The Frontiers of the Ranking World: UNIRANKS

After predatory journals and predatory conferences, the next logical step would be predatory rankings. 

Recently, internet searches have shown up something called UNIRANKS, with a polished website containing several plausible world and country rankings and announcements about a forthcoming conference, along with a list of photogenic speakers and detailed instructions about registration and payment.

I will not give out the URL since a couple of clicks in I ran into a bright red screen with a warning about phishing.

There appears to be no adequate methodological details, no advisory committee, no criteria for inclusion, or any of the other things provided  by even the most technically careless rankings. Even the name is a near copy of UniRank, a reputable if limited search engine and ranking.

So be warned. If I receive any indication that this is a proper ranking and conference I will of course post it.

SCImago Innovation Rankings: The East-West Gap Gets Wider

The decline of western academic research becomes more apparent every time a ranking with a stable and moderately accurate methodology is published. This will not be obvious if one just looks at the top ten, or even the top fifty, of the better known rankings. Harvard, Stanford, and MIT are usually still there at the top and Oxford and Cambridge are cruising along in the top twenty or the top thirty.

But take away the metrics that measure inherited intellectual capital such as the Nobel and Fields laureates in the Shanghai rankings or the reputation surveys in the QS, THE, and US world rankings, and the dominance of the West appears ever more precarious. This is confirmed if we turn from overall rankings to subject and field tables.

Take a look at the most recent edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking, which is highly reputed among researchers although much less so among the media. For sheer number of publications overall, Harvard still holds the lead although Zhejiang, Shanghai Jiao Tong and Tsinghua are closing in and there are more Chinese schools in the top 30.  Chinese dominance is reduced if we move to the top 10% of journals but it may be just a matter of time before China takes the lead there as well. 

But click to physical sciences and engineering. The top 19 places are held by Mainland Chinese universities with the University of Tokyo coming in at 20.  MIT is there at 33, Texas A & M at 55 and Purdue 62. Again the Chinese presence is diluted, probably just for the moment, if we switch to the top 10% or 1% of journals.  

Turning to developments in applied research, the shift to China and away from the West, appears even greater.

The SCImago Institutions rankings are rather distinctive. In addition to the standard measures of research activity, there are also metrics for innovation and societal impact. Also, they include the performance of government agencies, hospitals, research centres and companies.

The innovation rankings combine three measures of patent activity. Patents are problematic for comparing universities but they can establish broad long-term trends. 

Here are the top 10 for Innovation in 2009:

1.   Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique

2.   Harvard University 

3.   National Institutes of Health, USA

4.   Stanford University 

5.   Massachusetts Institute of Technology

6.   Institute National de las Sante et de la Recherche Medicale

7.   Johns Hopkins University 

8.   University of California Los Angeles

9.   Howard Hughes Medical Institute 

10.  University of Tokyo.

And here they are for 2023:

1.   Chinese Academy of Sciences 

2.   State Grid Corporation of China  

3.   Ministry of Education PRC

4.   DeepMind

5.   Ionis Pharmaceuticals

6.   Google Inc, USA

7.   Alphabet Inc 

8.  Tsinghua University

9.   Huawei Technologies Co Ltd

10.  Google International LLC.

What happened to the high flying universities of 2009?  Harvard is in 57th place, MIT in 60th, Stanford 127th, Johns Hopkins 365th, and Tokyo in 485th. 

it seems that the torch of innovation has left the hand of American, European, and Japanese universities and research centres and has been passed to Multinational, Chinese, and American companies and research bodies, plus a few Chinese universities. I am not sure where the loyalties of the multinational institutions lie, if indeed they have any at all.

US News and the Law Schools

There has always been a tension between the claim by commercial rankers that that they provide insights and data for students and other stakeholders and the need to keep on the good side of those institutions that can provide them with status, credibility, and perhaps even lucrative consultancies.

A recent example is Yale, Harvard, Berkeley and other leading law schools declaring that they will "boycott", "leave", "shun", or "withdraw from" the US News (USN) law school rankings. USN has announced that it will make some concessions to the schools although it seems that, for some of them at least, this will not be enough. It is possible that this revolt of the elites will spread to other US institutions and other rankings. Already Harvard Medical School has declared that it will follow suit and boycott the medical school rankings.

At first sight, it would seem that the law schools are performing an act of extraordinary generosity or self denial. Yale has held first place since the rankings began and the others who have joined the supposed boycott seem to be mainly from the upper levels of the ranking while those who have not seem to be mostly from the middle and lower. To "abandon" a ranking that has served the law school elite so well for many years is a bit odd, to say the least.

But Yale and the others are not actually leaving or withdrawing from the rankings. That is something they cannot do. The data used by US News is mostly from public sources or if it is supplied by the schools it can be replaced by public data. The point of the exercise seems to be to persuade US News to review their methodology so that it conforms to the direction where Yale law school and other institutions want to go.

We can be sure that the schools have a good idea how they will fare if the current methodology continues and what is likely to happen if there are changes. It is now standard practice in the business to model how institutions will be affected by possible tweaks in ranking methodology.

So what was Yale demanding? It wanted  fellowships to be given the same weighting as graduate legal jobs. This would appear reasonable on the surface but it seems that the fellowships will be under the control of Yale and therefore this would add a metric dependent on the ability to fund such fellowships. Yale also wanted debt-forgiveness programmes to be counted in the rankings. Again this is something dependent on the schools having enough money to spare.

For a long time the top law schools have been in the business of supplying bright and conscientious young graduates. Employers have been happy to pay substantial salaries to the graduates of the famous "top 14" schools since they appear more intelligent and productive than those from run of the mill institutions.

The top law schools have been able to do this by rigorous selection procedures including standardised tests and college grades. Basically, they have selected for intelligence and conscientiousness and perhaps for a certain amount of agreeability and conformity. There is some deception here,  including perhaps including self-deception. Yale and the rest of the elite claim that they are doing something remarkable by producing outstanding legal talent but in fact they are just recruiting new students with the greatest potential, or at least they did until quite recently.

If schools cannot select for such attributes then they will have problems convincing future employers that their graduates do in fact possess them. If that happens then the law school graduate premium will erode and if that happens future lawyers will be reluctant to go into never ending  debt to enter a career that is increasingly precarious and unrewarding.

The law schools, along with American universities in general, are also voicing their discontent with reliance on standardised tests for admission and their inclusion as ranking indicators. The rationale for this is that the tests supposedly discourage universities from offering aid according to need  and favours those who can afford expensive test prep courses.

Sometimes this is expanded into the argument that since there is a relationship between test scores and wealth then that is the only thing that tests measure and so they cannot measure anything else that might be related to academic ability. 

The problem here is that standardised tests do have a substantial relationship with intelligence, although not as much as they used to, which  in turn has a strong relationship with academic and career success. Dropping the tests means that schools will have to rely on high school and college grades. which have been increasingly diluted over the last few decades, or on recommendations, interviews, and personal essays which have little or no predictive validity and can be easily prepped or gamed.

It appears that American academia is retreating from its mission of producing highly intelligent and productive graduates and have embraced the goal of socialisation into the currently dominant ideology. Students will be  admitted and graduated and faculty recruited according to their doctrinal conformity and their declared identity.  

USN has gone some way to meeting the demands of the schools but that will probably not be enough. Already there are calls to have a completely new ranking system or to do away with rankings altogether.