Philippine Universities and the QS English Rankings

The QS subject rankings have produced quite a few surprises. Among them is the high position of several Philippine universities in the 2012 English Literature and Language ranking. In the top 100 we find Ateneo de Manila University, the University of the Philippines and De La Salle University. Ateneo de Manila in 24th place is ahead of Birmingham, Melbourne, Lancaster and University College Dublin.

How did the Philippine universities do so well? First, the subject rankings are based on different combinations of criteria. Those for English Literature and Language rankings have a 90 per cent weighting for the academic survey conducted in 2011 and 10 percent for the employer survey. There is, unlike the natural sciences, nothing for citations. Essentially then the English ranking is a measure of reputation in that subject and these universities were picked by a large number of survey respondents..

One feature of the QS academic survey is that respondents can choose to nominate universities globally or by region. Ateneo de Manila's performing better than Birmingham or Melbourne in this subject most probably means that it was being compared with others in Asia while the latter were assessed internationally.

Also, the category English Literature and Language is an extremely diverse one, covering scholars toiling away at a critical edition of Chaucer, post-modern cultural theorists and researchers in language education. I suspect that the high scores for Ateneo de Manila and the other universities came from dozens of postgraduate TESOL students in the US and Australia. It would be a good idea for QS to have separate rankings for English literature and English language education.

As usual, university administrators seem to be somewhat confused  about the rankings. The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the University of Santo Tomas is reported as saying;

The University, he pointed out, did not get any request for data from QS, the London consultancy that comes out with annual university rankings:
“With due respect to the QS, I think we should also know how the data is being collected, because as far as we are concerned, we are the academic unit taking care of arts and humanities and philosophy and literature,” he told the Varsitarian.
The QS survey may have been perception-based, and data gathering could have relied on what’s available on the Internet, Vasco added. “The question is, how do they source the data? Do they simply get it from the general information known about the University? Do they simply get it from the website? What if the website is not updated? What information will you get there?” he asked.
Vasco also said it would be difficult to compete in other clusters of the Arts and Humanities category of the QS subject rankings, namely Philosophy, Modern Languages, Geography, History, and Linguistics.
“[We] do not offer the same breadth of programs being surveyed under the arts and humanities cluster in the QS survey,” Vasco said.
The growing number of participants in the QS survey has contributed to the general decline of Philippine schools in various QS rankings, the Artlets dean noted. “More and more international universities from highly industrialized countries are participating, like universities from Europe, North America, and even Asia-Pacific,” he said. “Chances are, Philippine schools will slide down to lower rankings.”

For once, QS is being unfairly treated. The methodology of the subject rankings is explained quite clearly here