The European Union Rankings

The European Union is trying to develop a new ranking system to rival the existing ones. The motivation is fairly transparent. The object, as reported in the EUObserver is "to improve the ranking of European universities and improve Europe's economic power".

The EUObserver provides an excellent and succinct summary of the forces underlying the universities ranking boom.

"This means the rankings are increasingly receiving more attention for different specific purposes: Students use them to short-list their choice of university; public and private institutions use them to decide on funding allocations; universities use them to promote themselves; while some politicians use them as a measure of national economic achievements or aspirations. "

It seems that planning for the new rankings took place in the second half of 2009 and that in the first half of 2010 it will be tested on 150 institutions around the world, but only for engineering and business studies.

At that rate, THE, QS and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have nothing to worry about.

Global Institutional Profiles Project

Thomson Reuters have set up a new site here. It contains information, although not much so far, about the new Times Higher ranking system.

They will "address industry concerns over current profile systems... The 21st century research institution has many fluid layers, and Thomson Reuters is committed to developing an equally robust and dynamic dataset".

Notice that they are talking about research institutions as though universities do nothing but research and that they refer to higher education as an industry.

The page provides some hints about what might be included in the forthcoming rankings: peer review, scholarly outputs, citation patterns, funding levels and faculty characteristics.

I do not know whether there is any significance in the absence of internationalisation and faculty student ratio from the list.

The page could have done with some editing. There are too many barely meaningful adjectives -- robust, dynamic, flexible, data-driven, globally significant. And exactly what is a "fluid layer"?

Webometrics Out Soon

The next edition of the Webometrics rankings will be published at the end of January. Watch this space.

www.webometrics.info

The THE Reputational Survey

Thomson Reuters, acting on behalf of Times Higher Education, have published an open letter to university administrators announcing the development of a new ranking system. They promise much. The new ranking is the only one that "seeks to fundamentally change the way data is collected and analyzed". They believe "this development underscores a major breakthrough within the rankings dialogue".

There is some good news. Finally, the inaccurate term "peer review" is being dropped to be replaced by "reputational survey". Also, according to a comment on a previous post from Phil Baty, Deputy Editor at THE, "we will be looking to focus the survey more on non-research elements. It allows us to get at the less tangible elements of university activity that can not be measured through numbers." This is very sensible.

The two points above are welcome but I still do not see anything very revolutionary about the forthcoming survey.

There is another question. Thomson Reuters are asking university administrators to encourage their researchers and colleagues to take part. This would seem to introduce an element of bias into the survey from the very start. How many university administrators will read the open letter? How many will act on it? Will there be as many in Japan as in England?

What does this say about Nigerian Universities?

According to University World News, Nigerian banks prefer to recruit holders of polytechnic diplomas rather than university graduates. One bank manager said that diploma holders could perform most of the tasks normally done by graduates for less pay and did not require extensive computer literacy training.

I wonder if this would show up in any of the current university rankings.

Something about Ipsos MORI

Anyone interested in Ipsos MORI, the company appointed to conduct a survey of academic opinion for Times Higher Education can go here or have a look at the column to the left.

It seems that they have a number of junior staff outside the UK, or at least a lot of telephone interviewers, so that does to some extent allay one of my concerns about the company.

However the biodata for the senior staff is rather disconcerting. Some snippets:

"after graduating from Oxford University"
"has worked closely with both Conservative and Labour ministers ... as well as a wide range of local authorities and NHS trusts"
"served as Finance Director of BMRB"
"started her career at the BBC"
"has been a User Fellow at the centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at LSE and spent time working in the Prime Minister's Stategy Unit"
"a member of the MRQSA council"
"a full member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing"
"member of the council of Roehamton University"
"has chaired a number of round-table discussions with senior peers"
"has a BSc, MSc and MBA from Imperial College"

Very British (and just a little bit cosmopolitan -- "speaks five European languages", "always busy cookng up the next plan to explore to a far flung destination"), very establishment, rather politically correct and perhaps a little inward looking -- in much of the world, working with British government ministers, peers and the NHS is not something you would want to boast about.

Will a survey carried out by such a group reveal that in most respects places like Oxford, LSE and Imperial College are performing increasingly less well than leading American and Japanese universities?

In case you thought ranking was just a bit of fun


NTU ACCUSES SPANISH RANKING INSTITUTE OF LIBEL

The National University of Taiwan is protesting about a statement on the webometrics site that some universities had resorted to 'bad practices."

The practices consisted of hosting papers written by authors at other institutions. As well as NTU, webometrics referred to the University of Sao Paulo.

Other universities are listed as having more than one webdomain. These include the University of Maryland, the University of Manchester, Yonsei University, Korea University, Chiang Mai University, The Indian Institutes of Technology at Delhi and Kharagpur, Kuwait University and the University of Bahrein

Does Size Really Matter?
Times Higher Education (THE) are keeping the "peer review" but possibly with new questions. According to a recent article they will be using the British pollsters Ipsos MORI to collect data.

"So we are delighted to confirm that for the 2010 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, our new rankings partner Thomson Reuters has commissioned one of the world's leading polling companies, Ipsos Mori, to carry out research to support the peer-review element of the tables. Using a professional polling company means that we can inject proper targeting and transparency into the process while ensuring that we get a much larger response rate than in the past - the aim is for at least 25,000 responses in 2010. It also means that the questions in the opinion survey can be carefully crafted to elicit meaningful and consistent responses while ensuring that every respondent knows what is being asked of them. "

THE seems to be overly concerned with the number of respondents, claiming that the 9,000 plus of the 2009 THE-QS rankings was an inadequate number to represent the millions of academics of one sort or another around the world. They are right to be concerned but the number of respondents is not the main determinant of the validity of any survey. What matters more is the extent to which the sample is representative of the population about which data is sought. If THE and if Ipsos MORI are going to do no more than get a lot of people to fill out online forms then their new survey will be little better than the old one.

If the rankings industry is going to descend into a squabble about who's got the biggest survey then QS might be able to trump THE. They could revive their retired respondents from 2004-06, purchase a large stash of email addresses from Mardev, make the survey more user-friendly (tick boxes instead of typing names) and they might well be able to get above the 25,000 mark.

The choice of Ipsos MORI, whose offices are in London, Harrow, Manchester, Edinburgh, Belfast and Dublin might be an indicator of a narrowing of vision. THE's editorial board, which seems to have become more active of late, is predominantly British with a heavy bias towards officialdom. Discussion about rankings in THES seems rather anglocentric. A subtle slip was Phil Baty's recent reference to "overseas" universities. They may be overseas to you but you are overseas to them and everybody else.

Whither the QS Rankings?

While Times Higher Education is looking around for a new methodology, QS, judging from a recent conversation with Ben Sowter and Tony Martin and comments on its website, appears set on continuing with the old system perhaps with a bit of tweaking.

The need to maintain some sort of continuity is understandable, especially after the yo-yoing of some universities in recent editions of the THE-QS rankings. However, criticism of the rankings is such that it would seem a good idea to seize the opportunity to make some simple changes.

The least liked element of the THE-QS rankings of 2004-09 was the "peer review". It had, being based on the mailing lists of a Singapore-based publishing company with links to Imperial College London, an obvious geographical bias. The declared response rate was too low to meet conventional standards of face validity. Its weighting was too high. As a survey of research expertise it was quite redundant since citations are a far better measure of research impact and quality.

Furthermore, the "peer review" added to the overemphasis on research. The THE-QS rankings gave a 20 % weighting to citations, the faculty student ratio gave a big and obvious boost to universities with large numbers of non-teaching research-only faculty and then there was 40% for a research-based survey.

I would like to suggest a simple change. Keep the survey of academic opinion (and stop calling it a peer review because it is nothing of the sort) but use it to assess the general excellence or reputation, perhaps including teaching and student satisfaction, of universities. It is not credible that someone with a functioning mouse can sign up for the World Scientific list and became competent to assess the research performance of universities but he or she might have some idea of the general reputation of institutions. This would require minimal changes to the current procedure: all that is needed is to change the questions.

A couple of other refinements might be in order. The division of the academic world into three super-regions for weighting purposes is too crude. Latin America, Africa, Southwest Asia and Southeast Asia deserve to be treated as separate regions.

Telling everybody that you have sent 180,000 e-mails is asking for trouble if you are going to get a negligible response. It would be better to use the World Scientific lists to accumulate a list of people willing to participate in the survey, combine it with names collected from various events and then send out the survey. If nothing else, the response rate would be a little more respectable.

A Ranking from SCImago

Tekmillinen Korkeakoulu-Tekniska Hogskolen in the top 400
Ollscoil Luimnigh just misses top 1000
Good showing by Debreceni Egyetem

SCImago, a research group based on Spanish universities has published SIR, SCImago Institutions Rankings, has published its 2009 report which includes a ranking of 2124 institutions, including research centres as well as universities.

There are five indicators, one of which, the number of publications in Scopus-indexed journals, is used for ranking.

There are some positive things about this ranking. It uses Scopus data: anything which reduces the emerging Thomson Reuters monopoly is welcome. It ranks more than two thousand places. It is quite transparent: I have checked a few institutions and the figures seem accurate.

The most striking thing about this index is that it shows that a vast amount of research is being done outside universities. The top three places for research output go to government research centres in France, China and Russia, lending support to French claims that current ranking systems fail to take account of their distinctive system of higher education and research.

One irritating thing about these rankings is the eccentric naming policy. Japanese universities are referred to by their Japanese names but Korean and Chinese ones are in English. Some New Zealand universities are listed with English and Maori names but the Universities of Auckland and Waikato are only in English. Dublin Institute of Technology is in Irish but Trinity College Dublin is in English. Some Saudi institutions are in English and some in Arabic. Three Israeli universities are in Catalan (or German without the umlaut!)

An Ancient Dinosaur Reborn?

Times Higher Education and some of its readers seem to be concerned about what they think is the low position of the London School of Economics (LSE) in previous rankings. It is true that institutions that specialise in the social sciences and humanities suffer from any ranking based on citations and publications since they produce longer and fewer papers with fewer authors and more books and use citations more sparingly than do those in the natural sciences and medicine. However, this seems to affect universities like Yale and Princeton as much as LSE. It would be quite simple for rankers to use some sort of weighting to reduce the disadvantage of such places and it would be an improvement if THE were to do this in any future ranking system.

But the concern with LSE is rather suspicious. Should specialist institutions be regarded as the equal of universities that excel in all disciplines? Perhaps THE should also think about the overrating of Oxford and Cambridge (take away the peer review from the THE-QS rankings of 2004-09 or the alumni and awards indicators from the Shanghai rankings and see where they are) as they discuss their new system.

It might be worth recalling a comment made by a THE reader back in October.


"It is always quite interesting to see that British institutions are still regarded as the top of the world. (I just compare it with the FT MBA rankings as well, where UK institutions dominate all rankings). As someone from the continent I only can say "Long live the British Empire!" It seems to me that the stereotype of British domination is still very alive in UK. A closer look at the British economy, engineering and scientifc achievements, however, reveals the the mental fraud. Travelling across UK, I often realize that UK is frozen in time. Sometimes the technology, housing and machines are like from a 3rd world. London Metro is like from 1899. Trains across the country are like in the 30s. Communication technology is like mid of last century. I would have reasoned that with all the best universities, as you have figured out yourself, only bright scientist and engineers evolve. It's an illusion. Travel across Europe, marvel at French TGV trains, drive German cars and have a look at Spanish solar power plants and you will see that others, with officially inferior schooling systems, have achieved far more. Your university ranking is an illusion, buried in century long self-perception of world dominance. I am sorry to write that, but it is true. The British dominance is long gone, same with academic instituions. Your ranking list is an ancient dinosaur."

Whither the Times Higher Rankings?

Times Higher Education has announced that it will be producing a new ranking system to replace the THE-QS World University Rankings.

THE does not seem to have much idea about where it is going. Its advisory committe (it would be interesting to find out who they are) is reported to have complained that the number of respondents in the peer review is too small and that the citations indicator is biased against the social sciences and the humanities.

Neither of these is very helpful. The small number of respondents is not for lack of trying by QS. They have been sending out nearly 200,000 e-mails a year. I doubt if there is very much anyone can do get many more respondents. What could be done and should be done is to improve the validity of the survey by clearly identifying the group whose opinion is being sought or using databases that are less obviously biased. The second problem could be dealt with quite easily by assigning appropriate weighting to the various dsicipline clusters.

THE has also published comments from readers about future directions for its rankings. Some of these seem unaware of the basic methods of the THE-QS rankings. One, for example wants to see an "increased number of academics interviewed" -- QS never interviewed anyone for its survey. Others want the rankings to include criteria that are of limited global comparabilty such as starting salaries or graduate job prospects.

Several readers are unhappy with what they feel is the unfairly low position of LSE. This would seem misplaced. The rankings are supposed to be of universities not of research institutes and offering a full range of courses ought to be a significant element in the assessment of a university.

Other readers are sceptical about the significance of internationalisation and there appears to be division about whether citations are an adaequate nmeasure of research quality.

The response so far appears to be predominantly British. If THE are going to listen to their readers it is likely that the obvious pro-British and even pro-Oxbridge bias of the old rankings will continue.

Anyone interested in taking part in a survey by Thomson Reuters and THE can do so by going here.

Announcing GRAPE: Global Ranking of Academic Performance

I am surprised that nobody has thought of doing this before.

There are now six international university ranking systems and five of these, World University Rankings (THE-QS London), Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), International Professional Ranking of Higher Education Institutions (Ecole des Mines de Paris), Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities (Taiwan) and Global Ranking of Universities (Russia), provide a numerical score. I have simply added the scores for all universities that were in the top 30 on any one of these, converting the top score for The Paris and Taiwan rankings into 100. The top scorer in the composite ranking was of course Harvard which was awarded a composite score of 100. The other scores were then adjusted accordingly. Yale, Imperial College London, Northewestern and Waseda were not included in the Russian rankings so they were ranked according to their total score for the other four.

There are some interesting results. The University of Tokyo comes in second, with a good record for recent research and for CEOs of big companies. University College London and Imperial College perform poorly. Oxford and Cambridge are slipping a bit and Australian universities do badly.

Here then are the top 30 with the combined scores.

1. Harvard 100

2. University of Tokyo 79.91

3. MIT 74.05

4. Stanford 71.21

5. Columbia 62.61

6. Cambridge 61.87

7. Caltech 59.81

8. Oxford 59.29

9. University of Pennsylvania 57.65

10. Yale 57.00

11. Johns Hopkins 56.7

12. University of California Berkeley 55.22

13. Chicago 54.87

14. Cornell 53.42

15. Kyoto 53.42

16 . UCLA 53.07

17. Duke 52.66

18. Princeton 51.49

19. University College London 50.46

20. Michigan 49.19

21. Imperial College London 47.74

22. University of Washington Seattle 47.08

23. University of California San Diego 45.60

24. Toronto 45.46

25. Northwestern 46.09

26. University of Wisconsin Madison 42.98

27. Manchester 42.49

28. Edinburgh 42.46

29. McGill 42.41

30. University of Illinois Urbana Champagne 41.69

It is also intersting to look at the correlations between the specific rankings and the combined scores. The correlations (top 30 institutions only) are as follows.

Paris .818
Shanghai .815
Taiwan .773
Russia .652
THE-QS .491

Announcement

Readers may have noticed that some of the links on this page are no longer working. One reason for this is that the geocities site where I kept some items has been terminated by Yahoo.

I shall refrain from commenting on the ethics of this other than to say that it is not exactly the way for Yahoo to win friends of any sort.

I have now now started a website where I shall keep items relating to international university rankings such as news, papers, slides and so on.

The address is www.universities06.com

Interesting Times

The announced divorce of Times Higher Education and QS looks like the beginning of a new era for international university rankings.

QS have announced that nothing will be changed. According to director Nunzio Quacquarelli, the QS World University Rankings, as they will now be called, will employ the same consistent and credible methodology and will be led by the same team of Quacquarelli, John O'Leary, Martin Ince and Ben Sowter that created the rankings in 2004.

The QS rankings have of course been very far from consistent. There have in fact been several significant changes since 2004. But the change of name may prove to be even more significant Many people, especially in the US and Southeast Asia are unaware that these rankings are not produced by THE and some actually are under the impression that they come from "the Times of London", a name sufficient in itself to guarantee the highest quality. Without the magic name will the QS rankings have the same impact?

Meanwhile, THE will have problems of its own. if they are only going to assess citations and publications using data from Thomson Reuters, they will end up producing a clone of the Shanghai rankings. If they try to be more adventurous they will run into the problem of time. Spending a few months waiting for advice from their editorial board (composed of university administrators?) and reading comments from readers could mean that they will not be able to produce a ranking in time. It might be a clever ploy for QS to bring their rankings forward by a month or two causing another problem for THE.

And what about the US News and World Report? They have their own arrangement with QS that will apparently remain unchanged. But will red-blooded Americans really go on accepting data, not from "the Times of London" but from a consulting firm that keeps getting North Carolina universities mixed up?

,

News from Shanghai

The latest edition of the Academic Ranking of World Universities published by Shanghai Jiaotong University contains few changes at the top. In the top 20 the only change is that Johns Hopkins and Tokyo swap the 19th and 20th places.

Further down is another matter.

I have counted six institutions that have fallen out of the top 500. They are:

University of Akron
University of Idaho
University of Tennessee Health Center
Medical College of Georgia
University of Maine at Orono
Mississipi State University

Sad news about Idaho, alma mater of Sarah Palin. No doubt this will be further ammunition for those who want to crow about the intellectual superiority of Joe Biden.

The American universities have been replaced by:

Universite Victor Segalen II Bordeaux, France
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
University of Tehran, Iran
Kyungpook University, Korea

The trend is clear. The US, except perhaps for the West coast, is declining. The Mediterranean, Southwest Asia and the Pacific Rim are rising.

The recent conference in Shanghai highlighted the rise of King Saud University, largely accomplished by the recruitment of highly cited researchers, which was pretty much the strategy underlying the dramatic ascent of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the University of Tehran, who showed a massive improvement in the number of publications in 2008.

BREAKING NEWS

From Times Higher Education

"Times Higher Education has signed an agreement with Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading research-data specialist, to provide the data for its annual World University Rankings.

The magazine will develop a new rankings methodology in the coming months, in consultation with its readers, its editorial board of higher education experts and Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters will collect and analyse the data used to produce the rankings on behalf of Times Higher Education."

.........
"QS, which has collected and analysed the rankings data for the past six years, will no longer have any involvement with Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings."

The Rise of Asia Part I


International university rankings have been around long anough to show signs of long term trends. Making sense of the THE QS rankings is, however, complicated by frequent changes of methodologyand occasional errors. The Shanghai rankings seem to be another matter. There has only been one significant change in method, in 2004 when articles in Nature and Science were counted for five years rather than three. It should be possible then to determine some general trends in research performance from 2004 and 2008.



These rankings do not indicate the exact position of universities but place them within broad bands. This is understandable but rather pointless since positions can be calculated from the component indicators in less than half an hour.


If we compare the positions of various universities then some interesting changes begin to emerge .

Between 2004 and 2008 Chinese universities have advanced steadily. Peking from 296th to 241st, Tsinghua from 213rd to 203rd, Nanjing from 330rd to 292nd, University of Science and Technology China from 333rd to 243rd, Zhejiang from 350th to 226th, Fudan from 372nd to 325th and Jilin from 478th to 430th.



Shanghai Jiao Tong University itself rose from 461st to 257th.


In addition, seven Chinese universities entered the rankings between 2004 and 2008.


Taiwanese universities also rose: National Taiwan University from 174th to 164th, National Tsing Hua Univeristy from 362nd to 309th and National Cheng Kung University from 408th to 305th.


The picture for Hong Kong universities is mixed. The University of Hong Kong , the Chinese University of Hong Kiong and City Univeristy of Hong Kong went up but the Hong Kong University of Science and Technlogy and the Kong Kong Polytechnic University went down.

In a little while we shall see whether these trends continue.

More Comments on the THE-QS Rankings


"Canadian universities among top 200 in the world should be supported to keep them there" from The Vancouver Sun

"To the unbiased observer, the THE-QS rankings appear to be designed to put colony-dominated UK institutions at the top, for what appear to be biased business-related reasons, and indeed, THE-QS puts 4 of the top 6 universities in the world in the United Kingdom. How convenient for the home field advantage! but scarcely science, and scarcely reliable."
from Law Pundit.

"UC Irvine’s status takes a hit in new ranking of the world’s top colleges and universities" from Orange County Register

"King Saud University, King Fahd University of Petrolem and Minerals Listed among World's Top" from Saudi Gazette

"As Asian neighbours gain academic clout, the Kingdom must establish clear targets for itself". John O'Leary in Phnom Penh Post

"Canberra still Home of Australia's Best Higher Education, ANU" NOWUC

More Information at QS

A lot more data can now be found at www.topuniversities.com

How They Did It

According to university administrators, universities rise in the THE-QS rankings because of enlightened leadership, quality control exercises like key performance indicators, ISO compliance, professional development and so on, increasing the quantity and impact of research and internationalisation. When they fall it is, according to adminstrators, because of the manifest bias of the rankings or, according to disgruntled outsiders, beacause of adminsitrative deficiencies.

In this year's rankings, there have been quite a few substantial changes in both directions between 2008 and 2009. Here are some of the fortunate cases who experienced an improvement and some comments on what actually contributed to the changes.

University College London
Rose from 7th place (total score 98.1 ) to 4th (99), just behind Yale, largely because of an improvement of 2 points for the academic survey, which has a weighting of 40%.

Princeton
Rose from 12th (95.7) to 8th (96.6) mainly because of an improvement in the student faculty ratio from 75 to 82 despite falling on 3 other indicators.

University of Toronto
A big improvement from 41st (81.1) to 29th (85.3) largely due to a whopping improvement in the faculty student ratio from 18 to 63, counteracting a fall for citations per faculty from 100 to 74.

University of Alberta
Rose from 74th (72.9) to 59th (75.4). This was almost entirely because of an improvement on the recruiter review from 48 to 71 points.

University of Oslo
A spectacular ascent from 177th (57.5) to 101st (62.9) in which strong gains on academic suvey, recruiter review and faculty student ratio (weighting of 70%) outweighed losses for citations per faculty and internationalisation (weighting of 30%).

Pohang University of Science and Technology
Rose 50 places from 184th to 134th propelled by an improvement in the academic survey from 37 to 53 points.

Keio University
Another remarkable rise from 214th (53.0) to 142nd (61.6) resulting from an improvement of 6 points on the academic survey and 38 for faculty student ratio, tempered by a 9 point fall for citations per faculty.

Chulalongkorn University
An improvement of 28 places caused mainly by a rise of 10 points on the academic survey.

Yonsei University
Rose from 203rd ( 54.1) to 151st (60.3). An improvement of 20 points for the academic survey more than compensated for declines in 4 other indicators.

In general then, ascent and descent within these rankings depends to a very large extent on the academic survey and faculty student ratio followed by the recruiter review. Changes in citations per faculty and international faculty and students have little impact, at least in the short run.

The 2008 THE-QS Rankings

I have hesitated about putting up this post since the missing rankings might be restored in a few days or even hours.

I am sure that many people have noticed that the pre-2009 THE-QS rankings can no longer be accessed at the topuniversities site and that the list of the top 400 universities now there only includes the total scores, not those for the indicators. The Times Higher Education site does have data on the indicators for 2009 and preceding years but only for the top 200 universities in each case.

This unfortunately means that it is impossible for readers to check the reasons for the rise or fall of universities between 2008 and 2009.

All is not lost. I have saved the page for 2008 that indicates the indicator scores for the top 400. Anyone interested in knowing the scores for a particular university in that year can just send a note via the comments sections.

Comments on the 2009 THE-QS Rankings

America Slips in Rankings of World Universities

Brown University Falls

The University of Southhamton is Now Even Better

ntu's Ranking Rises

How Universiti Malaya did it

A standard feature of the annual release of the THE QS rankings is the chorus of derision that greets the fall of a Malaysian university or of congratulation for a rise.

This year Universiti Malaya (UM) rose 50 places from 230 to 180.

Acccording to the Vice-Chancellor it was because:

"The redefinition of key performance indicators for the academics and the new initiatives implemented in international networking, recruitment of international staff and students have produced a quick, positive impact,” he said."

According to Ben Sowter, QS's head of research,

" UM’s resurgence into the top 200 was clearly impressive.
“The apparent collective effort at the university to attract a greater proportion of international students suggests a progressive outlook,” he said in an e-mail interview."

But was this what actually happened?

First, between 2008 and 2009 UM dropped quite a bit on the academic survey from 64 out of 100 to 60 (top score is 100 and the mean is 50) and on the recruiter survey from 70 to 68. This may have been the result of a subtle change in the surveys that required respondents to type in the name of selected universities rather than clicking and dragging from a list. This could have worked to the disadvantage of less well known universities.

The fall on the surveys was almost exactly balanced by a rise in the score for international students from 46 to 65 and for international faculty from 63 to 72. The effect of the change in these indicators was reduced by the low weighting thet they receive.

There was also a slight improvement in citations per faculty from 20 to 21.

UM had an overall improvement from 50.8 to 56.5. This was almost entirely the result of a massive improvement in the faculty student ratio indicator, from 38 to 68, worth a 6 full points on the weighted total.

In 2008 UM,according to QS's Top Universities Guide, had a ratio of 14.8 students per faculty.

According to the QS topuniversities web site, the ratio has fallen to 8.9 this year. This appears to have been achieved by reducing the number of students by about 6,000 and by increasing the number of faculty by about 600.

Performance indicators may get UM into the Shanghai or Taiwan rankings but they were not relevant in this particular case.

Comments on the 2009 THE-QS Rankings

This article by Kris Olds is worth reading. A couple of extracts:

"It seems as if the Times Higher has decided to allocate most of its efforts to promoting the creation and propagation of this global ranking scheme in contrast to providing detailed, analytical, and critical coverage of issues in the UK, let alone in the European Higher Education Area. Six steady years of rankings generate attention, advertising revenue, and enhance some aspects of power and perceived esteem. But, in the end, where is the Times Higher in analyzing the forces shaping the systems in which all of these universities are embedded, or the complex forces shaping university development strategies? Rather, we primarily seem to get increasingly thin articles, based on relatively limited original research, heaps of advertising (especially jobs), and now regular build-ups to the annual rankings frenzy. In addition, their partnership with QS Quacquarelli Symonds is leading to new regional rankings; a clear form of market-making at a new unexploited geographic scale. Of course there are some useful insights generated by rankings, but the rankings attention is arguably making the Times Higher lazier and dare I say, irresponsible, given the increasing significance of higher education to modern societies and economies."
.....

"The discourse of “international” is elevated here, much like it was in the last Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK, with “international” codeword for higher quality. But international is just that – international – and it means nothing more than that unless we assess how good they (international students and faculty) are, what they contribute to the educational experience, and what lasting impacts they generate."