Tales of Jiggery-Pokery

Phil Baty argues in yesterday's Times Higher Education that, despite the "jiggery-pokery" employed by some universities to get a better position in university rankings, "there is no need to sacrifice mission to position"

He refers to several cases of university administrators manipulating data to rise in the rankings. One example is Albion College in the USA who divided a small alumnus donation into smaller annual payments. Frankly, I wonder if this is worth getting worried about. Surely, a far greater scandal in American colleges is the admission, in order to please alumni and get money out of them, of large numbers of academically unqualified student athletes.

The article then discusses "the less dishonest but nevertheless deleterious effects of rankings, such as pressing staff to publish in English-language journals, which may lift an institution's profile but may not best serve its local community'

This is true but it should be noted that THE has shifted from using Scopus data to Thomson Reuters whose database has been criticised for its overwhlemingly English language content.

Baty is right on target when he comments on institutions' importing large numbers of foreign students in order to boost their score for the internationalistion score on the THE-QS rankings. There are though other reasons, mainly financial, for doing this. In the UK and Australia it is likely that in many cases this has contributed to a decline in quality.

Counting international students is rather different from counting international faculty. In most cases, students pay, or someone pays for them, to travel abroad to go to university but universities pay international faculty to come to them.

It would be a good idea if THE dropped the intenational student indicator. If they are going to keep it then one simple and helpful measure might be to include the showing of a passport in the definition of international. In other words treat the European Union, or at least the Schengen Area, as a single country.