An Unwelcome Message

Phil Baty, who is in charge of world university rankings at Times Higher Education, writes about an email that he has received.

I was disturbed by an email that dropped into my in-box late last
month.

No, it was not another offer of cheap Viagra, or an announcement that I
had won an overseas lottery. It was more unsettling than that.

"Dear academic," it began. The greeting alone was a surprise, given
that I am a journalist with little more than a bachelor's degree by way of
academic credentials.

But my unease grew with each line of the message. The email was from a
major education information company inviting me to take part in an online survey
that would be used to create a university ranking.

It said that my role as a leading educationalist combined with my
subject focus made my opinion very important. It even offered to enter me into a
prize draw if I passed on my great wisdom and spent 10 minutes filling in the
form.

It would be amusing if the implications were not so serious. As the
email claimed, the audience for the company's annual exercise is in the
millions, and it is clear that university league tables in various forms have
become a very big business with wide influence.

Any organisation, such as Times Higher Education, that seeks to create
rankings must accept its responsibility to conduct thorough research and to
employ sound data.

There is a responsibility on companies doing such surveys that
academics are selected carefully by discipline, and by country and continent if
appropriate. If compilers want universities and students to see their league
table as robust the onus is on them to take a rigorous approach. When rankings can make or break a university's reputation, or influence multimillion-pound strategic decisions, anything less will simply not do.

I am sure that anyone reading this blog has received the message by now and knows that the mysterious sender is not Voldemort but QS, who are now producing their own university rankings independently of THE.

The sending of the message and form to Phil Baty actually represents an improvement for the QS survey. Even without a doctorate, he is probably better qualified to evaluate universities than most subscribers to the World Scientific mailing list, of whom nearly 200,000 receive the form every year. Subscription requires nothing more than the ability to click a mouse a few times.

I wonder though whether those who completed the THE survey form sent out by Thomson Reuters to authors who have published in ISI indexed journals are significantly better qualified. I have heard that there are many parts of the world where the granting of co-authorship of research papers is simply a perquisite of seniority within a department and nomination as corresponding author, the one who gets to go to conferences and do a bit of shopping, is decided partly or largely by political pressures.

It may be that the time has come for a greater variety of reputational surveys to be conducted. There is certainly room for a QS - style survey, essentially open to anyone who, for whatever reason, is interested. After all, that is a constituency that deserves some consideration . But equally, perhaps more so, we need as survey of research excellence that targets demonstrably competent researchers. The ability to be nominated as corresponding author -- I assume that is the one whose email addresses is entered in the ISI archives -- of a paper once in an academic career mught not be sufficient evidence of competence to evaluate university research and teaching. There is a case for a survey based on a more rigorous working definition of research competence, such as inclusion in the ISI list of highly cited researchers. Another possiblty might be to survey editors of academic journals. Response rates could be boosted by publishing the journals who took part. There is also an obvious niche for a student based survey of teaching.

Anyway, Phil, you might as well do the survey. There are many people less knowledgable than you filling out the form and, for that matter, the one for THE . You might even be the one who wins the BlackBerry.

Presentation by Phil Baty

A presentation by Phil Baty of Times Higher Education at the ISTIC meeting in Beijing reviewed the background of the now defunct THES-QS World University Rankings and the rationale for the development of a new ranking system.

There are some quotations that highlight familiar complaints about the THE-QS rankings:


“Results have been highly volatile. There have been many sharp rises and falls… Fudan in China has oscillated between 72 and 195…” Simon Marginson, University of Melbourne.


“Most people think that the main problem with the rankings is the opaque way it constructs its sample for its reputational rankings”. Alex Usher, vice president of Educational Policy Institute, US.


“The logic behind the selection of the indicators appears obscure”. Christopher Hood, Oxford University.



Baty also indicates several problems with the "peer review", citations, faculty student ratio and internationalisation indicators.



All of this is very sound. But it is not yet certain how much of an improvement the new THE rankings will be.



THE will now obtain citations and publication data from Thomson Reuters rather than Scopus. The Thomson Reuters data is based on the ISI indexes, which are somewhat more selective than the Scopus database. There is, however, a great deal of overlap and simply using ISI data rather than Scopus will not in itself make very much difference except perhaps that there will be a somewhat greater bias towards English using researchers and the research output that is measured may be of a somewhat higher quality. We should also remember that from 2004 and 2006, the THE-QS citations data were collected by the very same Jonathon Adams who is now overseeing the development of the new THE rankings.



Some of the "confirmed improvements" noted by Baty are certainly that. Normalising citation scores between various disciplinary groups to take account of varying patterns of publication and citation is something overdue. The presentation of information about various types of income will, if the raw data is publicly available, make it possible to evaluate universities in terms of value for money.


In some ways the reputational survey may be better then the QS "peer review" but exactly how much better is not yet clear. Baty says that only published researchers were asked to take part but this apparently could mean no more than being listed as the corresponding author for an article once in a lifetime. No doubt this yields a better qualified group of respondents than that made up those with the energy to sign up with World Scientific but is it really significantly better?


Also, there is much that we have not been told about the reputational survey. We know the total number of respondents, which was much lower than the original target, but not the response rate. Nor has there been indication of the number of responses from individual countries. This is particularly irksome since rumour and subjective impression suggest that many countries have been neglected by the recently closed THE survey.


The methodology still appears in need of refinement. Research income of various kinds appears four times as an indicator or part of an indicator: research income from industry as the sole indicator in the Economic Activity/Innovation category; as part of overall research income and as part of research income from industry and public sources in Research Indicators; and as part of total institutional income in Institutional Indicators. This is a bit messy.

There is still time for THE to produce an improved ranking system. Let's hope they can do it.

Presentation by Jonathon Adams

A summary of progress so far on Thomson Reuters' Global Institutional Profiles Project an be found here.

A Bit More About the THE Survey

Thomson Reuters have released a bit more information about the reputational survey they recently conducted for the 2010 Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

They managed to get 13,388 responses. This is quite a lot less than the original target of 25,000 although it is higher than the 9,000 plus respondents to the 2009 THE-QS rankings. This means that QS, who are preparing their own rankings, now have an opportunity to boost the numbers of their respondents by using the usual devices -- reminders, extended deadlines, a chance to win an iPad instead of a Blackberry and so on . Thomson Reuters may have made a mistake by closing their survey so early.

Still, numbers are not everything. Thomson Reuters can claim that their survey, which uses the ISI database of authors published in reputable academic journals, targets people who know something about research. The QS survey, on the other hand, consists merely of those who have managed to get on the mailing list of World Scientific.

Thomson Reuters have also provided some information about the regional and disciplinary distributions of their respondents. The largest group is from the Americas. While most disciplinary clusters are well represented, there is a very small number from the arts and humanities. Respondents spend slightly more than half their time doing research and slightly less than a third teaching.

Is this really enough? It would be interesting to know how many forms were sent out and what the response rate was. Also, how far back in time did Thomson Reuters go in collecting respondents? If they went back five or ten years many respondents might have retired or lost interest in research since publishing.

It also would be helpful if more information were given about the geographical distribution of the survey. One notable absurdity of the THE-QS surveys of 2004-2009 was the marked bias in favor of particular countries – more respondents from Indonesia than from Germany, more from the UK plus Australia than from the US, more from Ireland (just the Republic?) than from Russia. Thomson Reuters have probably overcome these biases but have new ones emerged? Has there been an adequate response from Southeast Asia outside Singapore? Have Russia and Central Asia and the Middle East outside Israel been affected by the omission of Russian and Arabic from the list of languages in which the forms can be completed?

It is good that Thomson Reuters have released some information but if they are to fulfill their promise of greater transparency more is needed.

The New THE Ranking Methodology

Times Higher Education has given some information about the proposed structure and methodology of their forthcoming World University Rankings. At first sight, the new rankings look as thought they might be an improvement on the THE-QS rankings of 2004-2009 but there are still unanswered questions and it is possible that the new rankings might have some defects of their own.

The proposed methodology will feature 13 indicators, possibly rising to 16 next year. Here we have the first problem. Frequent changes of method bedevilled the THE-QS rankings, producing, along with a series of errors, implausible rises and falls. If the new rankings are going to see further changes not just in the fine detail of data collection but in the actual indicators themselves then we going to see more spurious celebration or lamentation as universities bounce up down the rankings. Still, if THE are going to standardise the indicator scores from the beginning it is unlikely that their rankings will ever be as interesting as the THE-QS used to be.

The largest component of the proposed ranking is "research indicators" which accounts for 55% of the weighting. These include academic papers, citation impact, research income, research income from public sources and industry and a reputational survey of research.

Another category is "institutional indicators", which together get 25%: number of undergraduate entrants, number of PhDs awarded, a reputation survey of teaching and institutional income.

Ten per cent will go to "international diversity", divided equally, as in the THE-QS rankings, into international students and international faculty.

Another ten per cent goes to economic activity/ innovation. At the moment this consists entirely of research income from industry although there are apparently plans to add two other measures next year.

There are some obvious rough edges in the proposals. The economic activity/innovation income consists entirely of research income from industry but research income from public sources and industry appears under research indicators. In the institutional indicators, universities will get credit for admitting undergraduate students and for PhD students but nothing for anyone in between. I doubt if this will go unchanged. If undergraduates and PhD students are to be institutional indicators then we will see seriously negative backwash effects with masters programs being phased out and marginal students being herded into doctoral programs.

The new methodology is less diverse than appears from a simple count of the number of indicators. It is heavily research orientated. As noted, more than half of the weighting goes to a bundle of research indicators. However, economic activity/innovation is for this year nothing more than research income.

Adding to the emphasis on research, the institutional indicators include the number of doctorates awarded and the the ratio of doctorate to bachelor degrees awarded. Under institutional indicators there is a survey of teaching but the respondents are largely selected on the basis of their being authors of academic articles published in ISI indexed journals. There seems to be no evidence that the respondents do very much teaching and if Thomson Reuters include researchers with a non-university affiliations, of whom there are many in medicine and engineering ,then it is likely that many of those called upon to evaluate teaching have never done any teaching at all. Meanwhile student faculty ratio, a crude measure of teaching quality, has been removed.

It is regrettable that QS has apparently decided to keep the international students indicator. This has caused demonstrable harm to universities in several countries by encouraging the recruitment of students with inadequate linguistic and cognitive skills. One modification that THE should consider if they want to keep this measure, is declaring the EU a single entity. That was supposed to be the point of the Bologna process.

The proposed rankings include several indicators related to university income including research income. This is not a bad idea. After all, the provision of adequate funds is a necessary although far from a sufficient condition for the attainment of a reasonable level of quality. The inclusion of research income will, however, be detrimental to the interests of institutions like LSE that focus on the humanities and social science.

There are still unanswered questions. Some of these indicators will be scaled by dividing by the number of faculty. There will be many raised eyebrows if universities are required to include teaching staff who do no research in the measures of research output or research only staff in the other indicators. Whatever decision is made there is bound to be acrimonious wrangling.

Also unstated is the period from which the data for publications and citations are drawn. The further back the data collectors go the better for traditional elite universities. It is also not stated whether they will count self citations or publications in conference proceedings that are not rigorously reviewed.

So, if you want rankings that emphasise research and funding then THE and Thomson Reuters may be heading, somewhat uncertainly, in the right direction but perhaps at the price of neglecting other aspects of university quality.

From Brazil

There is an interview in Portuguese with Phil Baty of the THE World University Rankings here.

Reactions to the Asian Rankings

Last Sunday the Malaysian New Straits Times published an article by Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, Vice Chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). This particular university has generated considerable publicity by refusing to cooperate with QS, the organisers of the now defunct THE-QS rankings and the Asian University Rankings. Prof. Dzulkifli said of the latest edition of the 2010 rankings:


"FIVE Malaysian universities were ranked among the top institutions in the 2010 QS Asian University Rankings.

While some cheered and reckoned this is deservedly so -- considering the hard work -- others felt it is about time.

At Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), however, most were amused by the news for the simple reason that they have neither agreed to the invitation to participate nor have they submitted any data or information.

Nevertheless, USM has been assigned a meaningless "number".

Early in the year, the university took a firm stand on not participating in the newly minted QS, and officially notified the company of its intention.

As they made no response, it was assumed that the message was well understood. The silence adds to the conviction that the rankings exercise is suspect at best. "

USM's decision is especially significant since it has been awarded APEX status, with various privileges and enhanced autonomy, with the express purpose of becoming a world class university as measured by a high place in the rankings.

The refusal to participate is entirely understandable. The errors and shortcomings of QS products have been catalogued extensively in this blog and other sources. However, a boycott of the rankings does not mean very much. Most of the information used by QS is easily available from third party sources. In any case, USM's stance did not do it any harm. It ended up in the same position in the current Asian rankings as it did last year although with a larger number of points (average scores for all universities were much higher this year largely because of all those international exchange students rushing backwards and forwards.)

It is also surprising that a Malaysian university should find the QS rankings objectionable. After all, Malaysian and Southeast Asian universities in general have always done much better in QS rankings, thanks to a survey based on the mailing lists of a Singapore based company than in the the Shanghai, Scimargo or Webometrics rankings. It is not clear whether USM's stance is against rankings in general or just those produced by QS.

Discussion in the Straits Times

Two weeks ago the Singapore Straits Times included an article by Phil Baty of Times Higher education in which he explained why THE had "torn up" its annual rankings.

"Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of the old rankings was the so-called 'peer review' score. Some 40 per cent of a university's overall ranking score was based on this 'peer review' - in effect, a simple opinion survey, asking university staff which institutions they rated most highly.

Our former data provider, QS, achieved only a very small number of responses to this survey. Last year, around 3,500 people responded. Figures for individual countries were shocking. In 2008, just 563 responses from Britain were received, and just 180 responses from Malaysia. Most shockingly, only 116 responses were collected from China's many, many thousands of scholars in 2008. "

He then refers to the extreme volatility of the rankings:

"The University of Malaya in Malaysia, for instance, plummeted from 89th place in 2004 to joint 169th in 2005, before dropping out of the top 200 altogether later. Between 2008 and last year, Keio University in Japan moved up an amazing 72 places to 142. Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea jumped 54 places to 134."

Pohang did rise because of a marked improvement in the peer review but Keio's rise was because it did better on the student faculty ratio indicator. The fall of Universiti Malaya was because ethnic minorities were counted as international students and faculty in 2004 but not, after a "clarification of data" in 2005.

He then describes some features of the new THE reputational survey and concludes:

"So much rests on the results of our rankings: individual university reputations, student recruitment, vice-chancellors' and presidents' jobs sometimes, and major government investment decisions. We have a duty to overhaul the rankings to make them fit for such purposes. "

Two days ago there was a reply by Nunzio Quacquarelli of QS. He argued:

"The numbers of respondents to the QS academic peer review, quoted by Mr Baty, are misleading.

Our 2009 rankings were based upon 9,386 respondents, not 3,500 as quoted. QS received statistically significant numbers of academic respondents from all major Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, and 222 in Singapore. "

Some clarification is in order. Quacquarelli is correct in noting that the 2009 world rankings were based on 9,386 respondents. But it should be pointed out that about two thirds of those were respondents who had filled out the survey forms in 2008 and 2007 and had been given the opportunity to update their responses. If there was no updating then the old responses were included. Thus it is not impossible that some respondents had by 2009 retired, lost interest, moved or even died.

He then quotes from noted statistician Paul Thurman to claim that the academic opinion survey was valid.

Quacquarelli has a point in that it is not numbers alone that contribute to validity. However, it is hard to accept that a survey with more respondents from Ireland than from Russia and more from Hong Kong than from Japan can be regarded as a valid representation of global academic opinion.

Then there is an unconvincing assertion that THE had consistently endorsed the THE-QS rankings. This in fact refers to the time when John O'Leary and Martin Ince, now with QS, were editor and deputy editor of THE. Well, they would, wouldn't they?

It still remains to be seen whether the new THE survey will be better than QS's. It asks more questions and more detailed ones and has been distributed in several languages but the question of representativeness still remains. Thomson Reuters appear to be satisfied with the number of responses they have received but have not said how many there were or how they were distributed. I have a subjective impression that Southeast Asia and other regions may be underrepresented this time. I would, however, welcome detailed information from Thomson Reuters that would prove me wrong.

Another Rating System

The latest edition of University World News features an interview, by Vojana Sharma, with Morshidi Sirat of Universiti Sains Malaysia who is leading research into a new method of rating universities in developing countries.

"Pilot studies are currently under way in partner universities in Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines and are expected to be completed by the end of this year.

"We are collaborating with universities in the peripheral regions of these countries, not in the cities. Our aim is to examine to what extent universities in the region can contribute to regional development and serve the needs of their communities," Morshidi told University World News.

"They have their own role to fulfil," he said. "To compare them with universities in a different environment and political system would not be fair." "

The interview continues:

"The five-country pilot studies will review government and regional development targets for poverty alleviation and measure how these have been met by universities.

"Ratings will include measurements on access to universities, educational equity, community engagement and contribution to the environment and regional economy, and how well universities promoted 'human security' including values such as individual freedoms, reducing gender and political discrimination and other non-tangible measures of progress. ""

It sounds like an interesting idea although one wonders how something non-tangible can be measured.

Universiti Sains Malaysia is apparently boycotting the rankings this year. This does not seem to have done them any harm. it was in exactly the same place this year as in 2009 although, aided by a massive increase in the number of inbound exchange students, it scored quite a bit higher.

Governments Should Ignore Rankings

Says Nunzio Quacquarelli of QS Quacquarelli Symonds in an interview in University World News

Asian University Rankings

I have an article in the University World News on the 2010 QS University Rankings.

Waiting for U-Multirank

Phil Baty of Times Higher Education writes from a conference in Sweden:

"Peter van den Besselaar, a professor at the Rathenau Institute in the Netherlands, said that global rankings had become a "hot topic" - heavily criticised, yet also heavily used - among university managers.

He criticised the Shanghai Jiao Tong world rankings, arguing that existing systems' main weakness was their failure to address the individual missions and goals of the institutions they evaluated. This had "perverse effects", he said, as managers followed "the incentives embedded in the indicators".

Professor van den Besselaar called for a multi-dimensional ranking, with solid indicators relevant to different missions. This is being attempted by the European Commission-funded U-Multirank project, an interactive ranking where institutions are compared with those of the same type and mission via indicators chosen by users. But the project is only at the pilot phase of a feasibility study, and will rank just two subject areas by the end of 2011. "

The point about perverse incentives is a good one although I remain sceptical about those individual missions that cannot possibly be expressed by any indicator in any existing ranking.

A multi-dimesional interactive ranking sounds very nice but if we are still in the pilot stage of a feasibility study then there is not very much to get excited about.

More about the QS Asian University Rankings.

Here are the top 10.

1. University of Hong Kong
2. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
3. National University of Singapore (Up from 1oth place. That needs explaining)
4.Chinese University of Hong kong
5. University of Tokyo (down from 3)
6. Seoul National University
7. Osaka University
8. Kyoto University
9. Tohoku University
10. Nagoya University.

Peking University has fallen out of the top 10 to number 12. Fifteen Korean universities and all seven Indian Institutes of Technology are in the top 100.

QS Asian University Rankings

The QS Asian University Rankings have appeared. Five Malaysian universities are in the top 100. The best performer is Universiti Malaya at No. 42.

Under Pressure

The Guardian reports that some British universities have been putting pressure on students to get them to give good scores in the National Student Survey conducted by Ipsos MORI on behalf of Hefce:

"Eight British universities have been accused of putting undue pressure on students in an attempt to boost their position in crucial national league tables.

Documents released under freedom of information show the universities were reported to the higher education funding body in the last two years over allegations they tried to persuade students to give their institutions high scores in the National Student Survey.

The 22-question "student experience survey" is critical in determining universities' national rankings and their reputation with students and employers.

The eight universities were Swansea, Anglia Ruskin (in Cambridge and Chelmsford), Derby, Leicester, Portsmouth, Sunderland, Kingston and London Metropolitan. Documents show they have all been investigated by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce)."

Preliminary "Results" from Thomson Reuters

Thomas Reuters have announced what they call preliminary results of the reputational survey of academic researchers that will be one indicator in the forthcoming Times Higher Education international university rankings. The survey closed on May 2nd.

Thomson Reuters have not said how many survey forms were distributed nor how many responses they have received.

They say that they have received "thousands of responses from every corner of the world" and that they have achieved "an excellent breadth of results across six subject areas".

In an article in Forbes, Jonathan Adams, director of research evaluation at Thomson Reuters. says

"We're particularly pleased with the number of responses from the Asia Pacific region. As other surveys have been criticized for over-representing North America and Europe, we took particular care to better balance regional representation."

So far there has been nothing that QS, who conducted the much and very justly condemned academic survey for the THE-QS rankings of 2004-2009, have not said. Indeed, QS weighted their survey precisely so that one third of responses were from the Asia Pacific region.

The problem with the old THE-QS survey was that the UK and Australia were overrepresented in comparison with the United States and Japan and that within the three super-regions of the world there were marked variations in the number of reponses from country to country.

Thomson Reuters say that "To help control for language and translation bias, the Academic Reputation Survey was offered in eight languages: Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese and English."

If you going to send out the survey in two kinds of Portuguese, then not sending them in the two languages of the United Nations, Arabic and Russian, seems a little odd.

I am also wondering about about the distribution of the survey. I know of several people who took part in the QS survey last year and before but who, despite reasonable publication records in ISI-indexed journals, did not receive a survey form this time.

Thomson Reuters claim that their survey is superior to that of QS. Perhaps, it is: they have, for a start, made progress by asking questions about teaching. But we need more information than has been released so far to be convinced. It should be quite easy, at least, to release the total number of responses and the total response rate and those for individual countries and regions.

Malaysia and the Rankings

An article by Phil Baty of Times Higher Education in the Malaysia Star repeats earlier comments on the flaws of the old THE-QS World University Rankings:

"I must make a confession: the rankings of the world’s top universities that my magazine has been publishing for the past six years, and which have attracted enormous global attention, are not fit for purpose."

He then continues:

"Those who have used our rankings to cast judgment on the state of Malaysian higher education (and many, in very senior positions have done so) must be told that the annual tables had some serious flaws — flaws which I have a responsibility to put right."

He is absolutely right about the flawed rankings of 2004 - 2009 and about the use of ranking data for political purposes. It is particularly noticeable that any fall by Malaysian universities in the rankings is treated by some writers as the consequence of serious problems in the Malaysian education system. I remember at the end of 2007 receiving a request from a Singaporean newspaper to comment on the latest rankings in which Universiti Malaya (UM) had suffered a serious decline. I replied in detail that it was highly likely that the apparent fall in UM's position was due to changes in methodology and nothing else. This was confirmed a few days later when detailed indicator scores were published showing that UM's fall between 2006 and 2007 was almost entirely the result of the introduction of Z scores which boosted the scores for research for moderately productive research universities like Peking while slightly lifting those for relatively less productive ones like UM. The newspaper article, however, simply asserted that the decline was the result of deficiencies in UM and Malaysian higher education in general.

I do not dispute that Malaysian universities have problems. It is also obvious that in many years they tumbled down the QS rankings. The two just did not have anything to do with each other.

Equally it is true that the quantity of research in Malaysian universities has expanded greatly in recent years and that in some years some Malaysian universities rose. But again these two things were quite unrelated.

In the critique of the old rankings the focus is on the survey of academic opinion, which accounted for 40% of the rankings. Baty points out that a relatively small number of responses were collected from world academics, 563 from the UK, 180 from Malaysia, 201 from the Philippines.

It is true that the old THE-QS rankings collected a small number of responses but size alone is not the crux of the matter. What matters is whether the the sample is an adequate repesentation of the population from which it is drawn. It is arguable that subscribers to World Scientific (THE-QS) are less representative of international academic opinion than published researchers in peer reviewed journals (THE and Thomson Reuters . The actual number is less important. The new rankings will be vindicated not so much by the number of responses received but by how representative and qualified they are.

The article suggests that Malaysian scholars will be able to participate in the ranking than before. I am wondering about that. I know a few people in Malaysia who took part in the 2008 survey but have not received a form this year (perhaps they do not deserve to). It will be interesting to see the exact number of voters from Malaysia and elsewhere when the polls close.

The Emerging THE Rankings


Times Higher Education has announced some information about the data that will be collected for their forthcoming rankings.


It is now possible to speculate about what might be included or excluded. First, there has been no mention of an employer review. This is a pity since this was the only input from outside universities in the old THE-QS rankings.


Possible new indicators are number of bachelor's degrees, number of doctoral students admitted, number of doctorates awarded "including those funded by competitive research scholarships", total institutional income, research grant income and research contract income.


It is likely that if any of these are indicators in this year's and subsequent rankings there will be negative backwash effects. It is easy to foresee that diploma and certificate courses will be "upgraded", more and more marginal candidates admitted to doctoral programs and more and more dubious doctorates awarded. It is also likely that every award to a postgraduate student will somehow turn into a competitive research scholarship.


On the other hand data about income and source of income sounds promising since this is something that universities will find difficult to manipulate.


It looks as though student faculty ratio might be maintained as will the proportion of international students and international faculty. The reference to research only staff suggests that only teachers will be counted in the student faculty ratio, a very sensible idea.


As for international students and international faculty, there is a big difference between the two, namely that the former are paid to come to universities but the latter are not. There is surely enough evidence from the UK and Australia that artificial incentives to mass importation of unqualified students does nobody any good.

If THE decides to keep the internationalisation indicators it might be time to stop calling people who more a few miles within the EU international. Similarly, the special dispensation whereby Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong are designated international ought to be abolished.

The new rankings will probably include a research indicator based on citations rather than publications. This makes sense. The impact of research, indicated by the number of times it is cited, is more important than the simple fact of publication. There is, however, a risk that this will allow a further element of gaming into the rankings. Researchers will not only divide papers into the smallest possible unit of publication but will also start doing things like citing themselves copiously and unnecessarily or citing colleagues with whom reciprocal citing arrangements can be established.

The reputational survey (congratulations to THE for not calling it a peer review) appears to be under way. THE and their associates seem determined to avoid the Anglo-Saxon bias of the THE-QS rankings (and perhaps the bias among Anglo-Saxons towards the UK and Australia). It is possible though that new biases may be emerging. The distribution of forms will be based on UN data that could be several years out of date by the time they emerge from national bureaucracies. Taking a sample of opinion from ISI publications, which will reflect research projects that began several years earlier, may create a bias in favour of the traditional elite and against newcomers in the research world such as Iran, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and South America.

Comment by Nunzio Quacquarelli

Several items about or by leading figures in the ranking business have appeared recently. Nunzio Quacquarelli, director of QS, says:

"QS research has become highly respected and every year is referenced in roughly 1000 different newspapers, journals and web sites – a Who’s Who of the best media around the world"
There has also been an enormous amount of criticism, especially by academic experts such as Anthony van Raan, Simon Marginson, Eric Beerkens and so on. In comparison, favourable comments by Alan Kantrow, former editor of the McKinsey Quarterly, and Martin Ince do not really count for much. We also have that old quotation from Richard Sykes, "it takes smart people to know smart people." This begs the question of whether the ability to sign up for a an academic mailing list is sufficient to be a certified smart person. Sykes, incidentally, is described as the Rector of Imperial College London, which he has not actually been for nearly two years.

Quacquarelli then refers to Paul Thurman, a specialist in public health statistics, who says that a 2% response rate yielding 9,500 responses is as good as or better than most political opinion polls. Perhaps, although political polls are far from perfect. But this comment misses an important point. QS may have achieved a representative sample of subscribers to World Scientific, an academic publishing company based in Singapore with links to Imperial College (no wonder Richard Sykes is talking about smart people) but are those subscribers representative of expert academic opinion?


The article continues:

"Over 8000 academics have attended seminars specifically debating the QS World University Rankings methodology. Amongst attendees there has been almost universal acceptance of the QS ranking criteria."

Yes, but what matters is those who did not attend attend the seminars.

While we are on the subject of meetings with academics, it might be worth remembering a meeting in Kuala Lumpur in November 2005 at which Quacquarelli is reported to have said that QS was "not aware of Malaysia's racial composition" (the Star 18/11/2005). This is forgivable. After all, the QS office nearest to Malaysia is in Singapore which is very far away. Another report indicated that the "talk attracted comments from the floor some of who disagreed with his ranking methodology." (Sun 22/11/2005).

It seems that Nunzio Quacquarelli sees nothing wrong in the THE-QS rankings. Improvements have been made but there is certainly room for more. Failing to recognise the flaws in the rankings will not help anyone.

Graduate School Rankings



US News has released its annual ranking of American graduate schools. These are subject rankings rather than holistic.



The top schools in selected categories are:



Business: Harvard, Stanford

Education: Vanderbilt

Engineering: MIT

Law: Yale

Medical Research: Harvard

Medical Primary Care: University of Washington, Seattle

Biological Sciences: Stanford

Chemistry: Caltech

Computer Science: Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, Stanford

Earth Sciences: Caltech, MIT

Mathematics: MIT

Physics: Caltech, MIT, Berkeley

Statistics:Stanford

Economics: Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, Stanford

Library and Information Sciences: University of illinois: Urbana-Champaign, University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill

English: Berkeley

Psychology: Stanford, Berkeley

History: Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale

Public Affairs: Syracuse

Fine Arts: Rhode Island School of Design

The Survey Season

A few weeks ago there was a flurry of activity in the rankosphere as the leading rankers announced that they would be starting their surveys. It seems that we are now in a quiet period.

• QS announced that their employer survey would be open on March 23rd but to date there is no sign of life on their site.
• Academic survey forms from Thomson Reuters on behalf of Times Higher Education have been sent out to some countries. I am wondering though about how complete the coverage is. I have not received one although I admit that my record of publication in ISI indexed journals is not particularly brilliant.
• I have heard that several people have signed up for the World Scientific mailing lists, which provide the bulk of the respondents for the QS academic survey, but have not received any newsletters or other material. If World Scientific has frozen its lists or there is some sort of technical problem there might be a problem for QS.

Something from THE

An editorial by Phil Baty in Times Higher Education refers to a comment by Janez Potocnik, former European Commissioner for science and research, that university rankings are now used to assess national economic strength.

He then goes on to indicate other uses of rankings and to provide some more information about the forthcoming THE rankings. It seems that universities will be ranked in six subject areas, one more than in the THE-QS rankings, with life sciences and biomedicine being divided into life sciences and "clinical, pre-clinical and health".

Also "(w)e will also judge subject strength on the full range of measures used in the overall table. We believe this will represent another great improvement."

There might be a problem here. If THE are going to publish subject rankings based on the indicators used in the overall rankings it would not make sense to use the proportions of international students and international faculty, student faculty ratios or citations per faculty for the whole university to determine standing in specific disciplinary areas. So, Thomson Reuters would have to collect specific data about the numbers of international students in the social sciences and so on. Getting accurate information about numbers of students and faculty is diffcult enough for a university as a whole but for each disciplinary area it would be close to impossible. In any case, in many universities the boundaries between disciplinary areas may not correspond to those used by Thomson Reuters.

The reference to ranking the top 200 universities is disappointing. There is an enormous unmet demand for valid information about universities around the world, not just the top 200. Thomson Reuters say they are collecting information about a thousand universities (down from "thousands" a few weeks ago). It would be a pity to waste it.

Proposal for a Student League Table

The conference of the National Union of Students in the UK will condsider a proposal to start a student-run league table that will address "bread and butter" issues.

Another proposal for the conference is that university staff protesting against government cuts should "adopt a boycott on publishing their research".

The problem with that is that they would have to do some research in the first place.

Comments on the Economist article

The Economist has published a number of comments on its article on international university rankings.

The second, as we should have expected, is a complaint about the failure of the rankings to acknowledge the brilliance of LSE. The author, who has a master's from LSE, complains that "the THES and the Times usually score Oxford higher than the LSE- partly due to expenditure and, in the case of the Times, the higher number of 'good marks' " Unfortunately, the THE (no S now) - QS rankings never included expenditure as an indicator: Oxford outscored LSE mainly because of its performance on the academic survey component. I wonder if this says something about the excellent and rigorous research training provided by LSE.

There are also several complaints that teaching quality is not reflected in the current rankings and may even be inversely related to the research productivity of universities. However, there is a sensible observation from Rojr that

"There seems to be a popular but silly assumption that clever Oxbridge graduates are made clever by their experience at Oxbridge. Why? It's well known that Oxbridge picks the cleverest students up front--who's surprised that they're still the cleverest after graduating? Correlation does not imply causation! I wish the league tables would catch on to this.

If I were an employer, an acceptance letter from a top ranking university would be exactly as impressive as a graduation certificate (with any grade on it) from the same university. "

I suspect that global rankings would be more improved by a measure of student quality based on performance in national standardised tests such as the SAT than by efforts to assess the vague and culture-bound concept of teaching quality. I wonder also whether Oxbridge is still picking the cleverest students now that the entrance exams have been scrapped and A levels have become largely meaningless, leaving colleges reliant on admission interviews, probably the least valid of any selection procedure.

Finally, there are comments from Phil Baty of THE and Ben Sowter of QS.

Article in the Australian

An article by Andrew Trounson in the Australian discusses the developng rivalry between the Times Higher Education and the QS rankings and its implications for Australian universities.

Both ranking groups are attempting to increase the number of responses to the academic surveys that will be in both rankings. This might have serious consequences for Australian universities which always did better in the survey-based components of the THE_QS rankings than in the other indicators and which now face the prospect of losing ground in a bigger and more diverse survey.