Comment on a THE Editorial and Comments

Times Higher Education has published an editorial on the 2008 rankings that deserves comment. It says:

This is the fifth year we have published the rankings and the methodology
has remained unchanged for the past two. Along with our partners in the venture,
Quacquarelli Symonds, we make enormous efforts to ensure that our
quality-control processes and anti-cheating mechanisms are as robust as
possible.

I accept that so far this year the rankings have not been disfigured by the sort of spectacular errors that have occurred in the past but I would feel more confident about those enormous efforts if THE and QS owned up to their past errors, such as putting Duke in top place for student faculty ratio by counting undergraduate students as faculty, and indicated exactly what they are doing to stop similar mistakes from occurring again.

The editorial continues:

We try to ensure that the results are produced with a large amount of data. For example, there were more than 6,000 participants in the academic survey alone, producing an average of 20 responses per head. That is a staggering 120,000 data points, making it the largest known survey of university quality.

This is fallacious. The validity of any survey depends on how representative the respondents are of the larger population, not how many they are. If QS continued to report a response rate of around 3 percent they must expect continued criticism.

After proclaiming its lack of bias THE concludes:

For 2008, we congratulate Harvard University for its success
in topping the rankings yet again. However, it is worth remembering that its
endowment now totals more than $35 billion (£19 billion), roughly equivalent to
the total income received by the entire UK sector last year. By that measure,
the UK, with its 29 institutions in the Top 200 (and four in the Top 10), can
stand proud on the world stage.

According to THE's citations per faculty indicator the research impact of Cambridge academics is less than that of 35 other institutions including Resselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tufts, McMaster, Tel Aviv, UC Davis, Minnesota, Leiden, Emory, Toronto, Kyoto, Brown and ETH Zurch. Cambridge probably is not quite that bad -- there may be problems with the faculty side of the equation that are causing distortions -- but it does look as though the academic survey is in part an attempt to cover up the steady decline of British higher education and research.

There is a comment on the editorial by bgc:

The Times uses a non-transparent, undefined opinion
survey for most of their weightings - presumably this is what leads to such
nonsensical results.
Anyone who knows anything about international HE would
realize that the Times ranking lack basic validity.
For goodness sake,
sort-out the ranking methodology before next year. Or please stop inflicting
this annual embarrassment on those of us who practice scientometrics and try to
use objective methods of educational evaluation.

This is perhaps over-dramatic. The THE- QS rankings do seem to be improving in some respects. However, a reply by Martin Ince, editor of the rankings is rather unfortunate:

By contrast, we have measures relating to teaching,
globalisation and employability, and our research indicators cover the full
range of subjects. We set out exactly who and where our respondents are - there
is a nice pie chart in today's paper. These expert academics provide us with
about 126,000 data points (20 per person for 6,300 people) and make up the
biggest and best survey of university quality.

Whether the ability to sign on to a mailing list makes one an academic expert is debatable. And telling experts in scientometrics about your nice pie charts does you no good at all.