What happens to those who leave THE?

Times Higher Education (THE) appears to be getting rather worried about leading universities such as Rhodes University, University of Zurich, Utrecht University, and some of the Indian Institutes of Technology boycotting its World University Rankings (WUR) and not submitting data.

Thriving Rankings?

We have seen articles about how the THE rankings are thriving, indeed growing explosively. Now, THE has published a piece about the sad fate that awaits the universities that drop out of the WUR or their Impact Rankings. 

Declining Universities?

An article by two THE data specialists reports that 611 universities that remained in the THE world rankings from 2018 to 2023 retained, on average, a stable rank in the THE reputation ranking. The 16 who dropped out saw a significant decline in their reputation ranks, as did 75 who are described as never being in the WUR.

The last category is a bit perplexing. According to Webometrics, there are over 30,000 higher education institutions in the world and nearly 90,000, according to Alex Usher of HESA. So, I assume that THE is counting only those that got votes or a minimum number of votes in their reputation ranking. 

We are not told who the 75 never-inners or the 16 defectors are, although some, such as six Indian Institutes of Technology, are well known, so it is difficult to check THE's claims. However, it  is likely that an institution that boycotted the THE WUR would also discourage its faculty from participating in the THE academic survey, which would automatically tend to reduce the reputation scores since THE allows self-voting.

Also, we do not know if there have been changes in the weighting for country and subject and how that might modify the raw survey responses. A few years ago, I noticed that Oxford's academic reputation fluctuated with the percentage of survey responses from the humanities. It is possible that adjustments like that might affect the reputation scores of the leavers. 

The opacity of THE's methodology and the intricacies of its data processing system mean that we cannot be sure about THE's claim that departure from the world rankings would have a negative impact. In addition, there is always the possibility that universities on a downward trend might be more likely to pull out because their leaders are concerned about their rankings, so the withdrawal is a result, not the cause of the decline. 

We should also remember that reputation scores are not everything. If a decline in reputation was accompanied by an improvement in other metrics, it could be a worthwhile trade.

What happened to the IITs in the THE WUR?

Fortunately, we can check THE's claims by looking at a group of institutions from the same country and with the same subject orientation. In the 2019-20 world rankings, twelve Indian Institutes of Technology were ranked. Then, six -- Bombay, Madras, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Roorkee --  withdrew from the WUR, and six -- Ropar, Indore, Gandhinagar, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar --  remained, although two of these withdrew later. 

So, let's see what happened to them. First, look at the overall ranks in the WUR itself and then in Leiden Ranking, the Shanghai Rankings (ARWU), and Webometrics.

Looking at WUR, it seems that if there are penalties for leaving THE, the penalties for remaining could be more serious. 

Among the  IITs in the 2020 rankings, Ropar led in the 301-350 band, followed by Indore in the 351-400 band. Neither of them is as reputable in India as senior IITs such as Bombay and Madras and they had those ranks because of remarkable citation scores, although they did much less well for the other pillars. This anomaly was part of the reason for the six leavers to depart.

Fast-forward to the 2024 WUR. IIT Ropar has fallen dramatically to 1001-1200,  Indore, which had fallen from 351-400 to 601-800 in 2023, has opted out, and Gandhinagar has fallen from 501-600 to 801-1000. Bhubaneswar, which was in the 601-800 band in the 2020 WUR,  fell to 1001-1200 in 2022 and 2023 and was absent in 2024. Guwahati and Hyderabad remained in the 601-800 band.

Frankly, it looks like staying in the THE WUR is not always a good idea. Maybe their THE reputation improved but four of the original remaining IITs suffered serious declines.

IITs in Other Rankings

Now, let's examine the IITs' performance in other rankings. First, the total publications metric in Leiden Ranking. Between 2019 and 2023, four of the six early leavers rose, and two fell. The late leavers, Hyderabad and Indore, were absent in 2019 and were ranked in the 900s in 2023. Remainer Guwahati rose from 536th in 2019 to 439th in 2023.

For Webometrics, between 2019 and 2024, all 12 IITs went up except for Bombay.

Finally, let's check the overall scores in the QS WUR. Between 2021 and 2024, four of the six leavers went up, and two went down. Of the others, Guwahati went up, and Hyderabad went down.

So, looking at overall ranking scores, it seems unlikely that boycotting THE causes any great harm, if any. On the other hand, if THE is tweaking its methodology or something happens to a productive researcher, staying could lead to an embarrassing decline.

IITs' Academic Reputation Scores

Next, here are some academic reputation surveys. The  US News Best Global Universities is not as helpful as it could be since it does not provide data from previous editions, and the Wayback Machine doesn't seem to work very well. However, the Global Research Reputation metric in the most recent edition is instructive. 

The six escapees had an average rank of 272, ranging from 163 for Bombay to 477 for Roorkee.

The remainers' ranks ranged from 702 for Guwahati to 1710 for Bhubaneswar. Ropar was not ranked at all. So, leaving THE does not appear to have done the IITs any harm in this metric

Turning to the QS WUR academic reputation metric, the rank in the academic survey for the leavers ranges from 141 for Bombay to 500 for Roorkee. They have all improved since 2022. The best performing remainer is Guwahati in 523rd place.  Ropar and Gandhinagar are not ranked at all. Bhubaneswar, Indore and Hyderabad are all at 601+.  

Now for Round University Ranking's reputation ranking. Four of the six original leavers were there in 2019. Three fell by 2023 and Delhi rose. Two, Bombay and Roorkee, were absent in 2019 and present in 2023.

This might be considered evidence that leaving THE leads to a loss of reputation. But five of the original remainers are not ranked in these rankings, and Guwahati is there in 2023 with a rank of 417, well below that of the six leavers. 

There is then scant evidence that leaving WUR damaged the academic reputations of those IITs that joined the initial boycott, and their overall rankings scores have generally improved.

On the other hand, for IITs Ropar and Bhubaneswar remaining proved disastrous.  

IITs and Employer Reputation

In the latest GEURS employer rankings, published by Emerging, the French consulting firm, there are four exiting IITs in the top 250, Delhi, Bombay, Kharagpur, and Madras, and no remainers.

In the QS WUR Employer Reputation indicator, the boycotters all perform well. Bombay is 69th and Delhi is 80th. Of the six original remainers two, Ropar and Gandhinagar, were not ranked by QS in their 2024 WUR. Three were ranked 601 or below, and Guwahati was 381st, ahead of Roorkee in 421st place.

Conclusion

Looking at the IITs, there seems to be little downside to boycotting THE WUR, and there could be some risk in staying, especially for institutions that have over-invested in specific metrics. It is possible that the IITs are atypical, but so far there seems little reason to fear leaving the THE WUR. A study of the consequences of boycotting the THE Impact Rankings is being prepared 

THE's Big Bang Ranking

 

Another day, another ranking. 

Times Higher Education (THE) has published a "bang for the bucks" ranking.

THE is taking the scores for institutional income, research income, and income from industry and comparing them with the scores "for research, teaching, and working with industry." This, presumably, is supposed to reveal those universities that are able to process their funding efficiently and turn it into publications, citations, patents, doctorates, and survey responses

There are some methodological issues here. It is not clear exactly how the income scores are calculated. Is it from the raw monetary data that THE collects from universities, or has it been through the THE standardization and normalization machine? Is there some sort of weighting or just an average of the three income categories? 

Also, there is a chart that suggests that all the scores are counted except for the financial metrics, but the text implies that the international pillar is not counted as part of the bang that THE purports to measure.

Another issue is that the financial data in the THE rankings refers to the year two years before the date of publication. However, citation and publication data are from a five—or six-year period before the ranking is published. In effect, THE is claiming that their favored schools have a remarkable ability to send money back in time to the years when research proposals were written, papers published, and citations recorded.

THE lists ten countries as good bang producers, starting with the UK and including Pakistan and Egypt. It does not list China, South Korea, Canada, or Australia, which should make us a little suspicious, 

Then, looking at the list of twenty universities with the biggest bangs, we see a few familiar names, including Sussex and Brighton Medical School,  Babol Noshirvani University of Technology,  and  Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, that have appeared in this blog before because they received remarkably high scores for citations and consequently did well in the overall rankings. Some, including Quaid-i-Islam University, COMSATS University, Auckland University of Technology, Government College University Faisalabad, and University College London, have contributed to citation-rich multi-contributor papers from the Global Burden of Disease Studies or the Large Hadron Collider project. Others, such as Shoolini University of  Biotechnology and Management Sciences and Malaviya National Institute of Technology, have scores for research quality that are disproportionate to those for research environment or teaching. It looks as though a lot of  THE's Big Bang simply consists of getting masses of citations. 

It is also possible that universities might obtain a good bang for the buck score by underreporting their income, perhaps accidentally, which would help here, although not in conventional rankings. This has happened to Trinity College Dublin and probably to Harvard, although the latter case went unnoticed by almost everyone. Probably, the very high scores for Sorbonne University and Universite Paris Cite result from the special features of the French funding system.

I suspect quite a few institutions will take this ranking seriously or pretend to and use it as a pretext to try to obtain more largesse from increasingly impoverished states.

It would seem that THE is engaged in a public relations exercise for upmarket British and perhaps for US and continental universities. These are doing all sorts of amazing, brilliant, and exciting things for which they receive insufficient funds from cheapskate governments.  Just imagine what they could do if they got as much money as Chinese universities do. 

Presentation Slides

I am uploading some conference presentation slides. They are out of date but might have some historical interest.

1. QS and THE Subject Rankings Compared. Moscow April 2015.

2. Global Rankings: Changing Methodologies. Yekaterinburg February 2016

3. International Rankings and the Assessment of Teaching: A Regional Perspective. Doha March 2017

4. International University Rankings and Southeast Asia. Kuala Lumpur March 2019

5. Rankings, Universities and the Media. Bologna May 2019

6. COVID-19 and Developments in Global University Rankings. Beijing (online) October 2020

7. Developments in National and Regional Rankings. Warsaw June 2022

Comments on the THE Reputation Rankings

Times Higher Education (THE) has announced the latest edition of its reputation ranking. The scores for this ranking will be included in the forthcoming World University Ranking and THE's other tables, where they will have a significant or very significant effect. In the Japan University Ranking, they will get an 8% weighting, and in the Arab University Ranking, 41%. Why THE gives such a large weight to reputation in the Arab rankings seems a bit puzzling. 

The ranking is based on a survey of researchers "who have published in academic journals, have been cited by other researchers and who have been published within the last five years," presumably in journals indexed in  Scopus.

Until 2022 the survey was run by Elsevier but since then has been brought in-house. 

The top of the survey tells us little new. Harvard is first and is followed by the rest of the six big global brands: MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and Berkeley. Leading Chinese universities are edging closer to the top ten.

For most countries or regions, the rank order is uncontroversial: Melbourne is the most prestigious university in Australia, Toronto in Canada, Technical University of Munich in Germany, and a greyed-out Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia. However, there is one region where the results are a little eyebrow-raising. 

As THE has been keen to point out, there has been a remarkable improvement in the scores for some universities in the Arab region. This in itself is not surprising. Arab nations in recent years have invested massive amounts of money in education and research, recruited international researchers, and begun to rise in the research-based rankings such as Shanghai and Leiden. It is to be expected that some of these universities should start to do well in reputation surveys.

What is surprising is which Arab universities have now appeared in the THE reputation ranking. Cairo University, the American University in Beirut, Qatar University, United Emirates University, KAUST, and King Abdulaziz University have achieved some success in various rankings, but they do not make the top 200 here. 

Instead, we have nine universities: the American University in the Middle East, Prince Mohammed Bin Fahd University, Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud Islamic University, Qassim University, Abu Dhabi University,  Zayed University, Al Ain University, Lebanese University, and Beirut Arab University. These are all excellent and well-funded institutions by any standards, but it is hard to see why they should be considered to be among the world's top 200 research-orientated universities.

None of these universities makes it into the top 1,000 of the Webometrics ranking or the RUR reputation rankings. A few are found in the US News Best Global Universities, but none get anywhere near the top 200 for world or regional reputation. They do appear in the QS world rankings but always with a low score for the academic survey.

THE accepts that survey support for the universities comes disproportionately from within the region in marked contrast to US institutions and claim that Arab universities have established a regional reputation but have yet to sell themselves to the rest of the world.

That may be so, but again, there are several Arab universities that have established international reputations. Cairo University is in the top 200 in the QS academic survey, and the RUR reputation ranking, and the American University of Beirut is ranked 42nd for regional research reputation by USN. They are, however, absent from the THE reputation ranking. 

When a ranking produces results that are at odds with other rankings and with accessible bibliometric data, then a bit of explanation is needed.

  

Global rankings: the age of deference is coming to an end

 

Published in today's University World News

Rankings and the Threat from the East

Recently, we have heard a lot about global university rankings' responsibilities. Some have drawn attention to the increasing number of universities included in the rankings or the new rankings that allow universities to showcase the remarkable and interesting things they have been doing for society or the environment. There are claims that the well-known rankers are promoting global equity by including many more African and Asia universities.

Perhaps. But it seems that some rankings, particularly the two big-name ones, THE and QS, have another function, which is to downplay the rise of Chinese and maybe other Asian institutions and maintain the dominant position of the elite schools of the Global North. 

The table below shows the number of universities included in the top 100 universities in various global rankings. The table is arranged in ascending order according to the number of Mainland Chinese universities and refers to the most recent edition. 

Chinese universities are apparently uninterested in the rankings that supposedly assess contributions or commitment to the environment, sustainability, or equity. There are none in the top 100 of the new QS Sustainability Rankings or the GreenMetric Rankings and only one in the THE Impact Rankings. On the other hand, China does very well in Nature Index and in Leiden Rankings Publications and Publications in the top 1% of journals and fairly well in the URAP, Scimago, and National Taiwan University rankings. In short, China does best in those rankings that emphasize recent achievements in research in STEM subjects. 

The UK does best in rankings that include a substantial weighting for reputation, internationalization,  or activity related to sustainability and much less well in research-based rankings. 

The USA hasn't really bothered with the GreenMetric and THE Impact rankings. Its best performance is in UniRank, which is a measure of web activity, and Webometrics, which is half web activity, CWUR, which includes faculty and alumni achievement, and US News Best Global Universities, which has a strong reputation element. It is not so good in Nature Index, URAP, and NTU, which are research-based. 

It seems, to simplify a bit, that British and American universities benefit from indicators that measure or try to measure resources, reputation, web presence, and international activity, Chinese and some other Asian institutions are rapidly moving ahead in research and innovation.

Table: Number of Universities in the Top 100

Ranking	Country of publication	USA	UK	Mainland China
QS Sustainability	UK	12	28	0
UniRank	Australia	75	7	0
GreenMetric	Indonesia	3	3	1
THE Impact	UK	6	25	1
USN Global	USA	41	11	4
MosIUR	Russia	41	15	4
QS World	UK	27	17	5
CWUR	UAE	50	9	6
GEURS	France	18	8	6
Webometrics	Spain	53	9	6
THE World	UK	36	11	7
RUR	Georgia	38	11	7
ARWU	China	38	8	10
NTU	Taiwan	36	10	14
Scimago- universities	Spain	39	7	24
URAP	Turkiye	28	6	23
Leiden P 1%	Netherlands	39	8	28
Leiden P	Netherlands	31	6	36
Nature Index -  academic	UK	37	5	35