On July 11th Times Higher Education (THE) will publish their new European university rankings. These are supposed to be about teaching and seem to give priority to students as consumers of higher education.
They are similar to THE's Japanese and US rankings with four "pillars": Engagement (five indicators derived from the European Student Survey), Resources (three indicators), Outcomes (three indicators) and Environment, which consists entirely of the gender ratio of faculty and students.
THE are presenting these rankings as an innovative pilot project so they might contain interesting insights lacking in other international rankings. But it looks like THE will follow previous practice and only give scores for the four pillars and not for the component indicators. This would drastically reduce their value for students and other indicators since it would be difficult or impossible to figure exactly what has contributed to a high or a low score for any of the pillars.
Although the rankings claim to assess teaching, there is still a substantial research component here. Papers to staff ratio gets a weighting of 7.5%, and THE's survey of postgraduate teaching, which correlates very closely with the research survey, gets 10%.
What is missing here is any serious measure of the quality of students or graduates. This is the great omission of the current global ranking scene. QS have a survey of employers and CWUR counts the prizes won by university alumni. Neither of these are relevant for the great majority of institutions around the world.
The most valuable metrics in the US News national ranking are the test scores and high school standing of admitted students. The blunt reality is that employers and graduate and professional schools are interested in the cognitive skills, subject knowledge, conscientiousness and, sadly and increasingly, the willingness to conform of graduates and the ability to universities to nurture these is closely related to students' performance on standardised tests and national exams. It is disappointing that THE have been unable to find a way of capturing the quality of students and graduates.
It is also odd that THE are able to supply data on only one aspect of institutional environment, that is gender ratio.
U-Multirank already covers some of the indicators included in the new rankings and has a reasonable coverage of European universities. Whether THE can do better will be seen on the eleventh.
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