Never mind the rankings, THE has a huge database

There has been a debate, or perhaps the beginnings of a debate, about international university rankings following the publication of Bahram Bekhradnia's report to the Higher Education Policy Institute with comments in University World News by Ben Sowter, Phil Baty, Frank Ziegele and Frans van Vought  and Philip Altbach and Ellen Hazelkorn and a guest post by Bekhradnia in this blog.

Bekhradnia argued that global university rankings were damaging and dangerous because they encourage an obsession with research, rely on unreliable or subjective data, and emphasise spurious precision. He suggests that governments, universities and academics should just ignore the rankings.

Times Higher Education (THE) has now published a piece by THE rankings editor Phil Baty that does not really deal with the criticism but basically says that it does not matter very much because the THE database is bigger and better than anyone else's. This he claims is "the true purpose and enduring legacy" of the THE world rankings.

Legacy? Does this mean that THE is getting ready to abandon rankings, or maybe just the world rankings, and go exclusively into the data refining business? 

Whatever Baty is hinting at, if that is what he is doing, it does seem a rather insipid defence of the rankings to say that all the criticism is missing the point because they are the precursor to a big and sophisticated database.

The article begins with a quotation from Lydia Snover, Director of Institutional Research, at MIT:

“There is no world department of education,” says Lydia Snover, director of institutional research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But Times Higher Education, she believes, is helping to fill that gap: “They are doing a real service to universities by developing definitions and data that can be used for comparison and understanding.”

This sounds as though THE is doing something very impressive that nobody else has even thought of doing. But Snover's elaboration of this point in an email gives equal billing to QS and THE as definition developers and suggests the definitions and data that they provide will improve and expand in the future, implying that they are now less than perfect. She says:

"QS and THE both collect data annually from a large number of international universities. For example, understanding who is considered to be “faculty” in the EU, China, Australia, etc.  is quite helpful to us when we want to compare our universities internationally.  Since both QS and THE are relatively new in the rankings business compared to US NEWS, their definitions are still evolving.  As we go forward, I am sure the amount of data they collect and the definitions of that data will expand and improve."

Snover, by the way , is a member of the QS advisory board, as is THE's former rankings  "masterclass" partner, Simon Pratt.

Baty offers a rather perfunctory defence of the THE rankings. He talks about rankings bringing great insights into the shifting fortunes of universities. If we are talking about year to year changes then the fact that THE purports to chart shifting fortunes is a very big bug in their methodology. Unless there has been drastic restructuring universities do not change much in a matter of months and any ranking that claims that it is detecting massive shifts over a year is simply advertising its deficiencies.

The assertion that the THE rankings are the most comprehensive and balanced is difficult to take seriously. If by comprehensive it is meant that the THE rankings have more indicators than QS or Webometrics that is correct. But the number of indicators does not mean very much if they are bundled together and the scores hidden from the public and if some of the indicators, the teaching survey and research survey for example, correlate so closely that they are effectively the same thing. In any case, The Russian Round University Rankings have 20 indicators compared with THE's 13 in the world rankings.

As for being balanced, we have already seen Bekhradnia's analysis showing that even the teaching and international outlook criteria in the THE rankings are really about research. In addition, THE gives almost a third of its weighting to citations. In practice that is often even more because the effect of the regional modification, now applied to half the indicator, is to boost in varying degrees the scores of everybody except those in the best performing country. 

After offering a scaled down celebration of the rankings, Baty then dismisses critics while announcing that THE "is quietly [seriously?] getting on with a hugely ambitious project to build an extraordinary and truly unique global resource." 

Perhaps some elite universities, like MIT, will find the database and its associated definitions helpful but whether there is anything extraordinary or unique about it remains to be seen.