Power and Responsibility: The Growing Influence of Global Rankings


My article can be accessed at University World News. Comments can be submitted here.

Productive Universities

QS has been analysing university research output using Scopus data. The world's most productive university measured by the number of papers is Toronto. The top ten contain Harvard and five more US institutions, University College London, Sao Paulo and Tokyo.

Harvard is first for total citations and Rockefeller, a specialist medical school, for citations per paper.

It seems that the presence or absence of a medical school makes a lot of difference to performance measures based on total publications or citations. In general, there are substantial differences between disciplines with medicine and the humanities at opposite ends of the spectrum. The performance of schools like Toronto may to some extent reflect their balance of discipline.

Times Higher and Thomson Reuters would say that the answer to this problem lies in normalisation. But that raises another questions, namely whether all disciplines can be considered equal.

Boring is Good

QS have produced the second instalment of their "Latin University Rankings" (i.e. Latin American University rankings). This time there have been few changes. The top seven are the same as last year. According to QS, "the familiar look of the top ten in 2012 QS University Rankings: Latin America is evidence that last year’s inaugural exercise provided a fair and accurate overview of the current hierarchy of the region’s universities".

True, but does that mean that other rankings were invalidated by noticeable instability?

Here are the top ten:

1.  Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil
2.  Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
3.  Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil
4.  Universidad de Chile
5.  Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
6.  Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia
7. Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico
8. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
9. Universidad de Concepcion, Chile 
10. Universidad de Santiago de Chile

The Complete University Guide

David Jobbins has drawn my attention to the online British  Complete University Guide. This includes the 2013 League Table with the top five being:

1.  Cambridge
2.. LSE
3.  Oxford
4.  Imperial College
5.  Durham

At the bottom we have Southampton Solent, West of Scotland, London Metropolitan, East London and Bolton.

The criteria are entry standards, student satisfaction, research assessment and graduate prospects.

A little bit of sex but not too much, we're British university students

Student Beans has published a British university sex league, which consists of the results of a survey of the number of sex partners since starting university. At the top is Bangor University with an average of 8.31, followed by Heriot-Watt and Plymouth. This is probably a result of savage cuts which have curtailed library hours and left students with nothing else to do.

At the bottom are Roehampton (1.83), Chester (1,71) and Exeter (1.15). There seems no obvious explanation for such a broad variation. Comparing scores with those in the QS rankings produced only a trivial and insignificant correlation.

The methodology does not look very sound: there is no sign of any proper sampling or precautions against multiple responses.

The most sexually active students are in economics, social work, marketing and leisure. No surprises there. The least are in education (that's a relief), earth sciences, theology and, valiantly trying to slow the pace of global warming, environmental science.

The Uses of Rankings

The Indian Universities Grants Commission has laid down new regulations "to ensure academic collaboration between Indian and foreign educational institutes follows the highest standards".

The foreign institutions allowed to collaborate with Indian universities and colleges "must figure in list of top 500 global educational institutes, as ranked by the Times Higher Education Rankings or the Shanghai Rankings".

This sounds a little odd. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings only have 400 universities listed on their iphone app. Perhaps they will provide the Indian authorities with the remaining 100.

Another problem is that the Shanghai and THE rankings, especially the latter are not totally stable. So what happens if a university enters the top 500 before a contract is signed and then slips out the year after?

The THE New University Rankings

Times Higher Education have produced their ranking of 100 universities founded in the last fifty years. Here are the top ten:

1. Pohang University of Science and Technology
2. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
3. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
4. University of California, Irvine
5. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
6. Université Pierre et Marie Curie
7. University of California, Santa Cruz
8. University of York
9. Lancaster University
10. University of East Anglia

The list looks rather different from the QS new university ranking published two days ago. That is unsurprising since the QS table is heavily weighted towards two reputation surveys while the THE rankings are influences by various measures of income and by normalised citations.

QS Asian University Rankings

QS have just published their 2012 Asian University Rankings. I will comment in a bit more detail later.

The top ten are:

1.  The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2.  National University of Singapore
3.  University of Hong Kong
4.  Seoul National University
5.  Chinese University of Hong Kong
6.  Peking University
7.  Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
8.  University of Tokyo
9.  Pohang University of Science and Technology
10. Kyoto University

The QS Under 50 Top 50

Early this month, Times Higher Education announced that they would publish a ranking of the top 100 universities less than 50 years old. The date for publication was May 31.

Now QS have just announced their ranking of new universities. The top ten are

1.  Chinese University of Hong Kong
2.  Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
3.  Warwick
4.  Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
5.  Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
6.  University of York, UK
7.  Pohang University of Science and Technology
8.  Maastricht University
9.  City University of Hong Kong
10. University of California Irvine

East Asia, especially Hong Kong and Korea, make a strong showing although there are no Mainland Chinese universities in the top 50.

No doubt there will be quiet smirks around the QS offices. And no doubt THE will say something about originality on Thursday.

Exaggerated Metaphor Alert

Bloomberg has an interesting article by Mark C. Taylor, claiming that competition is killing higher education in the US.  I think that, like the Roman soldier in Night at the Museum, he is speaking metaphorically.

There are some amusing points about the craze for buildings and programs of every conceivable variety.

"It’s about “keeping up with the Joneses,” an official at Wright State University said in a Dayton Daily News article last fall detailing why colleges in Ohio were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on student centers and other nonacademic attractions in a down economy. In Georgia, state legislators arereviewing questionable practices used to fund 173 projects to build student housing, parking garages, stadiums and recreation centers.
Private universities with large endowments often start the cycle. Schools such as Harvard University and New York University, for example, take on billion-dollar debts. In a trickle-down effect, less affluent schools also feel pressure to borrow and spend -- money they do not have.  "

Then he describes how some schools have been gaming the rankings by reclassifying tutorials in order to decrease class size or by creating superfluous and expensive doctoral programs.

'Second- and third-tier universities often create unneeded doctoral programs to become eligible for additional federal support and to increase their global profile. For example, the University of North Texas has 36,000 students and advertisesitself as “a student-focused public research university”offering “97 bachelor’s, 82 master’s and 35 doctoral degree programs.”
Even this is not enough. Although severe budget shortfallshave led to cuts of as much as 90 percent for some programs, the university is adding new doctoral programs in a quest for the elusive top-tier status. This makes no educational sense and violates basic market principles. If successful, the University of North Texas will join too many other schools that are spending large amounts for unneeded programs that turn out products -- doctoral graduates -- for which the supply far outweighs the demand. This is a national issue, as pointed out in an article this month in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps.” '

Ranking Countries

Universitas 21, a global alliance of research intensive universities, has produced a ranking of higher education systems. The US is top but the UK performs less well in tenth place. Muslim countries do particularly badly.

What might be interesting would be to compare resources with output and produce an index of efficiency.


"A nation’s economic development depends crucially on the presence of an educated and skilled workforce and on technological improvements that raise productivity. The higher education sector contributes to both these needs: it educates and trains; it undertakes pure and applied research. Furthermore, in a globalised world, a quality higher education system that is well-connected internationally facilitates the introduction of new ideas, and fosters trade and other links with foreign countries, through the movement of students and researchers across national frontiers.

Given the importance of higher education, a nation needs a comprehensive set of indicators in order to evaluate the quality and worth of its higher education system. A good higher education system is well-resourced and operates in a favourable regulatory environment. Domestic and international connectivity are also important. The success of the system is measured by output variables such as research performance, participation rates and employment. We use such indicators to derive a ranking of national higher education systems. The measures are grouped under four main headings: Resources, Environment, Connectivity and Output.

The resource measures we use relate to government expenditure, total expenditure, and R&D expenditure in tertiary institutions. The environment variable comprises the gender balance in students and academic staff, a data quality variable and a quantitative index of the policy and regulatory environment based on survey results. We surveyed the following attributes of national systems of higher education: degree of monitoring (and its transparency), freedom of employment conditions and in the choice of the CEO, and diversity of funding. Our survey results are combined with those from the World Economic Forum. Data limitations restrict the connectivity variables to numbers of international students and articles written jointly with international collaborators.

Nine output measures are included and cover research output and its impact, the presence of world-class universities, participation rates and the qualifications of the workforce. The appropriateness of training is measured by relative unemployment rates. The measures are constructed for 48 countries and territories at various stages of development.

The top ten countries, in rank order, are the United States, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. "

Oxford and Cambridge

Following on from the last post, can anyone explain why Cambridge can't produce Prime Ministers and Oxford can't produce comedians, at least not professional ones?

And now for something a little bit different

Times Higher Education has announced that it will publish a ranking of new universities (less than fifty years old).

The Times Higher Education 100 Under 50 will – as its name suggests – rank the world’s top 100 universities under the age of 50. The table and analysis will be published online and as a special supplement to the magazine on 31 May, 2012.
The vast majority of the world’s top research-led universities have at least one thing in common: they are old. Building upon centuries of scholarly tradition, institutions such as the University of Oxford, which can trace its origins back to 1096, can draw on endowment income generated over many years and have been able to cultivate rich networks of loyal and successful alumni (including in Oxford’s case a string of British Prime Ministers) to help build enduring brands.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Malaysia's love-hate affair with international rankings has taken another twist. The official target now is get one university in the top 50 and three in the top 100 in the QS rankings. That basically means that a Malaysian university will have to be the equal of New South Wales, Tsinghua or Warwick.

Last year Universiti Malaya got into the top 500 in the Shanghai ARWU ranking. That is a solid achievement and it might mean more  if Malaysia could get another university there.

This is as part of its efforts to have a local university ranked among the world's top 50 universities by 2020.
Deputy Higher Education Minister Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah said the National Higher Education Strategic Plan also called for at least three local universities to be ranked among the world's top 100 universities.
To achieve this, he told the house that it needed to continuously recruit international students and participate in international education fairs to promote the "Education Malaysia" brand.
He was replying to Senator Mohd Khalid Ahmad who wanted to know why no local universities had been ranked among the world's top 200.
Saifuddin said the ministry was also intensifying promotional activities on the Internet and introducing student mobility programmes. This will allow them to take short-term courses with credits, and have better staff and student exchange programmes with foreign universities.
He said they were also having better scholarship coordination with foreign agencies and other bodies to facilitate the intake of foreign students at local universities.
He said the QS World University Ranking (QS WUR) was the preferred benchmark used to gauge a university.

What have I done?

I was recently in a public library somewhere in Southeast Asia. While browsing around I discovered that access to this blog was blocked because of  "other adult material".

I thought that perhaps someone was upset with university rankings in general, which is entirely understandable, but the THE, QS, ARWU, Webometrics and HEEACT sites were all unblocked.

My best guess is that the filter software interprets anything with "watch" in it as something to do with voyeurism. Or perhaps the post about "does size really matter?" was misunderstood.

Or perhaps it just means that this blog is very mature and sophisticated.

Is this what they meant by diversity?

On December 1st. of last year I commented on proposals that the US News Law School Rankings should include an indicator for diversity.

Such proposals are based on the increasing globalisation of the world economy and the need to understand other cultures. It is obvious that middle class white Americans who support abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, feminism and Obama must sit in classes with middle class African Americans who support abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, feminism and Obama if they wish to communicate effectively with North Korean bureaucrats, supporters of Boko Haram who will soon control most of Nigeria, the Muslim  Brotherhood or the Haredim who will soon control Israel.

The story of Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School who claims 1/32 Native American ancestry (which is not necessarily the same as Native American identity)  shows the importance of diversity in law education. Were it not for her Cherokee great-great-great grandmother she would obviously be teaching something quite different to her students and so would render them unfit to compete in our diverse multicultural world.

Student Experience Survey

From Times Higher Education, the top ten British universities from the students' viewpoint.

1.   Dundee
2.   Loughborough
3    Sheffield
4.   Oxford
5.   Cambridge
6.   East Anglia
7.   Southampton
8.   Aberystwyth
9.   Glasgow
10.  Leeds

Thomson Reuters in Trouble?

The online financial newsletter StreetAuthority has published a list of 12 companies that are at risk because of a looming debt problem.

Among them is Thomson Reuters who, among other things, run the Web of Science database and provide the data for the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Their data is also used by Shanghai Jiao Tong University's rankings to construct their Highly Cited Researchers and Publications indicators.

Thomson Reuters will not of course go bankrupt tomorrow. But if they are in trouble, then there could be implications for international university rankings.

During the past generation, a reasonable level of debt has always been seen as appropriate, because balance sheets were able to withstand a typical recession. Yet all that changed in 2008. GM's (NYSE: GM) debt load crashed the company, forcing it into bankruptcy, while many other companies such as GE (NYSE: GE), Ford Motor (NYSE: F), Hertz (NYSE: HTZ) and Domino's Pizza (NYSE: DPZ) saw their stocks plunge on fears a bankruptcy filing would be necessary if economic conditions worsened.

Thankfully, many companies wised up and have been taking steps to strengthen their balance sheets. But not everyone got the message. Some companies still carry too much debt and might run into trouble if the U.S. economy slips back into recession. These companies will need to make large payments to handle their debt, and right now they are at risk of not having enough cash to meet potential obligations. Typically, a company can simply roll over that debt and push out the time frame when debts come due. But a weak economy would make this task much harder as lenders grow skittish.

That's why it's so important to pay attention to balance sheets. Lots of debt is only a problem if the debts are soon coming due. For example, mattress maker Sealy Corp. (NYSE: ZZ) has a very weak balance sheet, with almost $800 million in debt and less than $100 million in cash. But management wisely rolled over its debt while it could, and now the company faces no major repayments until 2014.

But if a company's "current portion of long-term debt" -- that is, debts due within the next 12 months -- exceeds cash on hand, you need to listen to how management plans to address the problem because these companies could be at risk of failing. I went in search of companies that may have just such a problem (less cash than near-term loan obligations). I also added Canadian media firm Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI) to the mix because its weak balance sheet is just above that threshold. The table below highlights a group of companies that are at risk of having to declare bankruptcy in 2012 if their lenders are in no mood to extend them more loans.

LSE overtakes Oxford in British Ranking

The Complete University Guide has just published its rankings of British universities. According to Brendan O'Malley in University World News.

It is the first time since 2000 that Oxford and Cambridge have not shared the top two spots – in that year Imperial College London knocked Oxford into third place.


In separate listings for the leading universities and higher education institutions covering 62 subjects, Cambridge is in the top 10 for all 46 subjects it offers, and top in 30. Oxford is in the top 10 for all 32 of its subjects, and is placed first in 12. The LSE is in the top 10 for all 12 subjects offered, and top for three.


There are two new entrants to the Top 20 – the University of Glasgow (17th) and Leicester (19th). They have replaced Sussex, which just missed out in 21st place, and the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, which fell from 15th to 30th position.

O'Malley continues:

The interactive guide ranks universities on nine factors: student satisfaction; research assessment; entry standards; student-to-staff ratio; spending on academic services; spending on student facilities; good honours degrees achieved; graduate prospects; and completion.

The subject tables are based on four factors: student satisfaction; research assessment; entry standards; and graduate prospects.

When LSE offers 12 subjects and still beats Oxford with 32 subjects, these results need to be approached with caution. Bernard Kingston is honest enough to issue a health warning.

The good degrees and completion rates indicator are obvious incentives to game the system.

London Met Update

It seems that the proposal to ban alchohol from one campus was not quite what was reported. Apparently the vice-chancellor was looking for an excuse to save money. The latest report is that Muslim students are disassociating themselves from his plan.

Another Quality Initiative

Every so often education bureaucrats come up with bright ideas to boost quality and raise standards and proclaim their faith that students and teachers at all levels can perform as well as anybody anywhere.

A recent example is the decree by the the Director General of Higher Education at the Indonesian Education and Culture Ministry, that in order to graduate undergraduate students must publish a paper in a scientific journal, master's students in a national scientific journal and doctoral students in an international scientific journal.

It is easy to predict what will happen if this idea survives. Every university will set up a website and call it an  online journal to which  an essay, term paper or thought paper by every undergraduate or group of undergraduates will be uploaded, after running it through turnitin.

It would be almost as easy to set up national websites and call them national online scientific journals and publish term papers by masters students.

But getting papers into international journals will be another matter if the term international has any meaning and if the papers are to be single-author papers. We can expect a lot of creative workarounds here.

QS Paper 

Here are the links to a paper and presentation slides by Ben Sowter of QS that discusses the spin-offs: subject, regional and best student city rankings.

What about the Kindergarten Rankings?

US News will be publishing the Best High Schools rankings on May 1st.

Does Not Compute

London Metropolitan University seems to be getting rather desperate in its attempts to attract students. On the one hand:

"A London university is considering establishing alcohol-free zones on its campuses because so many of its students consider drinking to be immoral.
Professor Malcolm Gillies, vice-chancellor of London Metropolitan University, said the selling of alcohol was an issue of "cultural sensitivity" at his institution where a fifth of students are Muslim.
Speaking to a conference of university administrators in Manchester, he said that for many students, drinking alcohol was "an immoral experience".
"Because there is no majority ethnic group [at London Metropolitan], I think [selling alcohol] is playing to particular parts of our society much more [than to others]," he was reported as saying in the Times Higher Education magazine."

On the other:

"As part of a master's course in events experience management, London Metropolitan University will offer a module in partnership with Chillisauce, known for organising custom stag dos across Europe.
The firm's website lists options including mud-wrestling with scantily clad women in Budapest, a "spa with strippers" in Riga, or the option to be "punished" at a Tallinn "lap dancing dreamland".
The link has drawn criticism from unions, although students will be involved only in the company's more straightforward commercial activities - including corporate dinners and conferences.
Participants on the course will be asked to create a Guinness World Record attempt that doubles as a PR event for a consumer brand. They will devise a "creative concept" and pitch it to Chillisauce executives, who will attend seminars and lectures during the module.
But a University and College Union spokesman questioned "how employing a company that specialises in stag weekends offering wrestling with scantily clad women in jelly is likely to do much for a university's reputation"."

Opening the Black Box

I have just seen an article by Mu-Hsuang Huan of National Taiwan University published by Research Evaluation, an Oxford University Press journal. Here is the abstract:

"In the era of globalization, the trend of university rankings gradually shifts from country-wide analyses to world-wide analyses. Relatively high analytical weightings on reputational surveys have led Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings to criticisms over the years. This study provides a comprehensive discussion of the indicators and weightings adopted in the QS survey. The article discusses several debates stirred in the academia on QS. Debates on this ranking system are presented in the study. Firstly, problems of return rate, as well as unequal distribution of returned questionnaires, have incurred regional bias. Secondly, some universities are listed in both domestic and international reputation questionnaires, but some others are listed only in the domestic part. Some universities were evaluated only by domestic respondents, limiting their performance of the ranking results. Thirdly, quite a few universities exhibit the same indicator scores or even full scores, rendering the assessment questionable. Lastly, enormous changes of single indicator scores suggest that the statistic data adopted by QS Rankings should be further questioned."

The article is useful and interesting, especially the table of rates of return for different countries. But it does not seem to go beyond what this blog and others have been saying for a long time.

This seems to be another case of mainstream academia lagging behind the mass media which in turn  is way behind the blogosphere.