A few years ago the Shanghai rankings did an interesting tweak on their global rankings. They deleted the two indicators that counted Nobel and Fields awards and produced an Alternative Ranking.
There were some changes. The University of California San Diego and the University of Toronto did better while Princeton and Vanderbilt did worse.
Perhaps it is time for Times Higher Education (THE) to consider doing something similar for their citations indicator. Take a look at their latest subject ranking, Clinical, Pre-clinical and Health. Here are the top ten for citations, supposedly a measure of research impact or influence.
1. Tokyo Metropolitan University
2. Auckland University of Technology
3. Metropolitan Autonomous University, Mexico
4. Jordan University of Science and Technology
5. University of Canberra
6. Anglia Ruskin University
7. University of the Philippines
8. Brighton and Sussex Medical School
9. Pontifical Javeriana University, Colombia
10. University of Lorraine.
If THE started producing alternative subject rankings without the citations indicator they would be a bit less interesting but a lot more credible.
Here are some tweaks that might actually improve higher education:
ReplyDelete1) add an indicator for ratio of management to frontline staff (or cost of management to cost of academic staff). The lower the ratio, the higher the ranking;
2) add an indicator for ratio of permanent to casual academic staff.
Goodhart's law has run wild among university administrators and whole battalions of highly-paid managers spend all of their time trying to game these rankings, adding nothing to the universities whose resources they absorb. Maybe some of these rankings agencies might want to discourage rather than encourage that sort of thing? Nah.