Access to Rankings Data

Global Higher Ed has an excellent article by Kris Olds and Susan Robertson about the need for transparency in the collection and distribution of ranking data.

Yet More Reactions to the QS

As the world holds its breath waiting for the THE World University Rankings here are a few more reactions to the QS World University Rankings.

AUSTRALIAN universities have responded with a deafening silence to their contentious downgrading in last week's Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings.

The Australian


World's top universities: Four IITs slip in rankings

Sify Finance


Ranking is not everything

The Nation (Thailand)


University climbs fourteen places in world rankings

leedsstudent


A slow but steady climb

Malaysia Star Online

Ranking Research Impact

A team at the University of Western Australia has ranked the world' top 500 universities by research impact. The table is based on citations data derived from Scopus and covers the period 2000 to 2009. The ranking seems technically to be very competent.

The top five are:

1. Harvard

2. Stanford

3. MIT

4. UCLA

5. UC Berkeley

Cambridge is 13th and University College London 36th.

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More Reactions to the QS Rankings

Australian Higher Education Sector Down in Rankings and Nervous on International Enrolments
AIEC QUEST Australian International Education

4 Chinese universities rank among world's top 50
Peoples Daily Online

Some Reactions to the 2010 QS Rankings

Cambridge Knocks Harvard Off Top in University League

San Francisco Chronicle

Nine Taiwan universities listed among the world's top 500 Radio Taiwan International Israeli universities drop in international rankings Haaretz Trinity and UCD slip down rankings of top universities Independent.ie

Cambridge Beats Harvard -- Sort of

The big news from the QS World University Rankings today is that Cambridge is finally top after trailing Harvard for six years.

This seems a little odd since Cambridge is way behind Harvard, and a few other places, on all the indicators in the Shanghai rankings. So what happened? Looking at the indicator scores we find that on the "Academic Peer Review" -- more accurately called an Academic Reputation Index elsewhere on the site -- Cambridge is first and Harvard second. For the Employer Review Cambridge is third and Harvard first, reversing their places last year. For citations per faculty Harvard was third and Cambridge 36th, behind Tufts, Emory and UC Santa Cruz among others. For student faculty ratio, Cambridge was 18th and Harvard 40th. At the time of writing data was not available for International Faculty and Students.

It seems that the main factor in Cambridge's success was the academic survey. QS indicates the sources of the survey.

• 1,648 previous respondents who returned. If QS have continued the practice of previous years , they also counted respondents from 2009 and 2008 even if they did not submit a form.
• 180,00 out of 300,000 persons on the mailing list of World Scientific, a Singapore-based publishing company with links to Imperial College London. World Scientific, by the way, claim to have 400,000 subscribers.
• 48,125 records from Mardev-DM2
• 2,000 academics who signed up at the QS site
• Lists provided by institutions. In 2010 160 universities provided more than 40,000 names.

I will let readers decide how representative or accurate such a survey can be.

Incidentally, QS should be given credit for the detailed description of the methodology of this criterion.

QS announces Date

Times Higher Education have already announced that their World University Rankings will be published on September 16th.

This morning QS indicated on their topuniversities site that theirs will be out on September 8th.

World Class Universities as a Measure of System Quality

This a list of the percentage of each country's universities that are included in the top 500 of the Academic Ranking of World Universities produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. It might be considered a limited indicator of the overall quality of a country's higher education system.

The number of universities in each country included in the ARWU Top 500 is from ARWU . The total number of universities in each country is from Webometrics. A university is simply defined by the possession of a distinct URL.

It is of course easier to start a university in the US than in Israel where the country's first Arabic speaking university has only just been approved. However, this table does put the large number of American universities in global rankings in a different perspective.


1. Israel 21.21
2. Sweden 20.37
3. Australia 19.77
4. UK 16.17
5= Finland 11.76
5= Singapore 11.76
7. South Africa 11.54
8. Canada 11.33
9. New Zealand 11.11
10. Italy 10.89
11. Austria 10.61
12. Germany 9.75
13. Netherlands 8.21
14. Belgium 7.14
15. Switzerland 6.67
16. Ireland 6.00
17. Norway 5.89
18. USA 4.70
19. Spain 4.59
20. Saudi Arabia 4.44
21. Hungary 3.85
22. France 3.77
23. Denmark 3.57
24. Japan 3.50
25= Greece 3.125
25= Slovenia 3.125
27. South Korea 2.55
28. China 2.52
29. Chile 2.47
30. Portugal 1.79
31. Czech Republic 1.75
32. Argentina 0.95
33. Turkey 0.67
34. Poland 0.46
35. Brazil 0.40
36. Russia 0.30
37. Iran 0.19
38. India 0.13
39. Mexico 0.11

New Rankings on the Way

Times Higher Education have announced that their new rankings will be published on September 16th and have revealed the outline of their methodology.

The rankings will include five groups of indicators as follows:

A new broad category, called "Teaching - the learning environment", will be
given a weighting of 30 per cent.

Using five separate indicators, this category will use data on an institution's income, staff-student ratios and undergraduate-postgraduate mix, as well as the results of the first-ever global academic reputation survey examining the quality of teaching.

A further 30 per cent of the final rankings score will be based on another new indicator, "Research - volume, income and reputation".

This category will use four separate indicators, including data on research income, research output (measured by publications in leading peer-reviewed journals) and the results of the academic reputation survey relating to research.

The highest-weighted category is "Citations - research influence".

This category will examine a university's research influence, measured by the number of times its published work is cited in other academics' papers.

Based on the 12,000 journals indexed by Thomson Reuters' Web of Science, and taken over a five-year period, the citations data will be normalised to take account
of different volumes of citations between disciplines.

Reflecting the high levels of correlation between citations data and research excellence, this category will be given a weighting of 32.5 per cent.

A fourth category, "International mix - staff and students", will use data on the proportion of international staff and students on campus. This indicator will be given a 5 per cent weighting.

Knowledge transfer activities will be reflected in "Industry income - innovation", a new category worth 2.5 per cent of the total rankings score. This will be based on just one measure in 2010 - research income from industry.

There is still a lot apparently left undecided such as the distribution of indicators within the groups and exactly what faculty will count for scaling. In general, though, the broad outlines of the new ranking look promising with the exception of the large weighting -- nearly one third -- assigned to a single indication, citations. Certainly citations are a good measure of research impact and more difficult to manipulate than some others but putting so much emphasis on just one indicator will be a problem for face validity and will also amplify any data entry errors should they occur.

Finally, I wonder if it is a good idea to refer to the "seventh annual survey". Wouldn't it better to start all over again with the First THE Rankings?

From THE

I am reproducing Phil Baty's column from Times Higher Education in its entirety

One of the things that I have been keen to do as editor of the Times Higher
Education World University Rankings is to engage as much as possible with our
harshest critics.

Our editorial board was trenchant in its criticism of our old rankings. In particular, Ian Diamond, principal of the University of Aberdeen and former chief executive of the Economic and Social Research Council, was scathing about our use of research citations.

The old system failed to normalise data to take account of the dramatically different citation volumes between different disciplines, he said - unfairly hitting strong work in fields with lower average figures. We listened, learned and have corrected this
weakness for the 2010 rankings.

Another strong critic is blogger Richard Holmes, an academic at the Universiti Teknologi MARA in Malaysia. Through his University Ranking Watch blog, he has perhaps done more than anyone to highlight the weaknesses in existing systems: indeed, he highlighted many of the problems that helped convince us to develop a new methodology with a new data provider, Thomson Reuters.

He has given us many helpful suggestions as we develop our improved methodology. For example, he advised that we should reduce the weighting given to the proportion of international students on campus, and we agreed. He added that we should increase the weighting given to our new teaching indicators, and again we concurred.

Of course, there are many elements that he and others will continue to disagree with us on, and we welcome that. We are not seeking anyone's endorsement. We simply ask for open engagement - including criticism - and we expect that process will continue long after the new tables are published.

There are still issues to be resolved but it does appear that the new THE rankings are making progress on several fronts. There is a group of indicators that attempts to measure teaching effectiveness. The weighting given to international students, an indicator that is easily manipulable and that has had very negative backwash effects, has been reduced. The inclusion of funding as a criterion, while obviously favouring wealthy regions, does measure an important input. The weighting assigned to the subjective academic survey has been reduced and it is now drawn from a clearly defined and at least moderately qualified set of respondents.



There are still areas where questions remain. I am not sure that citations per paper is the only way to measure impact. At the very least, the h-index could be added, which would add another ingredient to the mix.



Also, there are details that need to be sorted out. Exactly what sort of faculty will be counted in the various scalings? Is self-citation be counted? I also suspect that not everybody will be enthusiastic about using statistics from UNESCO for weighting the results of the reputational survey. That is not exactly the most efficient organization in the world. There is also a need for a lot more information about the workings of the reputational survey. What was the response rate and exactly how many responses were there from individual countries?

Something that may well cause problems in the future is the proposed indicator of the ratio of doctoral degrees to undergraduate degrees. if this is retained it is easy to predict that universities everywhere will be encouraging or coercing applicants to master's programs to switch to doctoral programs.

Still, it does seem that THE is being more open and honest about the creation of the new rankings than other ranking organizations and that the final result will be a significant improvement.

America' Best Colleges 2011

US News and World Report's Ameica's Best Colleges 2011 is now out.

The top ten National Universities are:

1. Harvard
2. Princeton
3. Yale
4. Columbia
5. Stanford
6. University of Pennsylvania
7 = Caltech
7 = MIT
9 = Dartmouth
9 = Duke
9 = Chicago

Shanghai Rankings: Shifting Research Landscape

My article in University World News on the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universisities can be viewed here.

More from THE

Phil Baty in Times Higher Education gives us some clues about what the forthcoming THE World University Rankings will contain.

"While all the self-reported material bears the imprimatur of the supplying
institutions (and our tables include only those that have cooperated with our exercise) and it has been vetted for quality, the consultation had some concerns
about its consistency and robustness - especially in this inaugural year. For example, not all institutions could provide a clear or internationally comparable figure for their research income from industry.

For maximum robustness, we plan to give extra weighting to data that have been sourced independently of the institutions themselves and are globally consistent.

Citations data, for example, which are widely accepted as a strong proxy for research quality, will have a high weighting - perhaps about 30 per cent of the total ranking score.

We also have high confidence in the validity and independence of the results of our reputation survey. Although we may yet adjust its weighting, this subjective measure will not be weighted as highly as it was in our old methodology (2004-09), where reputation was worth 40 per cent."

It looks as though citations per paper, a measure of its influence throughout a research community, will count for a lot in the forthcoming rankings. It is questionable whether such a high weighting for a single component is justified. At the very least it could be combined with other measures of quality such as the h-index which is, in effect, a measure of both productivity and impact.

The reluctance to place too much emphasis on research income and perhaps other types of income, is understandable but perhaps unfortunate. This indicator would give the new rankings a distinctive feature and might also allow us to see whether institutions are giving value for money.

It is inevitable that the reputational survey would never be given the same weight that its predecessors received in the THE-QS rankings. Whether its results are really valid -- we still do not know the response rate -- remains to be seen.

Why international students are not a good indicator of quality

Times Higher Education describes a dispute between Coventry University and a recruiting agent in Chennai. According to the article, Ram Beegala was hired as a recruiting consultant and would only be paid if he succeeded in getting the number of Indian students above 450.

There is a comment by "To John" which might be slightly exaggerated:

"It is no secret that the Indian students who cannot get into any of their universities and colleges are the ones that are willing to come to the UK. Their intention is the 20 hour/week work allowed and assume rightly once they use the university route to get into UK they can stay in the country to work. In my university which recruits these students, the drop out rates for such students is high as they work more than 20 weeks to meet their expenses. Their attendance drops down after a few months. I have yet to come across a single non-EU student who comes with enough funds to complete a 3 UG degree. They are told by agents that they can work in the UK to meet part of their fees and all the living expenses. The students coming in to do MSc are poorly equipped and struggle to pass their modules and write project proposals."

Big Names and Unsung Heroes

In Times Higher Education, Phil Baty hints that the reduction in the weighting for subjective indicators in the forthcoming THE rankings will mean that those dominant in the past will suffer a decline and that there may be some new schools at the top.

"We can expect some big-name institutions to take a hit in the new World
University Rankings.

Why? Because the rankings we will publish this autumn will be based less on subjective opinion and more on objective evidence".

..........................................................................................................

"Under the initial proposals for our methodology, currently being refined in line with responses from the global academy, reputational measures are worth no more than 20 per cent of overall scores.

I have also set a cap to ensure that subjective elements are never again anywhere near the 50 per cent used in our previous methodology. This means that big names with big reputations that lack world-class research output and influence to match will suffer in comparison with previous exercises. Conversely, unsung heroes have a better chance of recognition".

Another Ranking

The ic4u ranking of 200 top universities is based on web popularity.

The top five are:

1. Stanford
2. MIT
3. National Autonomous University of Mexico
4. Berkeley
5. Peking

The Forbes Ranking

The 2010 edition of the Forbes College Rankings is now out. These are basically an evaluation from the students' viewpoint. The criteria are the number of alumni in Who's Who in America, ratings in RatemyProfessor, graduation rates, number of students and faculty winning national awards and accumulated student debt.

There are some surprises. Top place goes to Williams College a private liberal arts college that does not even get into Shanghai's top 500. The service academies do very well. On the other hand, Harvard is 8th, Yale 10th and Chicago 2oth.

Long Term Trends in the Shanghai Rankings

The Shanghai Rankings are noted for their methodological stability. Whereas frequent changes combined with the insertion and removal of errors produced wild fluctuations in the THE-QS rankings, the ARWU have remained essentially the same since they started. The Shanghai index never aroused as much public interest as the now defunct THE-QS league table but over the long run it is more likely to reveal real and significant trends.

If we compare the 2004 rankings with those just announced there are some noticeable changes over six years. Cambridge and Oxford have each slipped a couple of places while Imperial College and University College London have moved up a bit, although not as high as their implausible position in THE-QS. Tokyo has slipped from 14th to 20th and Kyoto from 21st to 24th. The leading Australian university has also fallen.

Russia has stagnated with only two institutions in the top 500 in 2004 and 2010. India has fallen back with the University of Calcutta dropping out of the rankings. The rising stars for scientific research are Mainland China (8 in 2004 and 22 in 2010), South Korea (7 in 2004 and 10 in 2010), Brazil (4 in 2004 and 6 in 2010) and the Middle East (none in 2004 and 4 from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran in 2010).

The Shanghai Rankings

The 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University is now out. See here.

From QS

A media advisory has been sent by Martin Ince, Chair of the Advisory Board of QS World University Rankings. See here.

The document describes the structure of the current rankings. Something interesting is that apparently the number of responses has increased to over 13,000, although about half of those would be from people who filled out the form in 2009 and 2008 and did not update their forms this year. The number of respondents is now about the same as that reported by Times Higher for their survey, although THE will no doubt point out that they can be fairly confident that their respondents are still alive and working in academia.

The number of respondents is less important than the response rate and so far neither QS or THE have said how many forms were distributed.

An Epic?

Times Higher Education (THE) has announced the completion of the collection of data for its forthcoming World University Rankings:

An epic effort by our world university rankings data supplier, Thomson Reuters, to collect information from hundreds of universities around the world concluded successfully last week.

I am not sure whether "epic" is the right word. The number of universities in the database does not seem much higher than that for which QS has collected information. The data does apparently include some information that QS has ignored such as institutional income and research income but has not included items counted by QS such as total student numbers or the number of postgraduate students other than doctoral candidates. Meanwhile, the number of respondents to the opinion survey has fallen far short of the original target of 25,000, even with a bit of topping up, like QS, from the Mardev mailing lists.

A proposal to rank universities by disciplines as specific as Agriculture has been dropped. Now, THE will rank universities in six disciplinary clusters, up from five in the THE-QS and QS rankings.

THE also give some idea of errors will be detected. That might be an improvement although I suspect that in many countries third party sources may not be as reliable as THE thinks.

One thing that is not mentioned is whether any universities have refused to participate in the data collection and what THE will do if there are any abstentions.

Discrimination In Top US Colleges

Russell K. Nieli in Minding the Campus discusses a study by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford that details the extent and depth of the racial and social discrimination practiced by America's top colleges.

"Consistent with other studies, though in much greater detail, Espenshade and Radford show the substantial admissions boost, particularly at the private colleges in their study, which Hispanic students get over whites, and the enormous advantage over whites given to blacks. They also show how Asians must do substantially better than whites in order to reap the same probabilities of acceptance to these same highly competitive private colleges. On an "other things equal basis," where adjustments are made for a variety of background factors, being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white (for those who applied in 1997) equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310 SAT point advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points.

The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student's chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database. To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550. Here the Espenshade/Radford results are consistent with other studies, including those of William Bowen and Derek Bok in their book The Shape of the River, though they go beyond this influential study in showing both the substantial Hispanic admissions advantage and the huge admissions penalty suffered by Asian applicants. Although all highly competitive colleges and universities will deny that they have racial quotas -- either minimum quotas or ceiling quotas -- the huge boosts they give to the lower-achieving black and Hispanic applicants, and the admissions penalties they extract from their higher-achieving Asian applicants, clearly suggest otherwise."

The advantage accorded to Non-Asian minority students, even those whose claim to moral reparation for generations of slavery or dispossession is questionable, is well known. What is surprising about Espenshade and Radford's study is the extent of the discrimination against poor, rural and working class whites.

In part, this is a consequence of the indicators used by American ranking organizations. Selective colleges are apparently reluctant to offer places to students who might not take up an offer for financial reasons since this would push down their acceptance rates and yield scores.

But there is more. Espenshade and Radford found that less affluent whites were dramatically less likely to be offered a place in a competitive private college even when SAT scores, a reasonable proxy for general intelligence, and high school grades were controlled for. In addition, they found evidence of serious discrimination against students who were involved in incorrect activities such as ROTC and Future Farmers of America, especially those holding leadership positions. Apparently "feeding the homeless" will boost one's chances of getting into a top private college if it means doling out soup in between starring in the school play and AP English classes but not if means showing an interest in growing the stuff that the homeless eat.

As cognitive skills become increasingly irrelevant to admission into America's best schools, it seems almost certain that US higher education will be less and less able to compete with those countries that continue to recruit those students most capable of demanding college-level work.

New Webometrics Rankings

The new Webometrics rankings are out.
There are few surprises. Here are the top universities in various categories.

World: Harvard
North America: Harvard
Latin America: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
Europe: Cambridge
Central and Eastern Europe: Charles University, Prague
Asia: Tokyo
South East Asia: National University of Singapore
South Asia: Indian University of Technology, Bombay
Arab World: King Saud University
Oceania: Australian National University
Africa: Cape Town

One interesting feature of the Arab World rankings is that universites in the Palestinian territories do very well in comparison with many in more affluent countries. Would anyone like to suggest an explanation?

Global-Rankings Ping Pong

Ben Wildavsky has an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the competition between Times Higher Education and QS over this year's university rankings. It is actually called Global-Rankings Smackdown! but the smackdown bit is rather exaggerated and the exclamation mark is unnecessary. There are some well informed and incisive comments on recent developments in international university ranking, including the divorce between THE and QS.

He concludes:

Will a redemption narrative help Times Higher earn credibility for its new rankings? Perhaps. It should certainly be applauded for its openness to criticism, and for all it is doing to inform the public about its next moves in what its editor characterizes, with appropriate caution, as “a decent first step” at improvement. But ultimately, debating tactics notwithstanding, the global league tables will be judged on their merits. As the wars over league tables continue, the next rankings season should be well worth watching.

I am not entirely sure about how much THE, or more accurately their new partners, Thomson Reuters are doing to inform the public about what they are doing. At the moment there are some things we know about the QS survey that we do not know about Thomson Reuters' -- number of forms sent out, response rate, number of responses from individual countries. Still, all that could change within a few weeks and it did take QS a couple of years before they gave out anything beyond the bare minimum about their survey.

The Avalanche

A short article in the Chronicle of Higher Education ,by Mark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Stanley W. Trimble, 'We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research', calls for a halt to the seemingly inexorable rise in the production of uncited and unread scholarly and scientific papers.

While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.

As a result, instead of contributing to knowledge in various disciplines, the increasing number of low-cited publications only adds to the bulk of words and numbers to be reviewed. Even if read, many articles that are not cited by anyone would seem to contain little useful information. The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole. Not only does the uncited work itself require years of field and library or laboratory research. It also requires colleagues to read it and provide feedback, as well as reviewers to evaluate it formally for publication. Then, once it is published, it joins the multitudes of other, related publications that researchers must read and evaluate for relevance to their own work. Reviewer time and energy requirements multiply by the year. The impact strikes at the heart of academe.

Unfortunately, now that authorship of an ISI-indexed article has become the qualification for participation n the reputational survey section of the THE World University Rankings I suspect that universities will go on encouraging their staff to produce more and more articles of questionable quality. Or perhaps we should say more and more email addresses in the ISI database.