve, New Straits Times, 20 November 2011) by Dr James Campbell, a lecturer in Education at Deakin University, Australia, and researcher with Universiti Sains Malaysia.

Even though the article carries a moribund photo of Alatas, it contains only one sentence in direct reference to him. And the sentence is difficult to understand. “The discourse of neo-liberal globalization is itself still arguably beholden to what Syed Hussein Alatas critiques as the discourse of The Lazy Native”.

The article does not explain what, if at all, neo-liberal globalization has to do with “the discourse of The Lazy Native”. And nowhere in the article is it clearly stated that many of Malaysia’s current higher education policies are neo-liberal to begin with. So Campbell is vague. He seems to be criticizing neo-liberalism in general, but not what is specifically neo-liberal about Malaysia’s higher education policies.

Campbell argues that comparisons between the National University of Singapore and Universiti Malaya may not always be valid “given important distinctions and differences in national policies and political culture between the two nations.”

But how does this reasoning square with the fact that a Malaysian sociologist like Syed Hussein Alatas taught at the National University of Singapore for over twenty years, and was appointed Head of Department of Malay studies there? What criteria of merit did NUS apply when they tenured Syed Hussein Alatas? Is Campbell suggesting that the same criteria cannot be applied in a Malaysian university? And if so, why not?

Malaysians may still remember Syed Hussein Alatas’ short-lived, controversial term (1988 – 1991) as Vice-Chancellor of Universiti Malaya when he tried to promote academic staff based on merit. For Alatas, one way to establish merit was to look at the publications of academics. The New Straits Times itself carried reports of the controversy, so it is no secret. Some of them contained statements like “five members of the students association have come out in support of Vice-Chancellor Syed Hussein Alatas’s stand on the appointment of non-Malay deans to faculties in the university” (NST, 12 March 1990).

When Campbell writes that any discussion of Malaysia’s higher education policies “needs to be placed in perspective against the needs of national development in a specific historical context”, and that notions of merit must take into account ideas of inclusion and social justice, what exactly does he mean? Inclusion, of course, necessarily entails exclusion. But who is being excluded and on what grounds are they being excluded? And whose sense of social justice are we talking about here?

Syed Hussein Alatas’ works from The Myth of the Lazy Native to his writings on corruption precisely warn against the dangers of relativising notions of social justice. So it is quite odd that Campbell would refer to Alatas in his article.

All written legacies can be appropriated, rightly and wrongly, to support a particular persuasion or agenda, and it depends on critics to call attention to what is right or wrong appropriation. One of the best writers I know, for example, who has creatively applied Syed Hussein Alatas’ ideas on mental captivity and the inability to raise original problems to the role of education and the Arts, is former New Straits Times columnist U-En Ng. “You can use entertainment to pull wool over people’s eyes and divert attention away from whatever it is you don’t want them to see or think about. Or, more positively, you can use artistic expression to build civic participation and the capacity to raise original problems,” he writes in the article Governing through the Arts (NST, 09 January 2011). “Rebellious performance art by university students tells you both what you can expect from the current education system as well as how the public might react to new ideas.”

At the same time, a young Italian poet from Osimo by the name of Andrea Palazzo reminds us that an excess of “the so-called need to express oneself can be the mortal enemy of Beauty and Truth. Overshadowed by popular opinion, great art dies, or rather it disappears, or languishes in museums.” And for Palazzo, the prospects for Philosophy in some Italian universities, which he feels are “conservative rather than selective”, are not much brighter either.

Syed Hussein Alatas believed that any process of change must necessarily be accompanied by a philosophical set of criteria for selection of what to reject, retain and strive for (see Erring Modernization, 1975). Quoting from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Use and Abuse of History, Alatas stressed the importance of having a horizon of thinking, “a line that divides the visible and the clear from the vague and shadowy” in order for an individual, a community and a nation to thrive. “We must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember, and instinctively see when it is necessary to feel historically and when unhistorically.”

It is, of course, extremely difficult to know when and what to remember and forget, especially when the spectre of Malaysia’s 1969 May 13 Racial Riots still haunts us, and when Malaysia is making itself dizzy by rushing to become a High Income Nation before eight years are up.

But one way for a line, a horizon of thinking, to become clearer is through good writing. And this may just be what will rescue Alatas’ work from languishing in the shadows.

Masturah Alatas

Worth Reading

Ranking in Higher Education: Its Place and Impact by Jan Sadlak. Originally appeared in the Europa World of Learning 2010.

The Power of Small Numbers

My attention has just been drawn to the citations per paper indicator in the 2011 QS Asian University Rankings. In first place is University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines, a very good school in some ways but not usually considered as a research rival to Hong Kong or Tokyo. It seems that UST's success was the result of just one much cited medical paper of which just one UST researcher was a co-author.

 Another highly cited many-authored medical paper seems to explain Universitas Padjadjaran's appearance in sixth place in this indicator even though the total number of papers is extremely small.

Leiden University have started offering fractional counting of publications in their rankings:

The fractional counting method gives less weight to collaborative publications than to non-collaborative ones. For instance, if the address list of a publication contains five addresses and two of these addresses belong to a particular university, then the publication has a weight of 0.4 in the calculation of the bibliometric indicators for this university. The fractional counting method leads to a more proper normalization of indicators and to fairer comparisons between universities active in different scientific fields. Fractional counting is therefore regarded as the preferred counting method in the Leiden Ranking.

This would be one way of avoiding giving a high position to universities that produce little but manage to get researchers included as co-authors a few papers, usually in medical journals,

FindThe Best

This is a site that has just come to my attention. There is a great variety of rankings of things like antivirus, snowboards and fertility clinics and also of colleges and universities, including business, law and medical schools.

The colleges and universities ranking is US only and includes a "smart ranking" combining  statistical information with the Forbes, US News and ARWU (Shanghai) rankings. This sounds like a good idea but there does not seem to be any information about the methodology.

The Happiest University in Britain?

According to the Daily Telegraph it's St Mary's University College Belfast. I thought Belfast was in Ireland but then again I did not do geography in secondary school.

Update: The Journal Bubble

Jeffrey Bealle has a list of predatory journals.

 Note  that some of the comments dispute the inclusion of some journals.

The Journal Bubble

Inside Higher Ed has a piece by Philip Altbach about the proliferation of dubious academic journals.

Clever people have figured out that there is a growing demand for outlets for scholarly work, that there are too few journals or other channels to accommodate all the articles written, that new technology has created confusion as well as opportunities, and (finally) and somewhat concerning is that there is money to be made in the knowledge communication business. As a result, there has been a proliferation of new publishers offering new journals in every imaginable field. The established for-profit publishers have also been purchasing journals and creating new ones so that they “bundle” them and offer them at high prices to libraries through electronic subscriptions.

Read it here.

I suspect that this is causing increasing problems for struggling but respectable journals in the academic periphery. I know of of least one journal that has had several submitters "disappear" after being asked  to make modest revisions or even deal with problems identified by a turnitin report. One wonders where the papers will reappear.

 

Research Fraud in the UK

AN article in Times Higher Education by Jack Grove indicates that there is a large amount of research fraud going on in UK universities, although the comments raise questions about the validity of the study.

I am wondering if there is any comparative international data available.

Primary School League Tables

The craze for rankings continues unabated. There is now a League Table for English primary schools.

The league tables show the percentage of 11-year-olds in each school reaching Level 4 – the standard expected for their age group – in both English and maths at primary school.

Officially, this means they can spell properly, start to use grammatically complex sentences and employ joined up handwriting in English. In maths, they should be able to multiply and divide whole numbers by 10 or 100 and be able to use simple fractions and percentages.

Pupils exceeding this standard are awarded a higher Level 5.Data for individual schools also shows three other measures: average points score, value-added and pupil progress.

Who says college isn't worth it?

There is a web site called SeekingArrangement which puts sugar daddies and sugar babies in touch with another. Apparently, large numbers of college graduates are signing up in the latter category, perhaps because of increasing difficulties in paying off student loans.

There is now a ranking of the top 20 colleges among sugar baby sign ups. I have doubts about the validity of the ranking. All that is necessary to be a certified college sugar baby, and get three times as many enquiries from sugar daddies (it's good to know that American society still values education), is an edu email address.

New York University might be number 1 because its tuition fees are so high or job prospects for graduates so meagre or maybe because the sugar daddies are in New York.

Here are the top twenty:

1. New York University (NYU) -- 185
2. University of Georgia -- 155
3. University of Phoenix -- 144
4. Tulane University -- 129
5. Temple University -- 113
6. Virginia Community College -- 108
7. University of Southern Florida -- 93
8. Arizona State University -- 85
9. Michigan State University -- 81
10. Ivy Tech Community College -- 78
11. Georgia State University -- 74
12. University of Wisconsin -- 73
13. Penn State University -- 72
14. University of Central Florida -- 67
15. Kent University -- 65
16. Maricopa Community College -- 63
17. Indiana University -- 62
18. University of California, Berkeley -- 61
19. The Art Institutes -- 60
20. Florida International University -- 59

Please note that I found this story via the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Online Education Rankings

US News has announced its rankings of American online education programs. There are six categories: Bachelor's, Business, Education, Engineering, Info tech and Nursing. Within each category there are rankings for faculty credentials and training, student services and technology, student engagement and assessment and, except for bachelor's, admissions selectivity. For bachelor programs the top universities are:

Faculty Credentials and Training
Westfield State University, Massachusetts

Student Engagement and Assessment  
Bellevue University, Nebraska

Student Services and Technology
Arizona State University, Tempe

The end of the university as we know it?


MIT has already been putting its course materials online for anyone to access free of charge. Now they are going a step further.

"MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

• organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
• feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
• allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
• operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.

There are a lot of questions that come to mind. Will students be assessed according to the same standards as conventional MIT students? If someone accumulates sufficient certificates of completion will they be entitled to an MITx degree? What will happen if employers and graduate school  start accepting MITx certificates as equivalent to standard academic credentials? If so, will MIT be able to resist the temptation to start charging hefty fees for a certificate.

MIT may, perhaps unwittingly,  have started a process that will end with universities becoming something very different.

How Did I Miss This?

The blog Registrarism has discovered a fascinating article, published in 2002 in Higher Education Quarterly, that compares university league tables (that is British university rankings) with the football (soccer to Americans) league tables.