Here is the full text of my article on the QS Subject Rankings published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

 

The QS university rankings by subject: Warning needed

By Richard Holmes
Philippine Daily Inquirer

7:37 pm | Monday, May 27th, 2013

 107  360  8

It is time for the Philippines to think about constructing its own objective and transparent ranking or rating systems for its colleges and universities that would learn from the mistakes of the international rankers.

The ranking of universities is getting to be big business these days. There are quite a few rankings appearing from Scimago, Webometrics, University Ranking of Academic Performance (from Turkey), the Taiwan Rankings, plus many national rankings.

No doubt there will be more to come.

In addition, the big three of the ranking world—Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education and Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities—are now producing a whole range of supplementary products, regional rankings, new university rankings, reputation rankings and subject rankings.

There is nothing wrong, in principle, with ranking universities. Indeed, it might be in some ways a necessity. The problem is that there are very serious problems with the rankings produced by QS, even though they seem to be better known in Southeast Asia than any of the others.
This is especially true of the subject rankings.

No new data

The QS subject rankings, which have just been released, do not contain new data. They are mostly based on data collected for last year’s World University Rankings—in some cases extracted from the rankings and, in others, recombined or recalculated.

There are four indicators used in these rankings. They are weighted differently for the different subjects and, in two subjects, only two of the indicators are used.

The four indicators are:
A survey of academics or people who claim to be academics or used to be academics, taken from a variety of sources. This is the same indicator used in the world rankings. Respondents were asked to name the best universities for research.
A survey of employers, which seem to comprise anyone who chooses to describe himself or herself as an employer or a recruiter.
The number of citations per paper. This is a change from the world rankings when the calculation was citations per faculty.
H-index. This is something that is easier to give examples for than to define. If a university publishes one paper and the paper is cited once, then it gets an index of one. If it publishes two or more papers and two of them are published twice each, then the index is two and so on. This is a way of combining quantity of research with quality as measured by influence on other researchers.

Out of these four indicators, three are about research and one is about the employability of a university’s graduates.

These rankings are not at all suitable for use by students wondering where they should go to study, whether at undergraduate or graduate level.

The only part that could be of any use is the employer review and that has a weight ranging from 40 percent for accounting and politics to 10 percent for arts and social science subjects, like history and sociology.

But even if the rankings are to be used just to evaluate the quantity or quality of research, they are frankly of little use. They are dominated by the survey of academic opinion, which is not of professional quality.

There are several ways in which people can take part in the survey. They can be nominated by a university, they can sign up themselves, they can be recommended by a previous respondent or they can be asked because they have subscribed to an academic journal or an online database.
Apart from checking that they have a valid academic e-mail address, it is not clear whether QS makes any attempt to check whether the survey respondents are really qualified to make any judgements about research.

Not plausible

The result is that the academic survey and also the employer survey have produced results that do not appear plausible.

In recent years, there have been some odd results from QS surveys. My personal favorite is the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, which set up a branch in Singapore in 2007 and graduated its first batch of students from a three-year Film course in 2010.In the QS Asian University Rankings of that year, the Singapore branch got zero for the other criteria (presumably the school did not submit data) but it was ranked 149th in Asia for academic reputation and 114th for employer reputation.

Not bad for a school that had yet to produce any graduates when the survey was taken early in the year.

In all of the subject rankings this year, the two surveys account for at least half of the total weighting and, in two cases, Languages and English, all of it.

Consequently, while some of the results for some subjects may be quite reasonable for the world top 50 or the top 100, after that they are sometimes downright bizarre.

The problem is that although QS has a lot of respondents worldwide, when it gets down to the subject level there can be very few. In pharmacy, for example, there are only 672 for the academic survey and in materials science 146 for the employer survey. Since the leading global players will get a large share of the responses, this means that universities further down the list will be getting a handful of responses for the survey. The result is that the order of universities in any subject in a single country like the Philippines can be decided by just one or two responses to the surveys.

Another problem is that, after a few obvious choices like Harvard, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Tokyo, most respondents probably rely on a university’s general reputation and that can lead to all sorts of distortions.

Many of the subject rankings at the country level are quite strange. Sometimes they even include universities that do not offer courses in that subject. We have already seen that there are universities in the Philippines that are ranked for subjects that they do not teach.

Somebody might say that maybe they are doing research in a subject while teaching in a department with a different name, such as an economic historian teaching in the economics department but publishing in history journals and getting picked up by the academic survey for history.
Maybe, but it would not be a good idea for someone who wants to study history to apply to that particular university.

Another example is from Saudi Arabia, where King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals was apparently top for history, even though it does not have a history department or indeed anything where you might expect to find a historian. There are several universities in Saudi Arabia that may not teach history very well but at least they do actually teach it.

These subject rankings may have a modest utility for students who can pick or choose among top global universities and need some idea whether they should study engineering at SUNY (State University of New York) Buffalo (New York) or Leicester (United Kingdom) or linguistics at Birmingham or Michigan.

But they are of very little use for anyone else.

The QS university rankings by subject: Warning needed

My article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer can be accessed here.

The QS Subject Rankings: Not Everybody is Impressed

The subject rankings just released by QS seem to be a shrewd marketing move. Dozens of universities around the world have learnt that they have been ranked for something by the renown and revered QS, which will look good in their promotional literature.

Some people are not impressed. Brian Leiter, the law scholar and philosopher asks whether they are a fraud on the public. See here for his answer.

Why are they so worried?

The UK HE International Unit represents the views of the British university sector and is cooperating with Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters in the organising of this week's Global University Summit in London, a Prestigious Event in a Spectacular Setting.

It has just issued a policy statement about the slowly emerging U-Multirank project, which is also discussed by David Jobbins in University World News.

The Unit has expressed a number of concerns. These include the overcrowding of the league table market, reliance on self-reported data which lack validity, the combining of incommensurate variables to create a league table, the risk of " becoming a blunt instrument that would not allow different strengths across an institution to be recognised" and diverting EU funds from other priorities. It claims that U-Multirank may "harm rather than benefit the sector."

It is difficult to see why the International Unit is getting so concerned. I agree that self reported data may lack validity but the QS and Times Higher Education global rankings also include such data. The combining of incommensurate variables is the essence of ranking. Sometimes blunt instruments are appropriate. A scalpel is of little use for hammering nails and a tool like U-Multirank may have uses which existing rankings do not.

As for the 2 million Euros, this is trivial compared with some of the things the EU has been wasting money on in recent years.

The Efficiency Rankings

Times Higher Education has a story about a study by Dirk Van Damme, head of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation at the OECD. This will be presented at the Global University Summit  held in Whitehall, London from the 28th to the 30th May.

The Summit "brings an invitation-only audience of leaders from the world’s foremost universities, senior policy-makers and international business executives to London in 2013." It is a "prestigious event" held in a "spectacular setting" and is sponsored by the University of Warwick, Times Higher Education, Thomson Reuters and UK Universities International Unit. Speakers include Vince Cable, Boris Johnson, the Russian ambassador and heads of various universities from around the world.

What Professor Van Damme has done is to treat the THE World University Rankings Research Indicator scores as an input and the Research Influence (Citations) scores as an output. The output scores are divided by the input scores and the result is a measure of the efficiency with which the inputs are turned into citations, which, as we all know, is the main function of the modern university.

According to THE:

"The input indicator takes scaled and normalised measures of research income and volume into account, and also considers reputation, while the output indicator looks at citations to institutional papers in Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science database, normalised for subject differences.
Professor van Damme said that the results - which show that university systems outside the Anglo-American elite are able to realise and increase outputs with much lower levels of input - did not surprise him.
“For example, Switzerland really invests in the right types of research. It has a few universities in which it concentrates resources, and they do very well,” he said.
Previous studies have found the UK to have the most efficient research system on measures of citation per researcher and per unit of spending.
But Professor van Damme explained that under his approach, productivity - output per staff member - was included as an input.
“With efficiency I mean the total research capacity of an institution, including its productivity, divided by its impact. The UK is not doing badly at all, but other countries are doing better, such as Ireland, which has a very low research score but a good citations score,” he said.
Given the severity of the country’s economic crisis, Ireland’s success was particularly impressive, he said.
“I think it is really conscious of the effort it has to make to maintain its position and is doing so.”
Low efficiency scores for China and South Korea reflected the countries’ problems in translating their huge investment into outputs, he added."

One hesitates to be negative about a paper presented at a prestigious event in a spectacular setting to an invitation only audience but this is frankly rather silly.

I would accept that income can be regarded as an input but surely not reputation and surely not volume of publications. Also, unless Van Damme's methodology has undisclosed refinements he is treating research scores as having the same value regardless of whether they are composed mainly of scores for reputation or for number of publications or for research income.

Then there is the time period concerned. Research income is income for one year, Publications are drawn from a five year period. These are then compared with citations over a six year period. So the paper is asking how research income for 2010 produces citations in the years 2006 - 2011 of papers published in the years 2006 - 2010. A university is certainly being remarkably efficient if its 2010 income is producing citations in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Turning to the citations side of the equation, it should be recalled that the THE citations indicator includes an adjustment by which the citation impact score for universities is divided by the square root of the citation impact score for the country as a whole. In other words a university located in a country where papers are not cited very much gets a big boost and the lower the national citation impact score the bigger the boost for the university. This is why Hong Kong universities suffered reduced scores when Thomson Reuters took them out of China when counting citations and put them in their own separate category.

So, it is not surprising that universities from outside the Anglo-Saxon elite do well for citations and thus appear to be very efficient. Thomson Reuters methodology gives such universities a very substantial weighting just for being located in countries that are  less productive in terms of citations.

None of this is new. In 2010 Van Damme did something similar at a seminar in London.

Van Damme is just analysing the top 200 universities in the THE rankings. It would surely be more interesting to analyse the top 400 whose scores are obtainable from an iPad/iPhone app.

So here are the top ten universities in the world according to the efficiency with which they turn income, reputation and publications into citations. The procedure is to divide the citations score from the 2012 THE rankings by the research indicator score.

1.  Tokyo Metropolitan University
2.  Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute
3.  Florida Institute of Technology
4.  Southern Methodist University
5.  University of Hertfordshire
6.  University of Portsmouth
7.  King Mongkut's University of Technology
8.  Vigo University
9.  Creighton University
10. Fribourg University

No doubt the good and the great of the academic world assembled in Whitehall will make a trip to Portsmouth  or even to Vigo or Creighton if they can find them on the map.

And now for the hall of shame. Here are the bottom ten of the THE top 400, ranked according to efficiency as measured by citations indicator scores divided by research scores. The heads of these failing institutions will no doubt be packing their bags and looking for jobs as junior administrative assistants at technical colleges in Siberia or the upper Amazon


391.  Tsinghua University
392.  Chinese University of Hong Kong
393.  National Taiwan University
394.  National Chiao Tung University
395.   Tilburg University
396.  Delft University of Technology
397.  Seoul National University
398.  State University of Campinas
399.  Sao Paulo University
400.  Lomosonov Moscow State University

In a little while I hope to publish the full 400 after I have finished being sarcastic about the QS subject rankings.

Update on IREG Approval 

• The International Ranking Experts group has also given its approval to the national ranking produced by the Perspektywy Education Foundation of Poland.

• The approval given to the QS World, Asian and Latin American Rankings does not apply to the QS Stars.

Details here.

The First IREG Audit 

QS is the first ranking organisation to get the seal of approval from the International Ranking Experts Group (IREG) for its World, Asian and Latin American rankings. 

The IREG audit process would appear on the surface to be quite rigorous. Take a look at the audit manual. There are a  number of criteria some of which sound quite daunting but are not really so. For example, Criterion 8 says:

 "If rankings are using composite indicators the weights of the individual indicators have to be published. Changes in weights over time should be limited and due to methodological or conception-related considerations."

Fair enough, but there is nothing about how weighting should be distributed across the indicators in the first place. Forty per cent for the academic survey in the QS rankings?

Some indicators are obvious -- providing a contact address. Others are so vague that they mean very little -- organisational measures that enhance the credibility of rankings.

The basic principle of the audit is that ranking organisations are given scores ranging from 1 (not sufficient/not applied) to 6 (distinguished) for the various criteria, with a double weighting for core criteria. The maximum score is 180 and 

"On the bases of the assessment scale described

above, the threshold for a positive audit decision will

be 60 per cent of the maximum total score. This

means the average score on the individual criteria

has to be slightly higher than “adequate”. In order

to establish the IREG Ranking Audit as a quality

label none of the core criteria must be assessed

with a score lower than three."

So a positive result could mean that an organisation is distinguished in everything. It could also mean that it is on average slightly higher than adequate. It would be interesting to know which applies to QS.

I do not know whether the auditors had any criticisms to make. If not it is difficult to see the point of the exercise. If they did it would be nice to know what they were.

QS are to be commended for submitting to the audit although it probably was not very searching but it still seems that the ranking world needs more and better monitoring and observation.

QS Rankings by Subject

QS have produced their annual subject rankings. At the top there are no real surprises and, while there is certainly room for argument, I do not think that anyone will be shocked by the top ten or twenty in each subject.

The university with the most number ones is Harvard:

Medicine
Biology
Psychology
Pharmacy and Pharmacology
Earth and Marine Sciences
Politics and International Studies
Law
Economics and Econometrics
Accounting and Finance
Education

MIT has seven:
Computer Science
Chemical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Phys and Astronomy
Chemistry
Materials Science

Then there is Berkeley with exactly the four you would expect:
Environmental Science
Statistics and Operational Research
Sociology
Communication and Media Studies

Oxford has three:

Philosophy
Modern Languages
Geography

Cambridge another three:
History
Linguistics
Mathematics


Imperial College London is top for Civil Engineering and University of California, Davis for Agriculture and Forestry.


These rankings are based on the academic opinion survey, the employer survey, citations per paper and h-index, a measure of both output and influence that eliminates outliers, in proportions that vary for each subject. They are very research-focused which is unfortunate since there seems to be a consensus emerging at conferences and seminars that the THE-TR rankings are for policy makers, the Shanghai ARWU for researchers and the QS rankings for undergraduate students.

Outside the top fifty there are some oddities resulting form the small number of responses when we leave the top fifty or top one hundred. I will leave it to specialists to find them.

Unsolicited Advice

There has  been a lot of debate recently about the reputation survey component in the QS World University Rankings.

The president of University College Cork asked faculty to find friends at other universities who "understand the importance of UCC improving its university world ranking". The reason for the reference to other universities is that the QS survey very sensibly does not permit respondents to vote for their own universities, those that they list as their affiliation.  

This request appears to violate QS's guidelines which permit universities to inform staff about the survey but not to encourage them to nominate or refrain from nominating any particular university. According to an article in Inside Higher Ed QS are considering whether it is necessary to take any action.

This report has given Ben Sowter of QS sufficient concern to argue that it is not possible to effectively manipulate the survey.  He has set out a reasonable case why it is unlikely that any institution could succeed in marching graduate students up to their desktops to vote for favoured institutions to avoid being sent to a reeducation camp or to teach at a community college.

However, some of his reasons sound a little unconvincing: signing up, screening, an advisory board with years of experience. It would help if he were a little more specific, especially about the sophisticated anomaly detection algorithm, which sounds rather intimidating.

The problem with the academic survey is not that an institution like University College Cork is going to push its way into the global  top twenty or top one hundred  but that there could be a systematic bias towards those who are ambitious or from certain regions. It is noticeable that some universities in East and Southeast Asia do very much better on the academic survey than on other indicators. 

The QS academic survey is getting overly complicated and incoherent. It began as a fairly simple exercise. Its respondents were at first drawn form the subscription lists of World Scientific, an academic publishing company based in Singapore. Not surprisingly, the first academic survey produced a strong, perhaps too strong, showing for Southeast and East Asia and Berkeley. 

The survey turned out to be unsatisfactory, not least because of an extremely small response rate. In succeeding years QS has added respondents drawn from the subscription lists of Mardev, an academic database, largely replacing those from World Scientific, lists supplied by universities, academics nominated by respondents to the survey and those joining the online sign up facility. It is not clear how many academics are included in these groups or what the various response rates are. In addition, counting responses for three years unless overwritten by the respondent might enhance the stability of the indicator but it also means that some of the responses might be from people who have died or retired.

The reputation survey does not have a good reputation and it is time for QS to think about revamping the methodology. But changing the methodology means that rankings cannot be used to chart the progress or decline of universities over time. The solution to this dilemma might be to launch a new ranking and keep the old one, perhaps issuing it later in the year or giving it less prominence.

My suggestion to QS is that they keep the current methodology but call it the Original QS Rankings or the QS Classic Rankings. Then they could introduce the  QS Plus or New QS rankings or something similar which would address the issues about the academic survey and introduce some other changes. Since QS are now offering a wide range of products, Latin American Rankings, Asian Rankings, subject rankings, best student cities and probably more to come, this should  not impose an undue burden.

First, starting with the academic survey, 40 percent is too much for any indicator. It should be reduced to 20 per cent.

Next, the respondents should be divided into clearly defined categories, presented with appropriate questions and appropriately verified.

It should be recognised that subscribing to an online database or being recommended by another faculty member is not really a qualification for judging international research excellence. Neither is getting one’s name listed as corresponding author. These days that  can have as much to do with faculty politics as with ability.  I suggest that the academic survey should be sent to:

(a) highly cited researchers  or those with a high h-index who should be asked about international research excellence;

(b) researchers drawn from the Scopus database who should be asked to rate the regional or national research standing of universities.

Responses should be weighted according to the number of researchers per country.

This could be supplemented with a survey of student satisfaction with teaching based on a student version of the sign up facility and requiring a valid academic address with verification.

Also, a sign up facility could be established for anyone interested and asking a question about general perceived quality.

If QS ever do change the academic survey they might as well review the other indicators. Starting with the employer review, this should be kept since, whatever its flaws, it is an external check on universities. But it might be easier to manipulate than the academic survey. Something was clearly going on in the 2011 ranking when there appeared to be a disproportionate number of respondents from some Latin American countries, leading QS to impose caps on universities exceeding the national average by a significant amount. 

"QS received a dramatic level of response from Latin America in 2011, these counts and all subsequent analysis have been adjusted by applying a weighting to responses from countries with a distinctly disproportionate level of response."

It seems that this problem was sorted out in 2012. Even so, QS might consider giving   half the weighting for this survey to an invited panel of employers. Perhaps  they could also broaden their database by asking NGOS and non-profit groups about their preferences.

There is little evidence that overall the number of international students has anything to do with any measure of quality and it also may have undesirable backwash effects as universities import large numbers of less able students. The problem is that QS are doing a good business moving graduate students across international borders so it is unlikely that they will ever consider doing away this indicator.

Staff student ratio is by all accounts a very crude indicator of quality of teaching. Unfortunately, at the moment there does appear to be any practical alternative. 

One thing that QS could do is to remove research staff from the faculty side of the equation. At the moment a university that hires an army of underpaid research assistants  and sacks a few teaching staff, or packs them off to a branch campus, would be recorded as having brought about a great improvement in teaching quality.

Citations are a notoriously problematical way of measuring research influence or quality. The Leiden Ranking shows that there are many ways of measuring research output and influence. It would be a good  idea to combine several different ways of counting citations. QS have already started to use the h- index in their subject rankings starting this year and have used citations per paper in the Asian University Rankings.

With the 20 per cent left over from reducing the weighting for the academic survey QS might consider introducing a measure of research output rather than quality since this would help distinguish among universities outside the elite and perhaps use internet data from Webometrics as in the Latin American rankings.

New Report Out

Global University Rankings and their Impact: Report II

Andrejs Rauhvargers

Asian higher education revolution a long way off

My article in University World News can be accessed here.

The Leiden Ranking

The Leiden ranking for 2013 is out. This is produced by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University and represents pretty much the state of the art in assessing research publications and citations.

A variety of indicators are presented with several different settings but no overall winner is declared which means that these rankings are not going to get the publicity given to QS and Times Higher Education.

Here are top universities, using the default settings provided by CWTS.

Total Publications: Harvard
Citations per Paper: MIT
Normalised Citations per Paper: MIT
Quality of Publications: MIT

There are also indicators for international and industrial collaboration that I hope to discuss later.

It is also noticeable that high flyers in the Times Higher Education citations indicator, Alexandria University, Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI), Hong Kong Baptist University, Royal Holloway, do not figure at all in the Leiden Ranking. What happened to them?

How could MEPhI, equal first in the world for research influence according to THE and Thomson Reuters, fail to even show up in the normalised citation indicator in the Leiden Ranking?

Firstly, Leiden have collected data for the top 500 universities in the world according to number of publications in the Web of Science. That would have been sufficient to keep these institutions out of the rankings.

In addition, Leiden use fractionalised counting as a default setting so that the impact of mutiple-author publications is divided by the number of university addresses. This would drastically reduce the impact of publications like the Review of Particle Physics.

Also, by field Leiden mean five broad subject groups whereas Thomson Reuters appears to use a larger number (21 if they use the same system as they do for highly cited researchers.) There is accordingly more chance of anomalous cases having a great influence in the THE rankings.

THE and Thomson Reuters would do well to look at the multi-authored, and most probably soon to be multi-cited, papers that were published in 2012 and look at the universities that could do well in 2014 if the methodology remains unchanged.

Combining Rankings

Meta University Ranking has combined the latest ARWU, QS and THE World Rankings. Universities are ordered by place so that Harvard gets the highest (i.e. lowest score) with an average of 2.67 (1st in ARWU, 3rd in QS and 4th in THE).

After that there is MIT, Cambridge, Caltech and Oxford.

Some More on the THE World University Rankings 2


I have calculated the mean scores for the indicator groups in the 2012-13 Times Higher education. world university rankings. The mean scores are for the 400 universities included in the published 2012-13 rankings are:

Teaching   41.67
International Outlook 52.35
Industry Income 50.74
Research 40.84
Citations 65.25

For Industry Income, N is 363 since 37 universities, mainly in the US, did not submit data. This might be a smart move if the universities realized that they were likely to receive a low score. N is 400 for the others.

There are considerable differences between the indicators which are probably due to Thomson Reuters' methodology. Although THE publishes data for 200 universities on its website and another 200 on an iPad/iPhone app there are in fact several hundred more universities that are not included in the published rankings but whose scores are used to calculate the overall mean from which scores for the ranked universities are derived.

A higher score on an indicator means a greater distance from all the institutions in the Thomson Reuters database.

The high scores for citations mean that there is a large gap between the top 400 and the lesser places outside the top 400.

I suspect that the low scores for teaching and research are due to the influence of the academic survey which contributes to both indicator clusters. We have already seen that after the top six, the curve for the survey is relatively flat.

The citations indicator already has a disproportionate influence contributing 30 % to the overall weighing. That 30 % is of course a maximum. Since universities on average are getting more for citations than the the  indicators, it has in practice a correspondingly greater weighting.

Some More on the THE World University Rankings 2012-13

Here are some observations based on a simple analysis of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings of 2012-13.

First, calculating the Pearson correlation between the indicator groups produces some interesting points. If a ranking is valid we would expect the correlations between indicators to  be fairly high but not too high. If the correlations between indicators are above .800 this suggests that they are basically measuring the same thing and that there is no point in having more than one indicator. On the other hand it is safe to assume that if an indicator does measure quality or desired characteristics in some way it will have a positive relationship with other valid indicators.

One thing about the 2012-13 rankings is that the relationship between international outlook (international faculty, students and research collaboration)  and the other indicators is negative or very slight. With teaching it is .025 (not significant), industry income .003 (not significant), research .156 and citations 158. This adds to  my suspicion that internationalisation, at least among those universities that get into the world rankings, does not per se  say very much about quality.

Industry income correlates modestly with teaching (.350) and research (.396), insignificantly with international outlook (.003) and negatively and insignificantly with citations (-.008).

The correlation between research  and teaching is very high at .905. This may well be because  the survey of academic opinion contributes to the teaching and the research indicators. There are different questions -- one about research and one about postgraduate supervision -- but the difference between the responses is probably quite small.

It is also very interesting that the correlation between scores for research and citations is rather modest at .410. Since volume of publications, funding and reputation should contribute to research influence, which is what citations are supposed to measure, this suggests that the citations indicator needs a careful review.

Teaching, research and international outlook are composites of several indicators. It would be very helpful if THE or Thomson Reuters released the scores for the separate indicators.

The California Paradox

Looking at the Times Higher Education reputation rankings, I noticed that there were two Californian universities in the  superbrand six and seven in the top 50. This is not an anomaly. A slightly different seven can be found in the THE World University Rankings. California does even better in the Shanghai ARWU with three in the top six and 11 in the top 50. This is a slight improvement on 2003 when there were ten. According to ARWU, California would be the second best country in the world for higher education if it became independent.

California’s performance is not so spectacular according to QS who have just four Californian institutions in their top fifty, a fall from 2004 when they had five (I am not counting the University of California at San Francisco which, being a single subject medical school, should not have been there). Even so it is still a creditable performance.

But, if we are to believe many commentators, higher education in California, at least public higher education, is dying if not already dead.

According to Andy Kroll in Salon:

"California’s public higher education system is, in other words, dying a slow death. The promise of a cheap, quality education is slipping away for the working and middle classes, for immigrants, for the very people whom the University of California’s creators held in mind when they began their grand experiment 144 years ago. And don’t think the slow rot of public education is unique to California: that state’s woes are the nation’s".

The villains according to Kroll are Californian taxpayers who refuse to accept adding to a tax burden that is the among the highest in the world. 

It is surprising that the death throes of higher education in California have gone unnoticed by the well known international rankers.

It is also surprising that public and private universities that are still highly productive and by international standards still lavishly funded exist in the same state as secondary and elementary schools that are close to being the worse in the nation in terms of student performance. The relative and absolute decline in educational achievement is matched by a similar decline in the overall economic performance of the state.

It may be just a matter of time and in the coming decades Californian universities will follow primary and secondary education into irreversible decline.

 

 

 

Preserving data

Times Higher and QS have both renovated their ranking pages recently and both seem to have removed access to some data from previous years. THE used to provide links to the Times Higher Education (Supplement) - Quacquarelli Symonds rankings of 2004-2010 but apparently not any more. QS do not seem to give access to these rankings before 2007. In both cases, I will update if it turns out that there is a way to get to these rankings.


There is, however,  a site which has the rankings for the top 200 of the THES - QS Rankings of 2004-2007.

The THE Reputation Rankings

Times Higher Education have published their reputation rankings based on data collected from the World University Rankings of 2012.

They are not very interesting. Which is exactly what they should be. When rankings show massive changes from one year to another a certain amount of scepticism is required.

The same six, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Oxford and Cambridge are well ahead of everybody else as they were in 2012 and in 2011.

Taking a quick look at the top fifty, there is little movement between 2011 and 2013. Four universities for the US, Japan, Netherlands and Germany have dropped out. In their place there is one more from Korea and from the the UK and two more from Australia.

I was under the impression that Australian universities were facing savage cuts in research funding and were going to be deserted by international students and researchers..

Maybe it is the other universities that are being cut. or maybe a bit of blood letting is good for the health.

I also noticed that the number of respondents went down a bit in 2012. It could be that the academic world is beginning to suffer from ranking fatigue.

GRE Country Ranking: Verbal Reasoning

Arranging the mean scores for the 2011-12 GRE Verbal Reasoning test, we can see that the bottom looks rather similar to  the Quantitative Reasoning test. It comprises African and Arab countries. The top is very different, with five out of six places held by countries where English is currently the native language of a majority of the population.

1	Australia	158.40
2	New Zealand	157.30
3=	Singapore	157.10
3=	Ireland	157.10
3=	UK	157.10
6	Canada	156.00
7	Netherlands	155.50
8	Belgium	155.00
9	US White	154.10
10	Switzerland	153.70
11	Romania	153.50
12=	Sweden	153.30
12=	South Africa	153.30
14	Bulgaria	153.20
15	Norway	153.10
16	USA	152.90
17	Argentina	152.80
18	France	152.70
19	US Asian	152.60
20	Austria	152.50
21	Germany	152.30
22	Denmark	152.30
23	Italy	152.20
24	Croatia	151.70
25	Finland	151.70
26	Uruguay	151.60
27	US American Indian	151.50
28=	Czech Republic	151.40
28=	Israel	151.40
28=	Trinidad	151.40
31	Hungary	151.20
32=	Portugal	150.90
32=	Spain	150.90
34	Poland	150.40
35	Lithuania	150.30
36	US Hispanic	150.20
37	Iceland	149.80
38	US Mexican	149.70
39=	Malaysia	149.50
39=	Barbados	149.50
41	Greece	149.40
42=	Costa Rica	149.10
42=	Philippines	149.10
44	Guatemala	149.00
45	Brazil	148.90
46=	Zimbabwe	148.80
46=	Jamaica	148.80
48	US Porto Rican	148.70
49=	Georgia	148.60
49=	Bosnia - Herzogovina	148.60
51	Guyana	148.60
52	Moldova	148.40
53	Macedonia	148.30
54=	Peru	148.20
54=	Mexico	148.20
54=	Bahamas	148.20
57	Chile	148.00
58	Belarus	147.90
59	Russia	147.80
60=	Latvia	147.70
60=	Colombia	147.70
62	Albania	147.60
63=	Estonia	147.60
63=	Venezuela	147.60
63=	El Salvador	147.60
63=	Cuba	147.60
63=	St Lucia	147.60
68=	Hong Kong	147.50
68=	South Korea	147.50
70=	Ukraine	147.40
70=	Bahrain	147.40
72=	Serbia	147.30
72=	Bolivia	147.30
74=	Eritrea	147.20
74=	Honduras	147.20
76=	Zambia	147.10
76=	Afghanistan	147.10
78	Pakistan	147.00
79	Panama	146.80
80	US Black	146.70
81=	Ecuador	146.50
81=	Kenya	146.50
83	Nigeria	146.40
82=	Morocco	146.30
82=	Senegal	146.30
82=	Nicaragua	146.30
87=	Cyprus	146.10
87=	Dominican Republic	146.10
87=	Sierra leone	146.10
90	Uzbekistan	146.00
91	China	145.90
92	Mongolia	145.80
93=	Vietnam	145.70
93=	Myanmar	145.70
95	Kazakhstan	145.60
96=	Togo	145.50
96=	Ghana	145.50
98=	Tunisia	145.20
98=	Uganda	145.20
100	Niger	145.10
101=	Burkina Faso	145.00
101=	Malawi	145.00
103	Kyrgyzstan	144.90
104=	India	144.70
104=	Indonesia	144.70
106	Cote d'Ivoire	144.60
107=	Japan	144.50
107=	Nepal	144.50
107=	Haiti	144.40
110=	Taiwan	144.20
110=	Bangladesh	144.20
110=	Ethiopia	144.20
110=	Benin	144.20
110=	Congo DR	144.20
115	Turkey	144.10
116=	Egypt	143.80
116=	Azerbaijan	143.80
118	Armenia	143.70
119=	Turkmenistan	143.50
119=	Cameroon	143.50
121=	Macao	143.40
121=	Sri Lanka	143.40
121=	Tanzania	143.40
124	Thailand	142.80
125=	Syria	142.70
125=	Rwanda	142.70
127	Qatar	142.50
128	Algeria	141.60
129	Jordan	141.40
130	Oman	141.30
131	Yemen	141.00
132	Congo Republic	140.90
133	Kuwait	140.80
134	Sudan	140.60
135=	UAE	140.30
135=	Mali	140.30
137	Namibia	140.20
138	Saudi Arabia	137.40

Ranking Countries by GRE Scores



ETS has produced an analysis of the scores for the Graduate Record Exam required for entry into US graduate schools. Among the more interesting tables are the scores by nationality for the general test, composed of verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing. This could be regrded as a crude measure of a country's undergraduate education system although clearly there are all sorts of factors that would blur the picture.

Here are mean scores for quantitative skills  by country.

1	Hong Kong	169.50
2	China	162.90
3	Singapore	160.30
4	Taiwan	159.20
5	Vietnam	158.90
6	Turkey	158.70
7	South Korea	158.20
8	Macao	158.00
9	France	157.50
10	Belgium	157.10
11	Czech Republic	156.90
12	Israel	156.70
13	Switzerland	156.70
14	Netherlands	156.60
15	Greece	156.40
16=	Bulgaria	156.30
16=	Japan	156.30
18	Hungary	156.20
19	Australia	155.70
20	Germany	155.50
21=	Russia	155.30
21=	Thailand	155.30
23=	Belarus	154.80
23=	Romania	154.80
25=	Bangladesh	154.70
25=	Lithuania	154.70
27	Malaysia	154.60
28=	Eritrea	154.50
28=	Iceland	154.50
28=	Tunisia	154.50
31=	New Zealand	154.40
31=	Ukraine	154.40
33	Latvia	154.30
34	Sri Lanka	154.20
35=	Austria	154.10
35=	India	154.10
35=	Italy	154.10
38=	Indonesia	154.00
38=	Moldova	154.00
40=	Armenia	153.80
40=	Ireland	153.80
42=	Cyprus	153.70
42=	Argentina	153.60
44	Canada	153.60
45=	Nepal	153.50
45=	Portugal	153.50
45=	US Asian	153.50
48=	Albania	153.40
48=	Mongolia	153.40
50=	Croatia	153.30
50=	Egypt	153.30
52	Poland	153.20
53=	Norway	153.10
53=	Pakistan	153.10
53=	Spain	153.10
56	UK	152.90
57=	Denmark	152.80
57=	Kazakhstan	152.80
59=	Chile	152.70
59=	Syria	152.70
61=	Azerbaijan	152.60
61=	Macedonia	152.60
61=	Serbia	152.60
61=	Sweden	152.60
65	Myanmar	152.40
66	Peru	152.30
67=	Turkmenistan	152.20
67=	Uzbekistan	152.20
69	Jordan	151.90
70=	Estonia	151.80
70=	Ethiopia	151.80
70=	Morocco	151.80
73	Georgia	151.60
74	Finland	151.50
75=	South Africa	151.30
75=	Uruguay	151.30
77	Bolivia	150.80
78	Brazil	150.50
79	US White	150.40
80	Bosnia - Herzog	150.10
81	Venezuela	150.00
82=	Benin	149.70
82=	Costa Rica	149.70
84	USA	149.50
85	Colombia	149.40
86	Mexico	149.30
87=	Bahrain	149.20
87=	Zimbabwe	149.20
89	Philippines	149.10
90	Trinidad	148.80
91=	Ecuador	148.60
91=	Panama	148.60
91=	UAE	148.60
91=	Yemen	148.60
95=	Algeria	148.50
95=	Sudan	148.50
97=	Guatemala	148.30
97=	Kyrgyzstan	148.30
99	Cote d' Ivoire	148.10
100	Togo	148.00
101	Qatar	147.90
102	Barbados	147.80
103	Rwanda	147.60
104=	El Salvador	147.50
104=	Honduras	147.50
106=	Ghana	147.40
106=	Nigeria	147.40
108	Cuba	147.30
109=	Kenya	147.10
109=	US American Ind	147.10
111	US Hispanic	147.00
112	Cameroon	146.90
113=	Burkina Faso	146.80
113=	Niger	146.80
113=	Zambia	146.80
116=	Dominican Repub	146.50
116=	Guyana	146.50
116=	Kuwait	146.50
116=	Tanzania	146.50
116=	US Mexican	146.50
121=	Uganda	145.90
121=	US Porto Rican	145.90
123	Jamaica	145.80
124	Oman	145.40
125	Senegal	145.30
126	St Lucia	145.20
127	Congo DR	145.10
128	Nicaragua	144.50
129=	Afghanistan	144.20
129=	Haiti	144.20
131	Mali	144.00
132	Malawi	143.90
133=	Bahamas	143.70
133=	Sierra Leone	143.70
135	US Black	143.10
136	Saudi Arabia	142.80
137	Congo Republic	142.40
138	Namibia	140.20

More Rankings on the Way

Soon it will be springtime in the Northern hemisphere and spring would not be complete without a few more rankings.

The Times Higher Education reputation rankings will be launched in early March at the British Council's Going Global conference in Dubai.

“Almost 50,000 academics have provided their expert insight over just three short annual rounds of the survey, providing a serious worldwide audit of an increasingly important but little-understood aspect of global higher education – a university’s academic brand.”
This year’s reputation rankings will be the based on the 16,639 responses, from 144 countries, to Thomson Reuters’ 2012 Academic Reputation Survey, which was carried out during March and April 2012. The 2011 survey attracted 17,554 responses, and 2010’s survey attracted 13,388 respondents.

The survey is by invitation only and academics are selected to be statistically representative of their geographical region and discipline. All are published scholars, questioned about their experiences in the field in which they work. The average time this year’s respondents spent working in the sector was 17 years. '

Meanwhile, the QS ranking of 30 subjects is coming soon. Until now these have been based on varying combinations of employer opinion, academic opinion and citations. This year they will be adding  an indicator based on the h-index.

Here is a definition from Wikipedia:

"The index is based on the distribution of citations received by a given researchers publications. Hirsch writes:

A scientist has index h if h of his/her N_p papers have at least h citations each, and the other (N_p − h) papers have no more than h citations each.

In other words, a scholar with an index of h has published h papers each of which has been cited in other papers at least h times.^[2] Thus, the h-index reflects both the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. The index is designed to improve upon simpler measures such as the total number of citations or publications. The index works properly only for comparing scientists working in the same field; citation conventions differ widely among different fields.
The h-index serves as an alternative to more traditional journal impact factor metrics in the evaluation of the impact of the work of a particular researcher. Because only the most highly cited articles contribute to the h-index, its determination is a relatively simpler process. Hirsch has demonstrated that h has high predictive value for whether a scientist has won honors like National Academy membership or the Nobel Prize. "

This means that one paper cited once produces an index of 1, 20 papers cited 20 times an index of 20, 100 papers cited 100 times an index of 100 and so on.

The point of this is that it combines productivity and quality as measured by citations and reduces the effect of extreme outliers. This is definitely an improvement for QS.

Freedom Indicator?

It is often argued  that the quality of a a university has something to do with academic freedom. Some Western academic have become noticeably self-righteous about respect for human rights in other countries. There have been criticisms of Yale University's links with Singapore, where gay rights are restricted.

One wonders whether Western campuses should talk so loudly about freedom. A recent incident at Carleton University in Canada suggests that when it comes to human rights some humans are much more equal than others.

Carleton has a freedom wall where students can write thoughts that are forbidden in the rest of the campus, probably even in much or most of Canada. Even this was too much for Arun Smith, a seventh year (yes, that's right) human rights student. From the Macleans On Campus blog:

"Seventh-year Carleton University human rights [apparently human rights and political science with a minor in sexuality studies] student Arun Smith has apparently not been in school long enough to learn that other people have rights to opinions that differ from his. After the “free speech wall” on campus was torn down, he posted a message to his Facebook wall claiming responsibility. “If everyone speaks freely we end up simply reinforcing the hierarchies that are created in our society,” it read. The display had been erected by campus club Carleton Students for Liberty and students were encouraged to write anything they wanted on the paper. Someone wrote “abortion is murder” and “traditional marriage is awesome.” GBLTQ Centre volunteer Riley Evans took offense, telling The Charlatan student newspaper that the wall was attacking those who have had abortions and those in same-sex relationships."

It appears that Arun Smith has been widely condemned and that he will be punished. What seems to have been passed over is that it is apparently necessary to have a wall where mainstream religious opinions can be expressed. Yes, I know that "abortion is murder" is a gross simplification of a complex philosophical issue but whose fault is it that it has to be expressed in three words?

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has issued a Campus Freedom Index for Canadian universities. Unsurprisingly, Carleton gets a C and 3 Fs. The best appears to be St Thomas with one A and three Bs

What about an international edition?