Comments on the Economist article

The Economist has published a number of comments on its article on international university rankings.

The second, as we should have expected, is a complaint about the failure of the rankings to acknowledge the brilliance of LSE. The author, who has a master's from LSE, complains that "the THES and the Times usually score Oxford higher than the LSE- partly due to expenditure and, in the case of the Times, the higher number of 'good marks' " Unfortunately, the THE (no S now) - QS rankings never included expenditure as an indicator: Oxford outscored LSE mainly because of its performance on the academic survey component. I wonder if this says something about the excellent and rigorous research training provided by LSE.

There are also several complaints that teaching quality is not reflected in the current rankings and may even be inversely related to the research productivity of universities. However, there is a sensible observation from Rojr that

"There seems to be a popular but silly assumption that clever Oxbridge graduates are made clever by their experience at Oxbridge. Why? It's well known that Oxbridge picks the cleverest students up front--who's surprised that they're still the cleverest after graduating? Correlation does not imply causation! I wish the league tables would catch on to this.

If I were an employer, an acceptance letter from a top ranking university would be exactly as impressive as a graduation certificate (with any grade on it) from the same university. "

I suspect that global rankings would be more improved by a measure of student quality based on performance in national standardised tests such as the SAT than by efforts to assess the vague and culture-bound concept of teaching quality. I wonder also whether Oxbridge is still picking the cleverest students now that the entrance exams have been scrapped and A levels have become largely meaningless, leaving colleges reliant on admission interviews, probably the least valid of any selection procedure.

Finally, there are comments from Phil Baty of THE and Ben Sowter of QS.