Global university rankings are now well into their second decade. Since 2003, when the first Shanghai rankings appeared, there has been a steady growth of global and regional rankings. At the moment most global rankings are of two kinds, those that focus entirely or almost entirely on research and those such as the Russian Round Rankings, Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) that claim to also measure teaching, learning or graduate quality in some way, although even those are biased towards research when you scratch the surface a little.
The ranking industry has become adept at measuring research productivity and quality in various ways. But the assessment of undergraduate teaching and learning is another matter.
Several ranking organisations use faculty student ratio as a proxy for quality of teaching which in turn is assumed to have some connection with something that happens to students during their programmes. THE also count institutional income, research income and income from industry, again assuming that there is a significant association with academic excellence. Indicators like this are usually based on those supplied by institutions. For examples of problems here see an article by Alex Usher and a reply by Phil Baty.
An attempt to get at student quality is provided by the CWUR rankings now based in UAE, counting alumni who win international awards or who are CEOs of major companies. But obviously this is relevant only for a very small number of universities. A new pilot ranking from Moscow also counts international awards.
The only attempt to measure student quality by the well known rankers that is relevant to most institutions is the survey of employers in the QS world and regional rankings. There are some obvious difficulties here. QS gets respondents from a variety of channels and this may allow some universities to influence the survey. In recent years some Latin American universities have done much better on this indicator than on any other.
THE now publish a global employability ranking which is conducted by two European firms, Trendence and Emerging. This is based on two surveys of recruiters in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, France, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, UAE, UK, and USA. There were two panels with a total of over 6,000 respondents.
A global survey that does not include Chile, Sweden, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Poland, Malaysia or Taiwan can hardly claim to be representative of international employers. This limited representation may explain some oddities of the rankings such as the high places of the American University of Dubai and and the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
The first five places in these rankings are quite similar to the THE world rankings: Caltech, Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Cambridge. But there some significant differences after that and some substantial changes since last year. Here Columbia, 14th in the world rankings, is in third place, up from 12th last year. Boston University is 6th here but 70th in the world rankings. Tokyo Institute of Technology in 19th place is in the 251-300 band in the world rankings. CentraleSupelec, is 41st, but in the world 401-500 group.
These rankings are useful only for a small minority of universities, stakeholders and students. Only 150 schools are ranked and only a small proportion of the world's employers consulted.
QS have also released their global employability rankings with 500 universities. These combine the employer reputation survey, used in their world rankings with other indicators: alumni outcomes, based on lists of high achievers, partnership with employers, that is research collaboration noted in the Scopus database, employer-student connections, that is employers actively present on campus, and graduate employment rate. There seems to be a close association, at least at the top, between overall scores, employer reputation and alumni outcomes. Overall the top three are Stanford, UCLA, Harvard. For employer reputation they are Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and for alumni outcomes Harvard, Stanford Oxford.
The other indicators are a different matter. For employer-student connections the top three are Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Arizona State University, and New York University. In fact seven out of the top ten on this measure are Chinese. For graduate employment rate they are Politecnico di Torino, Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and Sungkyunkwan University and for partnership with employers Stanford, Surrey and Politecnico Milano. When the front runners in indicators are so different one has to wonder about their validity.
There are some very substantial differences in the ranks given to various universities in these rankings. Caltech is first in the Emerging-Trendence rankings and 73rd in QS. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is 12th in Emerging-Trendence but not ranked at all by QS. The University of Sydney is 4th in QS and 48th in Emerging-Trendence. The American University of Dubai is in QS's 301-500 band but 138th for Emerging-Trendence
The rankings published by THE could be some value to those students contemplating careers with the leading companies in the richest countries.
The QS rankings may be more helpful for those students or stakeholders looking at universities outside the very top of the global elite. Even so QS have ranked only a fraction of the world's universities.
It still seems that the way forward in the assessment of graduate outcomes and employability is through standardised testing along the lines of AHELO or the Collegiate Learning Assessment.
No comments:
Post a Comment