As far as the rankings are concerned, Singapore has been a great success story, at least as far as the Big Two (THE and QS) are concerned.
In the latest QS world rankings the two major Singaporean universities, National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU, have done extremely well, both of them reaching the eleventh spot. Predictably, the mainstream local media has praised the universities, and quoted QS spokespersons and university representatives about how the results are due to hiring talented faculty and the superiority of the national secondary education system.
There is some scepticism in Singapore about the rankings. The finance magazine Dollars and Sense has just published an article by Sim Kang Heong that questions the latest performance by Singapore's universities, including the relatively poor showing by Singapore Management University.
The author is aware of the existence of other rankings but names only two (ARWU and THE) and then presents a list of indicators from all the QS rankings including regional and specialist tables as though they were part of the World University Rankings.
The piece argues that "it doesn't take someone with a PhD to see some of the glaring biases and flaws in the current way QS does its global university rankings."
It is helpful that someone is taking a sceptical view of Singapore's QS ranking performance but disappointing that there is no specific reference to how NUS and NTU fared in other rankings.
Last February I published a post showing the ranks of these two institutions in the global rankings. Here they are again:
THE: 23rd and 51st
Shanghai ARWU: 85th and 96th
RUR: 50th and 73rd
Leiden (publications): 34th and 66th
These are definitely top 100 universities by any standard. Clearly though, the QS rankings rate them much more highly than anybody else.
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Thursday, July 11, 2019
India and the QS rankings
The impact of university rankings is mixed. They have, for example, often had very negative consequences for faculty, especially junior, who in many places have been coerced into attending pointless seminars and workshops and churning out unread papers or book chapters in order to reach arbitrary and unrealistic targets or performance indicators.
But sometimes they have their uses. They have shown the weakness of several university systems. In particular, the global rankings have demonstrated convincingly that Indian higher education consists of a few islands of excellence in a sea of sub-mediocrity. The contrast with China, where many universities are now counted as world class, is stark and it is unlikely that it can be fixed with a few waves of the policy wand or by spraying cash around.
The response of academic and political leaders is not encouraging. There have been moves to give universities more autonomy, to increase funding, to engage with the rankings. But there is little sign that India is ready to acknowledge the underlying problems of the absence of a serious research culture or a secondary school system that seems unable to prepare students for tertiary education.
Indian educational and political leaders have lately become very concerned about the international standing of the country's universities. Unfortunately, their understanding of how the rankings actually work seems limited. This is not unusual. The qualities needed to climb the slippery ladder of academic politics are not those of a successful researcher or someone able to analyse the opportunities and the flaws of global rankings.
Recently there was a meeting of the Indian minister for Human Resource Development (HRD) plus the heads of the Indian Institutes of Technology Bombay and Delhi and Indian Institute of Science Bangalore.
According to a local media report, officials have said that the reputation indicators in the QS international rankings contribute to Indian universities poor ranking performance as they are "an area where the Indian universities lose out the maximum number of marks - due to the absence of Indian representation at QS panel."
The IIT Bombay director is quoted as saying "there are not enough participants in the UK or the US to rate Indian universities."
This shows ignorance of QS's methodology. QS now collects response from several channels including lists submitted by universities and a facility where individual researchers and employers can sign up to join the survey. In 2019 out of 83,877 academic survey responses collected over five years, 2.6% were from academics with an Indian affiliation, which is less than Russia, South Korea, Australia or Malaysia but more than China or Germany. This does not include responses from Indian academics at British, North American or Australian institutions. A similar proportion of responses to the QS employer survey were from India.
If there are not enough Indian participants in the QS survey then this might well be the fault of Indian universities themselves. QS allows universities to nominate up to 400 potential survey participants. I do not know if they have taken full advantage of this or whether those nominated have actually voted for Indian institutions.
It is possible that India could do better in the rankings by increasing its participation in the QS surveys to the level of Malaysia but it is totally inaccurate to suggest that there are no Indians in the current QS surveys
If Indian universities are going to rise in the rankings then they need to start by understanding how they actually work and creating informed and realistic strategies.
But sometimes they have their uses. They have shown the weakness of several university systems. In particular, the global rankings have demonstrated convincingly that Indian higher education consists of a few islands of excellence in a sea of sub-mediocrity. The contrast with China, where many universities are now counted as world class, is stark and it is unlikely that it can be fixed with a few waves of the policy wand or by spraying cash around.
The response of academic and political leaders is not encouraging. There have been moves to give universities more autonomy, to increase funding, to engage with the rankings. But there is little sign that India is ready to acknowledge the underlying problems of the absence of a serious research culture or a secondary school system that seems unable to prepare students for tertiary education.
Indian educational and political leaders have lately become very concerned about the international standing of the country's universities. Unfortunately, their understanding of how the rankings actually work seems limited. This is not unusual. The qualities needed to climb the slippery ladder of academic politics are not those of a successful researcher or someone able to analyse the opportunities and the flaws of global rankings.
Recently there was a meeting of the Indian minister for Human Resource Development (HRD) plus the heads of the Indian Institutes of Technology Bombay and Delhi and Indian Institute of Science Bangalore.
According to a local media report, officials have said that the reputation indicators in the QS international rankings contribute to Indian universities poor ranking performance as they are "an area where the Indian universities lose out the maximum number of marks - due to the absence of Indian representation at QS panel."
The IIT Bombay director is quoted as saying "there are not enough participants in the UK or the US to rate Indian universities."
This shows ignorance of QS's methodology. QS now collects response from several channels including lists submitted by universities and a facility where individual researchers and employers can sign up to join the survey. In 2019 out of 83,877 academic survey responses collected over five years, 2.6% were from academics with an Indian affiliation, which is less than Russia, South Korea, Australia or Malaysia but more than China or Germany. This does not include responses from Indian academics at British, North American or Australian institutions. A similar proportion of responses to the QS employer survey were from India.
If there are not enough Indian participants in the QS survey then this might well be the fault of Indian universities themselves. QS allows universities to nominate up to 400 potential survey participants. I do not know if they have taken full advantage of this or whether those nominated have actually voted for Indian institutions.
It is possible that India could do better in the rankings by increasing its participation in the QS surveys to the level of Malaysia but it is totally inaccurate to suggest that there are no Indians in the current QS surveys
If Indian universities are going to rise in the rankings then they need to start by understanding how they actually work and creating informed and realistic strategies.
Thursday, July 04, 2019
Comparing National Rankings: USA and China
America's Best Colleges
The US News America's Best Colleges (ABC) is very much the Grand Old Man of university rankings. Its chief data analyst has been described as the most powerful man in America although that is perhaps a bit exaggerated. These rankings have had a major role in defining excellence in American higher education and they may have contributed to US intellectual and scientific dominance in the last two decades of the twentieth century.
But they are changing. This year's edition has introduced two new measures of "social mobility", namely the number of Pell Grant (low income) students and the comparative performance of those students. There is suspicion that this is an attempt to reward universities for the recruitment and graduation of certain favoured groups, including African Americans and Hispanics, and perhaps recent immigrants from the Global South. Income is used as a proxy for race since current affirmative action policies at Harvard and other places are under legal attack.
It should be noted that success is defined as graduation within a six year period and that is something that can be easily achieved by extra tuition, lots of collaborative projects, credit for classroom discussions and effort and persistence, holding instructors responsible for student failure, innovative methods of assessment, contextualised grading and so on.
The new ABC has given the Pell Grant metrics a 5% weighting and has also increased the weighting for graduation rate performance, which looks at actual student outcomes compared to those predicted from their social and academic attributes, from 7.5% to 8%. So now a total of 13 % in effect goes to social engineering. A good chunk of the rankings then is based on the dubious proposition that universities can and should reduce or eliminate the achievement gap between various groups.
To make room for these metrics the acceptance rate indicator has been eliminated, and the weightings for standardised test scores, high school rank, counsellor reviews and six year graduation rate have been reduced.
Getting rid of the acceptance rate metric is probably not a bad idea since it had the unfortunate effect of encouraging universities to maximise the number of rejected applications, which produced income for the universities but imposed a financial burden on applicants.
The rankings now assign nearly a one third weighting to student quality, 22% to graduation and retention rates and 10% for standardised tests and high school rank.
It seems that US News is moving from ranking universities by the academic ability of their students to ranking based on the number and relative success of low income and "minority" students.
The latest ranking shows the effect of these changes. The very top is little changed but further down there are significant shifts. William and Mary is down. Howard University, a predominantly African American institution, is up as are the campuses of the University of California system.
ABC also has another 30% for resources (faculty 20% and financial 10%), 20% for for reputation (15 % peer and 5% high school counsellors), and 5% for alumni donations.
Shanghai Best Chinese University Rankings
The Shanghai Best Chinese University Ranking (BCUR) is a recent initiative although ShanghaiRanking has been doing global rankings since 2003. They are quite different from the US News rankings.
For student outcomes Shanghai assigns a weighting of 10% to graduate employment and does not bother with graduation rates. As noted, ABC gives 22% for student outcomes (six year graduation rate and first year retention rate).
Shanghai gives a 30% weighting for the dreaded Gaokao, the national university entrance exam, compared to 10% for high school class rank and SAT/ACT scores in ABC.
With regard to inputs, Shanghai allocates just 5% for alumni donations, compared to 30% in the ABC for class size, faculty salary, faculty highest degrees, student faculty ratio, full time faculty and financial resources.
That 5% is the only thing in Shanghai that might be relevant to reputation while ABC has a full 20% for reputation among peers and counsellors.
Shanghai also has a 40% allocation for research, 10% for "social service", which comprises research income from industry and income from technology transfer, and 5% for international students. ABC has no equivalent to these, although it publishes rankings separately on postgraduate programmes.
To compare the two, ABC is heavy on inputs, student graduation and retention, reputation, and social engineering. Probably the last will become more important over the next few years
BCUR, in contrast, emphasises student ability as measured by a famously rigorous entrance exam, student employment, research, links with industry, and internationalisation.
It seems that in the coming years excellence in higher education will be defined very differently. An elite US university will be one well endowed with money and human resources, will make sure that most of its students graduate one way or another, will ensure that that the ethnic and gender composition of the faculty and student body matches that of America or the world, and has a good reputation among peers and the media.
An elite Chinese university will be one that produces employed and employable graduates, admits students with high levels of academic skills, has close ties with industry, and has a faculty that produces a high volume of excellent research.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
The Influence of rankings revisited
Rankings are everywhere. Like a cleverly constructed virus they are all over the place and are almost impossible to delete. They are used for immigration policy, advertising, promotion, and recruitment. Here is the latest example.
A tweet from Eduardo Urias noted by Stephen Curry reported that an advertisement for an assistant professorship at Maastricht University included the requirement that candidates "should clearly state the (THE, QS, of FT business school) ranking of the university of their highest degree."
The sentence has since been removed but one wonders why the relevant committee at Maastricht could not be trusted to look up the university ranks by themselves and why should they ask about those specific rankings, which might not be the most relevant or accurate. Maastricht is a very good university, especially for the social sciences (I knew that anyway and I checked with Leiden Ranking), so why should it need to take rankings into account instead of looking at the applicants grad school records publications?
Even though that sentence was removed. this one remains.
"Maastricht University is currently ranked fifth in the top of Young Universities under 50 years."
A tweet from Eduardo Urias noted by Stephen Curry reported that an advertisement for an assistant professorship at Maastricht University included the requirement that candidates "should clearly state the (THE, QS, of FT business school) ranking of the university of their highest degree."
The sentence has since been removed but one wonders why the relevant committee at Maastricht could not be trusted to look up the university ranks by themselves and why should they ask about those specific rankings, which might not be the most relevant or accurate. Maastricht is a very good university, especially for the social sciences (I knew that anyway and I checked with Leiden Ranking), so why should it need to take rankings into account instead of looking at the applicants grad school records publications?
Even though that sentence was removed. this one remains.
"Maastricht University is currently ranked fifth in the top of Young Universities under 50 years."
Monday, June 17, 2019
Are Malaysian Universities Going Backwards?
International university rankings have become very popular in Malaysia, perhaps obsessively so. There is also a lot of commentary in the media, usually not very well informed.
Are Malaysian universities going backwards?
Murray Hunter writing in Eurasia Review thinks so. His claim is supported entirely by their relatively poor performance in the Times Higher Education (THE) world and Asian university rankings.
(By the way, Hunter refers to "THES" but that changed several years ago).
Hunter apparently is one of those who are unaware of the variety and complexity of the current international university ranking scene. The IREG international inventory lists 45 rankings and is already in need of updating. Many of these cover more institutions than THE, some are much more technically competent, and some include more indicators.
THE's is not the only ranking available and it is not very helpful for any institution seeking to make genuine improvements. It bundles eleven indicators in groups so that it is very difficult to work out exactly what contributed to a deterioration or an improvement . The two metrics that stand alone have produced some amusing but questionable results, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology first for research impact, Anadolu University for industry income.
It really is no disgrace to do badly in these rankings.
Hunter's article is a mirror image of the excitement in the Malaysian media about the rise of Malaysian universities in the QS rankings, which seems to be largely the result of massive Malaysian participation in the QS academic survey, which has a disproportionate weighting of 40%.
Malaysian universities have been celebrating their rise in the QS world rankings for some time. That is perhaps a bit more reasonable than getting excited about the THE rankings but still not very helpful.
We need to use a broad range of rankings. For a start take a look at the Leiden Ranking for quantity and quality of research. For total publications Universiti Malaya (UM) has risen from 509th place in 2006-09 to112th in 2014-17.
For the percentage of publications in the top 1% of journals, the most selective indicator, its rank has risen from 824th in 2006-2009 to 221st in 2014-17.
Turning to the Moscow based Round University Rankings for a more general assessment, we find that UM has risen from 269th in 2016 to 156th in 2019 (76th for teaching).
Malaysian universities, at least the best known ones, are making significant and substantial progress in stable and reliable global rankings.
At the end of the article Hunter says that "(t)he fact that Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) has run into second best Malaysian University in less than 20 years of existence as a university is telling about the plight of Malaysian public universities."
Actually, it says nothing except that THE has a flawed methodology for counting citations. UTAR's performance in the THE rankings is the result of one talented researcher working for the Global Burden of Disease project, limited research output, a bonus for location in a country with a modest impact score and a refusal to use fractional counting.
Are Malaysian universities going backwards?
Murray Hunter writing in Eurasia Review thinks so. His claim is supported entirely by their relatively poor performance in the Times Higher Education (THE) world and Asian university rankings.
(By the way, Hunter refers to "THES" but that changed several years ago).
Hunter apparently is one of those who are unaware of the variety and complexity of the current international university ranking scene. The IREG international inventory lists 45 rankings and is already in need of updating. Many of these cover more institutions than THE, some are much more technically competent, and some include more indicators.
THE's is not the only ranking available and it is not very helpful for any institution seeking to make genuine improvements. It bundles eleven indicators in groups so that it is very difficult to work out exactly what contributed to a deterioration or an improvement . The two metrics that stand alone have produced some amusing but questionable results, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology first for research impact, Anadolu University for industry income.
It really is no disgrace to do badly in these rankings.
Hunter's article is a mirror image of the excitement in the Malaysian media about the rise of Malaysian universities in the QS rankings, which seems to be largely the result of massive Malaysian participation in the QS academic survey, which has a disproportionate weighting of 40%.
Malaysian universities have been celebrating their rise in the QS world rankings for some time. That is perhaps a bit more reasonable than getting excited about the THE rankings but still not very helpful.
We need to use a broad range of rankings. For a start take a look at the Leiden Ranking for quantity and quality of research. For total publications Universiti Malaya (UM) has risen from 509th place in 2006-09 to112th in 2014-17.
For the percentage of publications in the top 1% of journals, the most selective indicator, its rank has risen from 824th in 2006-2009 to 221st in 2014-17.
Turning to the Moscow based Round University Rankings for a more general assessment, we find that UM has risen from 269th in 2016 to 156th in 2019 (76th for teaching).
Malaysian universities, at least the best known ones, are making significant and substantial progress in stable and reliable global rankings.
At the end of the article Hunter says that "(t)he fact that Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) has run into second best Malaysian University in less than 20 years of existence as a university is telling about the plight of Malaysian public universities."
Actually, it says nothing except that THE has a flawed methodology for counting citations. UTAR's performance in the THE rankings is the result of one talented researcher working for the Global Burden of Disease project, limited research output, a bonus for location in a country with a modest impact score and a refusal to use fractional counting.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Bangladeshi Universities Should Forget about Their Websites
Bangladesh has a lot of universities but none of them have succeeded in getting into the list of 417 universities included in the THE Asian University Rankings. The country's performance is worse than anywhere in South Asia. Even Nepal and Sri Lanka have managed one university each
Once again, it seems that the media and and university administrators have been persuaded that there is only one set of international rankings, those produced by Times Higher Education (THE), and that the many others, which are documented in the IREG Inventory of International Rankings, do not exist.
The response of university bureaucrats shows a lack of awareness of current university rankings and their methodologies. Dhaka University's head claimed, in an interview with the Dhaka Tribune, that if the university had provided the necessary information on its website it would be in a "prestigious position". He apparently went on to say that the problem was that the website was not up to date and that a dean has been assigned to discuss the matter.
THE does not use data from university websites. It collects and processes information submitted by institutions, bibliometric data from the Scopus database and responses to surveys. It makes no difference to THE or other rankers whether the website was updated yesterday or a decade ago.
The Vice Chancellor of Shahjahal University of Science and Technology spoke about research papers not being published on websites or noted in annual reports. Again, this makes no difference to THE or anyone else.
He was, however, correct to note that bureaucratic restrictions on the admission of foreign students would reduce the scores in those rankings that count international students as an indicator.
Universities in Bangladesh need to do some background research into the current ranking scene before they attempt to get ranked. They should be aware of the rapidly growing number of rankings. THE is not the only international ranking and it is probably unsuitable for universities in countries like Bangladesh that do not have very much income or established reputations and are unable to participate in citation-rich global projects.
They should look at rankings with a more appropriate methodology. Dhaka University, for example, is currently ranked 504th among universities in the Scimago Institutions Rankings, which include patents, altmetrics, and web size as well as research.
Bangladeshi universities should first review the current rankings and make a note of their procedures and requirements and also consider the resources available to collect and submit data .
It would probably be a good idea to focus on Scimago and the research focussed URAP rankings, If universities want to try for a research plus teaching ranking which require institutions to submit data then it would be better to contact the Global Institutional profile Project to get into the Round University Rankings or QS with the objective of leveraging their local reputations with academics and employers.
Saturday, April 13, 2019
Do we really need a global impact ranking?
Sixteen years ago there was just one international university ranking, the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). Since then rankings have proliferated. We have world rankings, regional rankings, subject rankings, business school rankings, young university rankings, employability rankings, systems rankings, and best student cities.
As if this wasn't enough, there is now a "global impact" ranking published by Times Higher Education (THE). This was announced with a big dose of breathless hyperbole as though it was something revolutionary and unprecedented. Not quite. Before THE's ranking there was the GreenMetric ranking published by Universitas Indonesia. This measured universities' contribution to sustainability through indicators like water, waste, transportation, and education and research .
THE was doing something more specific and perhaps more ambitious, measuring adherence to the Sustainable Development Goals proclaimed by the UN. Universities could submit data about eleven out of the 17 seventeen goals and a minimum of four were counted for the overall rankings, with one, partnership for the goals, being mandatory.
The two rankings have attracted different respondents so perhaps they are complementary rather than competitive. The GreenMetric rankings include 66 universities from Indonesia, 18 from Malaysia and 61 from the USA compared to 7, 9 and 31 in the THE impact rankings. On the other hand, the THE rankings have a lot more universities from Australia and the UK. It is noticeable that China is almost entirely absent from both (2 universities in GreenMetric and 3 in THE's).
But is there really any point in a global impact ranking? Some universities in the West seem to be doing a fairly decent job of producing research in the natural sciences although no doubt much of it is mediocre or worse and there is also a lot of politically correct nonsense being produced in the humanities and social sciences. They have been far less successful in teaching undergraduates and providing them with the skills required by employers and professional and graduate schools. It is surely debatable whether universities should be concerned about the UN sustainable development goals before they have figured out to fulfill their teaching mission.
Similarly, rankers have become quite adept at measuring and comparing research output and quality. There are several technically competent rankings which look at research from different viewpoints. There is the Shanghai ARWU which counts long dead Nobel and Fields laureates, the National Taiwan University ranking which counts publications over an eleven year period period, Scimago which includes patents, URAP with 2,500 institutions, the US News Best Global Universities which includes books and conferences.
The THE world ranking is probably the least useful of the research-dominant rankings. It gives a 30 % weighting to research which is assessed by three indicators, reputation, publications per staff and research income per staff. An improvement in the score for research could result from an improved reputation for research, an reduction in the number of academic staff, an increase in the number of publications, an increase in research funding, or a combination of some or all of these. Students and stakeholders who want to know exactly why the research prowess of a university is rising or falling will not find THE very helpful.
The THE world and regional rankings also have a citations indicator derived from normalised citations impact. Citations are benchmarked against documents in 300+ fields, five document types and five years of publications. Further, citations to documents with less that a thousand authors are not fractionalised. Further again, self-citations are allowed. And again, there is a regional modification or country bonus applied to half of the indicator, dividing a universities impact score by the square root of the score of the country in which it is located. This means that every university except those in the country with the highest score goes up, some a bit and some a lot.
The result of all this is a bit of a mess. Over the last few years we have seen institutions rise to glory at the top of the citations that should never have been there, usually because they have succeeded in combining a small number of publications with participation in a mega project with hundreds of authors and affiliated universities and thousands of citations. Top universities for research impact in the 2018-19 world rankings include Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, the University of Reykjavik, the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and Anglia Ruskin University.
There is something disturbing about university leaders queuing up to bask in the approval of an organisation that seems to think that Babol Norshirvani University of Technology has a greater research influence than anywhere else in the world. The idea that a ranking organisation that cannot publish a plausible list of influential research universities should have the nerve to start talking about measuring global impact is quite surprising.
Most rankers have done better at evaluating research than THE. At least they have not produced indicators as ridiculous as the normalised citations indicator. Teaching, especially undergraduate teaching, is another matter. Attempts to capture the quality of university teaching have been far from successful. Rankers have tried to measure inputs such as income or faculty resources or have conducted surveys but these are at best very indirect indicators. It seems strange that they should now turn their attention to various third missions.
Of course, research and teaching are not the only thing that universities do. But until international ranking organisations have worked out how to effectively compare universities for the quality of learning and teaching or graduate employability it seems premature to start trying to measure anything else.
It is likely though that many universities will welcome the latest THE initiative. Many Western universities faced with declining standards and funding and competition from the East will welcome the opportunity to find something where they can get high scores that will help with branding and promotion.
As if this wasn't enough, there is now a "global impact" ranking published by Times Higher Education (THE). This was announced with a big dose of breathless hyperbole as though it was something revolutionary and unprecedented. Not quite. Before THE's ranking there was the GreenMetric ranking published by Universitas Indonesia. This measured universities' contribution to sustainability through indicators like water, waste, transportation, and education and research .
THE was doing something more specific and perhaps more ambitious, measuring adherence to the Sustainable Development Goals proclaimed by the UN. Universities could submit data about eleven out of the 17 seventeen goals and a minimum of four were counted for the overall rankings, with one, partnership for the goals, being mandatory.
The two rankings have attracted different respondents so perhaps they are complementary rather than competitive. The GreenMetric rankings include 66 universities from Indonesia, 18 from Malaysia and 61 from the USA compared to 7, 9 and 31 in the THE impact rankings. On the other hand, the THE rankings have a lot more universities from Australia and the UK. It is noticeable that China is almost entirely absent from both (2 universities in GreenMetric and 3 in THE's).
But is there really any point in a global impact ranking? Some universities in the West seem to be doing a fairly decent job of producing research in the natural sciences although no doubt much of it is mediocre or worse and there is also a lot of politically correct nonsense being produced in the humanities and social sciences. They have been far less successful in teaching undergraduates and providing them with the skills required by employers and professional and graduate schools. It is surely debatable whether universities should be concerned about the UN sustainable development goals before they have figured out to fulfill their teaching mission.
Similarly, rankers have become quite adept at measuring and comparing research output and quality. There are several technically competent rankings which look at research from different viewpoints. There is the Shanghai ARWU which counts long dead Nobel and Fields laureates, the National Taiwan University ranking which counts publications over an eleven year period period, Scimago which includes patents, URAP with 2,500 institutions, the US News Best Global Universities which includes books and conferences.
The THE world ranking is probably the least useful of the research-dominant rankings. It gives a 30 % weighting to research which is assessed by three indicators, reputation, publications per staff and research income per staff. An improvement in the score for research could result from an improved reputation for research, an reduction in the number of academic staff, an increase in the number of publications, an increase in research funding, or a combination of some or all of these. Students and stakeholders who want to know exactly why the research prowess of a university is rising or falling will not find THE very helpful.
The THE world and regional rankings also have a citations indicator derived from normalised citations impact. Citations are benchmarked against documents in 300+ fields, five document types and five years of publications. Further, citations to documents with less that a thousand authors are not fractionalised. Further again, self-citations are allowed. And again, there is a regional modification or country bonus applied to half of the indicator, dividing a universities impact score by the square root of the score of the country in which it is located. This means that every university except those in the country with the highest score goes up, some a bit and some a lot.
The result of all this is a bit of a mess. Over the last few years we have seen institutions rise to glory at the top of the citations that should never have been there, usually because they have succeeded in combining a small number of publications with participation in a mega project with hundreds of authors and affiliated universities and thousands of citations. Top universities for research impact in the 2018-19 world rankings include Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, the University of Reykjavik, the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and Anglia Ruskin University.
There is something disturbing about university leaders queuing up to bask in the approval of an organisation that seems to think that Babol Norshirvani University of Technology has a greater research influence than anywhere else in the world. The idea that a ranking organisation that cannot publish a plausible list of influential research universities should have the nerve to start talking about measuring global impact is quite surprising.
Most rankers have done better at evaluating research than THE. At least they have not produced indicators as ridiculous as the normalised citations indicator. Teaching, especially undergraduate teaching, is another matter. Attempts to capture the quality of university teaching have been far from successful. Rankers have tried to measure inputs such as income or faculty resources or have conducted surveys but these are at best very indirect indicators. It seems strange that they should now turn their attention to various third missions.
Of course, research and teaching are not the only thing that universities do. But until international ranking organisations have worked out how to effectively compare universities for the quality of learning and teaching or graduate employability it seems premature to start trying to measure anything else.
It is likely though that many universities will welcome the latest THE initiative. Many Western universities faced with declining standards and funding and competition from the East will welcome the opportunity to find something where they can get high scores that will help with branding and promotion.
Where is the real educational capital of the world?
Here is another example of how rankings, especially those produced by Times Higher Education (THE), are used to mislead the public.
The London Post has announced that London is the Higher Educational Capital of the World for 2019. Support for this claim is provided by four London universities appearing in the top 40 of the THE World University Rankings which, unsurprisingly, have been welcomed by London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
In addition, THE has Oxford and Cambridge as first and second in the world in their overall rankings and QS has declared London to be the Best Student City.
THE is not the only global ranking. There are now several others and none of them have Oxford in first place. Most of them give the top spot to Harvard, although in the QS world rankings it is MIT and in the GreenMetric rankings Wageningen.
Also, if we look at the number of universities in the top 50 of the Shanghai rankings we cannot see London as the undisputed HE capital of the world. Using this simple criterion it would be New York with three, Columbia, New York University and Rockefeller.
Then come Boston, Paris, Chicago and London with two each.
The London Post has announced that London is the Higher Educational Capital of the World for 2019. Support for this claim is provided by four London universities appearing in the top 40 of the THE World University Rankings which, unsurprisingly, have been welcomed by London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
In addition, THE has Oxford and Cambridge as first and second in the world in their overall rankings and QS has declared London to be the Best Student City.
THE is not the only global ranking. There are now several others and none of them have Oxford in first place. Most of them give the top spot to Harvard, although in the QS world rankings it is MIT and in the GreenMetric rankings Wageningen.
Also, if we look at the number of universities in the top 50 of the Shanghai rankings we cannot see London as the undisputed HE capital of the world. Using this simple criterion it would be New York with three, Columbia, New York University and Rockefeller.
Then come Boston, Paris, Chicago and London with two each.
Saturday, April 06, 2019
Resources alone may not be enough
Universitas 21 has just published its annual ranking of higher education systems. There are four criteria each containing several metrics: resources, connectivity, environment and output.
The ranking has received a reasonable amount of media coverage although not as much as THE or QS.
A comparison of the ranks for the Resources indicator, comprising five measures of expenditure, and for Output, which includes research, citations, performance on rankings, graduation rates and enrolments, produces some interesting insights. There are countries such as Denmark and Switzerland that do well for both. China, Israel and some European countries seem to be very good at getting a high output from the resources available. There are others, including Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, that appear to have adequate or more than adequate resources but whose rank for output is not so high.
These are of course limited indicators and it could perhaps just be a matter of time before the resources produce the desired results. The time for panic or celebration may not have arrived yet. Even so, it does seem that some countries or cultures are able to make better use of their resources than others.
The table below orders countries according to the difference between their ranks for resources and for output. Ireland is 20 places higher for output than it is for resources. India is seven places lower.
The relatively poor performance for Singapore is surprising given that country's reputation for all round excellence. Possibly there is a point where expenditure on higher education runs into diminishing or even negative returns.
The ranking has received a reasonable amount of media coverage although not as much as THE or QS.
A comparison of the ranks for the Resources indicator, comprising five measures of expenditure, and for Output, which includes research, citations, performance on rankings, graduation rates and enrolments, produces some interesting insights. There are countries such as Denmark and Switzerland that do well for both. China, Israel and some European countries seem to be very good at getting a high output from the resources available. There are others, including Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, that appear to have adequate or more than adequate resources but whose rank for output is not so high.
These are of course limited indicators and it could perhaps just be a matter of time before the resources produce the desired results. The time for panic or celebration may not have arrived yet. Even so, it does seem that some countries or cultures are able to make better use of their resources than others.
The table below orders countries according to the difference between their ranks for resources and for output. Ireland is 20 places higher for output than it is for resources. India is seven places lower.
The relatively poor performance for Singapore is surprising given that country's reputation for all round excellence. Possibly there is a point where expenditure on higher education runs into diminishing or even negative returns.
|
China
|
+20
|
|
Ireland
|
+20
|
|
Russia
|
+18
|
|
Greece
|
+16
|
|
Hungary
|
+14
|
|
Italy
|
+14
|
|
UK
|
+11
|
|
Israel
|
+10
|
|
Slovenia
|
+10
|
|
South Korea
|
+10
|
|
Australia
|
+8
|
|
USA
|
+8
|
|
Spain
|
+7
|
|
Taiwan
|
+4
|
|
Bulgaria
|
+3
|
|
Germany
|
+3
|
|
Iran
|
+3
|
|
Netherlands
|
+3
|
|
Japan
|
+3
|
|
Czech Republic
|
+2
|
|
Belgium
|
+1
|
|
Croatia
|
+1
|
|
Romania
|
+1
|
|
Thailand
|
+1
|
|
Finland
|
0
|
|
France
|
0
|
|
Indonesia
|
0
|
|
New Zealand
|
0
|
|
Canada
|
-1
|
|
Denmark
|
-1
|
|
Portugal
|
-1
|
|
Argentina
|
-2
|
|
Norway
|
-2
|
|
Poland
|
-2
|
|
South Africa
|
-2
|
|
Switzerland
|
-2
|
|
Ukraine
|
-5
|
|
Hong Kong
|
-4
|
|
Sweden
|
-5
|
|
India
|
-7
|
|
Chile
|
-9
|
|
Singapore
|
-9
|
|
Austria
|
-11
|
|
Mexico
|
-13
|
|
Serbia
|
-13
|
|
Slovakia
|
-14
|
|
Turkey
|
-14
|
|
Brazil
|
-16
|
|
Saudi Arabia
|
-25
|
|
Malaysia
|
-28
|
Thursday, April 04, 2019
What to do to get into the rankings?
I have been asked this question quite a few times. So finally here is an attempt to answer it.
If you represent a university that is not listed in any rankings, except uniRank and Webometrics, but you want to be, what should you do?
Where are you now?
The first thing to do is to find out where you are in the global hierarchy of universities.
Here the Webometrics rankings are very helpful. These are now a mixture of web activity and research indicators and provide a rank for over 28,000 universities or places that might be considered universities, colleges, or academies of some sort.
If you are ranked in the bottom half of Webometrics then frankly it would be better to concentrate on not going bankrupt and getting or staying accredited.
But if you are in the top 10,000 or so then you might be able to think about getting somewhere in some sort of ranking.
Where do you want to be?
Nearly everybody in higher education who is not hibernating has heard of the Times Higher Education (THE) world and regional rankings. Some also know about the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) or the Shanghai rankings. But there are now many more rankings that are just as good as, or in some cases better than, the "big three".
According to the IREG inventory published last year there are now at least 45 international university rankings including business school, subject, system and regional rankings, of which 17 are global rankings, and there will be more to come. This inventory provides links and some basic preliminary information about all the rankings but it already needs updating.
The methodology and public visibility of the global rankings varies enormously. So, first you have to decide what sort of university you are and what you want to be. You also need to think about exactly what you want from a ranking, whether it is fuel for the publicity machine or an accurate and valid assessment of research performance.
If you want to be a small high quality research led institution with lavish public and private funding, something like Caltech, then the THE world rankings would probably be appropriate. They measure income three different ways, no matter how wastefully it is spent, and most of the indicators are scaled according to number of staff or students. They also have a citations indicator which favours research intensive institutions like Stanford or MIT along with some improbable places like Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Brighton and Sussex Medical School or Reykjavik University.
If, however, your goal is to be a large comprehensive research and teaching university then the QS or the Russia-based Round University Rankings might be a better choice. The latter has all the metrics of the THE rankings except one plus another eight, all with sensible weightings.
If you are a research postgraduate-only university then you would not be eligible for the overall rankings produced by QS or THE but you could be included in the Shanghai Rankings.
Data Submission
Most rankings rely on publicly accessible information. However these global rankings use include information submitted by the ranked institution: QS world rankings, THE world rankings, Round University Ranking, US News Best Global Universities, U-Multirank, UI Greenmetric. Collecting, verifying and submitting data can be a very tiresome task so it would be well to consider whether there are sufficient informed and conscientious staff available. U-Multirank is especially demanding in the the amount and quality of data required.
List of Global Rankings
Here is the list of the 17 global rankings included in the IREG inventory with comments about the kind of university that is likely to do well in them.
CWTS Leiden Ranking
This is a research only ranking by a group of bibliometric experts at Leiden University. There are several indicators starting with the total number of publications, headed by Harvard followed by the University of Toronto, and ending with the percentage of publications in the top 1% of journals, headed by Rockefeller University.
CWUR World University Rankings
Now produced out of UAE, this is an unusual and not well-known ranking that attempts to measure alumni employment and the quality of education and faculty. At the top it generally resembles more conventional rankings.
Emerging/Trendence Global University Employability Rankings
Published in but not produced by THE, these are based on a survey of employers in selected countries and rank only 150 universities.
Nature Index
A research rankine based on a very select group of journals. Also includes non-university institutions. The current leader is the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This ranking is relevant only for those universities aiming for the very top levels of research in the natural sciences.
National Taiwan University Rankings
A research ranking of current publications and citations and those over a period of eleven years. It favours big universities with the current top ten including the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan.
QS World University Rankings
If you are confident of building a local reputation then this is the ranking for you. There is a 40 % weighting for academic reputation and 10 % for employer reputation. Southeast Asian universities often do well in this ranking.
Webometrics
This now has two measures of web activity, one of citations and one of publications. It measures quantity rather than quality so there is a chance here for mass market institutions to excel.
Reuters Top 100 Innovative Universities
This is definitely for the world's technological elite.
Round University Rankings
These rankings combines survey and institutional data from Clarivate's Global Institutional Profiles Project and bibliometric data from the.Web of Science Core Collection. They are the most balanced and comprehensive of the general world rankings although hardly known outside Russia.
Scimago Institution Rankings
These combine indicators of research, innovation measured by patents and web activity. They tend to favour larger universities that are strong in technology.
Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)
These are the oldest of the global rankings with a simple and stable methodology. They are definitely biased towards large, rich, old research universities with strengths in the natural sciences and a long history of scientific achievement.
THE World University Rankings
The most famous of the international rankings, they claim to be sophisticated, rigorous, trusted etc but are biased towards UK universities. The citations indicator is hopelessly and amusingly flawed. There are a number of spin-offs that might be of interest to non-elite universities such as regional, reputation, young universities and, now, global impact rankings.
U-Multirank
Contains masses of information about things that other rankings neglect but would be helpful mainly to universities looking for students from Europe.
UI GreenMetric Ranking
This is published by Universitas Indonesia and measures universities' contribution to environmental sustainability. Includes a lot of Southeast Asian universities but not many from North America. Useful for eco-conscious universities.
uniRank University Ranking
This is based on web popularity derived from several sources. In many parts of Africa it serves as a measure of general quality.
University Ranking by Academic Performance
A research ranking produced by the Middle East Technical University in Ankara that ranks 2,500 universities. It is little known outside Turkey but I noticed recently that it was used in a presentation at a conference in Malaysia.
US News Best Global Universities
Sometimes counted as one of the big four but hardly ever the big three, this is a research ranking that is balanced and includes 1,250 universities. For American universities is a useful complement to the US News' America's best Colleges.
You will have to decide whether to take a short-term approach to rankings, by recruiting staff from the Highly Cited Researchers list, admitting international students regardless of ability, sending papers to marginal journals and conferences, signing up for citation-rich mega projects, or by concentrating on the underlying attributes of an excellent university, admitting students and appointing and promoting faculty for their cognitive skills and academic ability, encouraging genuine and productive collaboration, nurturing local talent.
The first may produce quick results or nice bonuses for administrators but it can leave universities at the mercy of the methodological tweaking of the rankers, as Turkish universities found out in 2015.
The latter will take years or decades to make a difference and unfortunately that may be too long for journalists and policy makers.
If you represent a university that is not listed in any rankings, except uniRank and Webometrics, but you want to be, what should you do?
Where are you now?
The first thing to do is to find out where you are in the global hierarchy of universities.
Here the Webometrics rankings are very helpful. These are now a mixture of web activity and research indicators and provide a rank for over 28,000 universities or places that might be considered universities, colleges, or academies of some sort.
If you are ranked in the bottom half of Webometrics then frankly it would be better to concentrate on not going bankrupt and getting or staying accredited.
But if you are in the top 10,000 or so then you might be able to think about getting somewhere in some sort of ranking.
Where do you want to be?
Nearly everybody in higher education who is not hibernating has heard of the Times Higher Education (THE) world and regional rankings. Some also know about the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) or the Shanghai rankings. But there are now many more rankings that are just as good as, or in some cases better than, the "big three".
According to the IREG inventory published last year there are now at least 45 international university rankings including business school, subject, system and regional rankings, of which 17 are global rankings, and there will be more to come. This inventory provides links and some basic preliminary information about all the rankings but it already needs updating.
The methodology and public visibility of the global rankings varies enormously. So, first you have to decide what sort of university you are and what you want to be. You also need to think about exactly what you want from a ranking, whether it is fuel for the publicity machine or an accurate and valid assessment of research performance.
If you want to be a small high quality research led institution with lavish public and private funding, something like Caltech, then the THE world rankings would probably be appropriate. They measure income three different ways, no matter how wastefully it is spent, and most of the indicators are scaled according to number of staff or students. They also have a citations indicator which favours research intensive institutions like Stanford or MIT along with some improbable places like Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Brighton and Sussex Medical School or Reykjavik University.
If, however, your goal is to be a large comprehensive research and teaching university then the QS or the Russia-based Round University Rankings might be a better choice. The latter has all the metrics of the THE rankings except one plus another eight, all with sensible weightings.
If you are a research postgraduate-only university then you would not be eligible for the overall rankings produced by QS or THE but you could be included in the Shanghai Rankings.
Data Submission
Most rankings rely on publicly accessible information. However these global rankings use include information submitted by the ranked institution: QS world rankings, THE world rankings, Round University Ranking, US News Best Global Universities, U-Multirank, UI Greenmetric. Collecting, verifying and submitting data can be a very tiresome task so it would be well to consider whether there are sufficient informed and conscientious staff available. U-Multirank is especially demanding in the the amount and quality of data required.
List of Global Rankings
Here is the list of the 17 global rankings included in the IREG inventory with comments about the kind of university that is likely to do well in them.
CWTS Leiden Ranking
This is a research only ranking by a group of bibliometric experts at Leiden University. There are several indicators starting with the total number of publications, headed by Harvard followed by the University of Toronto, and ending with the percentage of publications in the top 1% of journals, headed by Rockefeller University.
CWUR World University Rankings
Now produced out of UAE, this is an unusual and not well-known ranking that attempts to measure alumni employment and the quality of education and faculty. At the top it generally resembles more conventional rankings.
Emerging/Trendence Global University Employability Rankings
Published in but not produced by THE, these are based on a survey of employers in selected countries and rank only 150 universities.
Nature Index
A research rankine based on a very select group of journals. Also includes non-university institutions. The current leader is the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This ranking is relevant only for those universities aiming for the very top levels of research in the natural sciences.
National Taiwan University Rankings
A research ranking of current publications and citations and those over a period of eleven years. It favours big universities with the current top ten including the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan.
QS World University Rankings
If you are confident of building a local reputation then this is the ranking for you. There is a 40 % weighting for academic reputation and 10 % for employer reputation. Southeast Asian universities often do well in this ranking.
Webometrics
This now has two measures of web activity, one of citations and one of publications. It measures quantity rather than quality so there is a chance here for mass market institutions to excel.
Reuters Top 100 Innovative Universities
This is definitely for the world's technological elite.
Round University Rankings
These rankings combines survey and institutional data from Clarivate's Global Institutional Profiles Project and bibliometric data from the.Web of Science Core Collection. They are the most balanced and comprehensive of the general world rankings although hardly known outside Russia.
Scimago Institution Rankings
These combine indicators of research, innovation measured by patents and web activity. They tend to favour larger universities that are strong in technology.
Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)
These are the oldest of the global rankings with a simple and stable methodology. They are definitely biased towards large, rich, old research universities with strengths in the natural sciences and a long history of scientific achievement.
THE World University Rankings
The most famous of the international rankings, they claim to be sophisticated, rigorous, trusted etc but are biased towards UK universities. The citations indicator is hopelessly and amusingly flawed. There are a number of spin-offs that might be of interest to non-elite universities such as regional, reputation, young universities and, now, global impact rankings.
U-Multirank
Contains masses of information about things that other rankings neglect but would be helpful mainly to universities looking for students from Europe.
UI GreenMetric Ranking
This is published by Universitas Indonesia and measures universities' contribution to environmental sustainability. Includes a lot of Southeast Asian universities but not many from North America. Useful for eco-conscious universities.
uniRank University Ranking
This is based on web popularity derived from several sources. In many parts of Africa it serves as a measure of general quality.
University Ranking by Academic Performance
A research ranking produced by the Middle East Technical University in Ankara that ranks 2,500 universities. It is little known outside Turkey but I noticed recently that it was used in a presentation at a conference in Malaysia.
US News Best Global Universities
Sometimes counted as one of the big four but hardly ever the big three, this is a research ranking that is balanced and includes 1,250 universities. For American universities is a useful complement to the US News' America's best Colleges.
You will have to decide whether to take a short-term approach to rankings, by recruiting staff from the Highly Cited Researchers list, admitting international students regardless of ability, sending papers to marginal journals and conferences, signing up for citation-rich mega projects, or by concentrating on the underlying attributes of an excellent university, admitting students and appointing and promoting faculty for their cognitive skills and academic ability, encouraging genuine and productive collaboration, nurturing local talent.
The first may produce quick results or nice bonuses for administrators but it can leave universities at the mercy of the methodological tweaking of the rankers, as Turkish universities found out in 2015.
The latter will take years or decades to make a difference and unfortunately that may be too long for journalists and policy makers.
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