The Decline of the University of California

Rankings have been justly criticised. Still, they do have their uses. They can identify which institutions and systems are ailing and which are in good health.

California was once the incarnation of the American dream with high wages, cheap housing, free or cheap education right through to college or even law, medical or graduate school. The University of California (UC) system was hailed as the peak of modern public research university education.

Now the state seems to have entered a period of decay. On any measure of literacy or education tCalifornia falls near the bottom of the USA. So how has this affected the public university system?

The question is now more urgent since UC Berkeley has just admitted to sending false data to the US News America's Best Colleges. Apparently the university had inflated the funds donated by alumni, a metric that accounts for five per cent of those rankings. Berkeley is now cast into the dark regions of higher education full of unranked places. It will be interesting to see what happens to applications and donations over the next couple of years. 

Questions about the performance of universities are often answered by reference to the Big Two international rankings, QS and Times Higher Education (THE). That might not be a good idea.These rankings are unbalanced with indicators that have an excessive weighting, THE's citation indicator and QS's academic survey. They are sometimes volatile and can produce  results that can be charitably described as unusual and counter-intuitive. They also rely on surveys and data submitted directly by institutions which are not very reliable. Both, however, suggest that UC is slowly and steadily declining since 2011 (THE) and 2017 (QS).

To get an accurate picture of research quality it would be better look at the Leiden Ranking, which has a consistent and transparent methodology. This too shows that there has been a steady decline in the relative global performance of the UC system. 

First, compare performance for publications, the default indicator, in 2006-9 and 2014-17. Every single campus of UC, except for Merced which is not ranked, has fallen: UCLA from 6th to 23rd, Berkeley from 23rd to 43rd, San Diego from 25th to 37th, Davis from 26th to 54th, San Francisco from 39th to 63rd,  Irvine from 88th to 146th, Santa Barbara from 168th to 28th, Riverside from 270th to 391st, Santa Cruz from 436th to 620th.

If we want to talk about quality we might look at another indicator, the number of papers in the top 1%.

Again we have a  pattern of decline although not so steep: The smallest is San Francisco from 15th to 16th, the largest Riverside from 84th to 252nd. And there is one case of  an improvement: San Diego goes from from 25th to 19th.

So far we have just looked at research. There is no global ranking that makes any serious attempt to assess teaching and learning. There are some that have indicators that might have something to do with student ability or graduate quality. The most useful of these are the Russia based Round University Rankings, which use data from Clarivate Analytics and include 20 indicators in four groups, teaching, research, international diversity and financial sustainability. 

Berkeley was ranked 52nd overall in the world and 32nd in the US in 2011. It was 197th for teaching, 5th for research, 133rd for  international diversity, and 8th for financial sustainability.

In 2019 it was still 52nd overall in the world and 27th in the USA. It had risen for teaching to 168th and for international diversity to 97th but had fallen for research to 20th and to 38th for financial sustainability.

Going into detail we see that Berkeley is improving for numbers of academic staff per student and world teaching reputation but falling for everything related to research.

Berkeley is the best of the UC campuses. All of the others except for the unranked Merced have fallen and all except for Davis have fallen for research.

It seems that UC is approaching the edge of the cliff. It is likely that the fall will get faster as Chinese students stop coming. It is difficult to see how the financial situation can get better in the foreseesble future and where the next generation of college-ready students are going to come from. No doubt there are more headlines and scandals to come.