Selected Comments from Times Higher Education


Mike Reddin 17 September, 2010
World university rankings take national ranking systems from the ridiculous to the bizarre. Two of the most glaring are made more so by these latest meta analyses.
Number One: R&D funding is scored not by its quality or contribution to learning or understanding but by the amount of money spent on that research; it ranks expensive research higher than cheap research; it ranks a study of 'many things' better than the study of a 'few things'; it ranks higher the extensive and expensive pharmacological trial than the paper written in tranquility over the weekend. I repeat, it does not score 'contribution to knowledge'.

Number Two. Something deceptively similar happens in the ranking of citations. We rank according to number alone - not 'worth' - not whether the paper merited writing in the first place, not whether we are the better for or the worse without it, not whether it adds to or detracts from the sum of human knowledge. Write epic or trash .... as long as it is cited, you score. Let me offer utter rubbish - the more of you that denounce me the better; as long as you cite my name and my home institution.

Which brings me full circle: the 'rankings conceit' equates research / knowledge / learning / thinking / understanding with institutions - in this case, universities and universities alone. Our ranking of student 'outcomes' (our successes/failure as individuals on many scales) wildly presumes that they flow from 'inputs' (universities). Do universities *cause* these outcomes - do they add value to those they have admitted? Think on't. Mike Reddin http://www.publicgoods.co.uk/



jorge Sanchez 18 September, 2010
this is ridiculous~ LSE was placed 67 in the previous year and THE decided to end relations with QS because of this issue. now since THE is no longer teaming up with QS, how could you possibly explain this anomaly by placing LSE ranked 86 in the table????


Mark 18 September, 2010
where is the "chinese university of Hong Kong in the table??? it is no longer in the top 200 best universities....

last year was in the top 50 now is off the table??? is this a serious ranking?????


Of course it's silly 18 September, 2010
Just look at the proposition that teaching is better if you have a higher proportion of doctoral students to undergraduate students.

This is just plainly silly, as 10 seconds thinking about the reputation of teaching in the US will tell you: liberal arts colleges offer extraordinary teaching in the absence of PhD programmes.



Matthew H. Kramer 18 September, 2010
Though some tiers of these rankings are sensible, there are some bizarre anomalies. Mirabile dictu, the University of Texas doesn't appear at all; the University of Virginia is ridiculously low at 72; NYU is absurdly low at 60; the University of Hong Kong is preposterously overrated at 21. Moreover, as has been remarked in some of the previous comments -- and as is evident from a glance at the rankings -- the criteria hugely favor technical institutes. The rank of MIT at 3 is credible, because MIT is outstanding across the board. However, Cal Tech doesn't belong at 2, and Imperial (which has no programs at all in the humanities and social sciences) certainly doesn't belong at 9. Imperial and especially Cal Tech are outstanding in what they do, but neither of them is even close to outstanding across the gamut of subjects that are covered by any full-blown university. I hope that some of these anomalies will be eliminated through further adjustments in the criteria. The exclusion of Texas is itself sufficiently outlandish to warrant some major modifications in those criteria.



Matthew H. Kramer 18 September, 2010
Weird too is the wholesale exclusion of Israeli universities. Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and Technion belong among the top 200 in any credible ranking of the world's universities.


Neil Fazel 19 September, 2010
No Sharif, no U. Texas, no Technion. Another ranking to be ignored.


OZ academic 20 September, 2010
While the criteria seem to be OK, although they might be debated, how to carry out the statistical analyses and how to collect the data are the issues for the validity of the poll. The omission of Chinese University of Hong Kong, in the inclusion of the Hong Kong Baptist University and Hong Kong Polytechnic University in the world's top 200 universities, seems to be very "mysterious" to me. As I understand the Chinese University of Hong Kong is more or less of a similar standard in teaching and research in comparison to the Hong Kong University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, but they have some slight edges over the Hong Kong Baptist University and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I wonder if there are mix-ups in the data collection processes. If this is true, then there are disputes in this poll not only in the criteria of assessment but also in the accuracy in data collections and analyses.