The Emerging THE Rankings


Times Higher Education has announced some information about the data that will be collected for their forthcoming rankings.


It is now possible to speculate about what might be included or excluded. First, there has been no mention of an employer review. This is a pity since this was the only input from outside universities in the old THE-QS rankings.


Possible new indicators are number of bachelor's degrees, number of doctoral students admitted, number of doctorates awarded "including those funded by competitive research scholarships", total institutional income, research grant income and research contract income.


It is likely that if any of these are indicators in this year's and subsequent rankings there will be negative backwash effects. It is easy to foresee that diploma and certificate courses will be "upgraded", more and more marginal candidates admitted to doctoral programs and more and more dubious doctorates awarded. It is also likely that every award to a postgraduate student will somehow turn into a competitive research scholarship.


On the other hand data about income and source of income sounds promising since this is something that universities will find difficult to manipulate.


It looks as though student faculty ratio might be maintained as will the proportion of international students and international faculty. The reference to research only staff suggests that only teachers will be counted in the student faculty ratio, a very sensible idea.


As for international students and international faculty, there is a big difference between the two, namely that the former are paid to come to universities but the latter are not. There is surely enough evidence from the UK and Australia that artificial incentives to mass importation of unqualified students does nobody any good.

If THE decides to keep the internationalisation indicators it might be time to stop calling people who more a few miles within the EU international. Similarly, the special dispensation whereby Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong are designated international ought to be abolished.

The new rankings will probably include a research indicator based on citations rather than publications. This makes sense. The impact of research, indicated by the number of times it is cited, is more important than the simple fact of publication. There is, however, a risk that this will allow a further element of gaming into the rankings. Researchers will not only divide papers into the smallest possible unit of publication but will also start doing things like citing themselves copiously and unnecessarily or citing colleagues with whom reciprocal citing arrangements can be established.

The reputational survey (congratulations to THE for not calling it a peer review) appears to be under way. THE and their associates seem determined to avoid the Anglo-Saxon bias of the THE-QS rankings (and perhaps the bias among Anglo-Saxons towards the UK and Australia). It is possible though that new biases may be emerging. The distribution of forms will be based on UN data that could be several years out of date by the time they emerge from national bureaucracies. Taking a sample of opinion from ISI publications, which will reflect research projects that began several years earlier, may create a bias in favour of the traditional elite and against newcomers in the research world such as Iran, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and South America.