Tuesday, August 23, 2016

The Naming of Universities



You can tell a few things about universities from their names. If, for example, a university has a direction in its name then it is usually not ranked very highly: University of East London, Southern Illinois University. Those that are named after long dead people -- Yale, Duke -- are often but not always -- Bishop Grosseteste -- very prestigious.

It might be an idea to have a ranking of institutions with the most interesting or strangest names. After all nearly everything else about higher education is ranked somewhere or other. California University of Pennsylvania should be near the top. And of course there is Hamburger University and Butler University. Or, from a few years ago, The Universal Institute of Food Management and Hotel Administration I was Called by the Almighty and I Said Yes My Lord, which was actually a restaurant somewhere along the road from Maiduguri to Kano in Nigeria.

Another high flier might be the Lovely Professional University, a "semi-residential university college in North India", which is ranked 4326th in the world and 213rd in India by Webometrics. I doubt if it will get many votes in the QS or THE academic surveys unless it changes its name which I suspect might be a literal translation from Hindi or Sanskrit. 

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Worth Watching



Video
Salvatore Babones, Gaming the Rankings Game: University Rankings and the Future of the University


Thursday, August 18, 2016

Shanghai Rankings 2016 Update




An interesting tweet from    reports that the average change in rank position in this year's Shanghai rankings was 32 compared to 11.7 between 2014 and 2015. Changes in methodology, even simple ones, can lead to a lot of churning.

Meanwhile, here are the correlations between the various indicators in the ranking. In general, it seems that the indicators are not measuring exactly the same thing and they do not raise red flags by showing a low or zero association with each other.

The lowest correlations are between publications and alumni and award (alumni and faculty winning Nobel and Fields awards). Publications are papers in the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index in 2015 while the alumni and award indicators go back several decades. Time makes a difference and as a measure of contemporary research excellence Nobel and Fields awards may be losing their relevance.




 alumni
 award
highly
cited
Nature
& Science
 publications
PCP
 total
alumni
 1
 .764
 .480
 .708
 .439
 .612
 .783
award
 .764
 1
 .544
 .751
 .403
 .686
 .846
highly
cited
 .480
 .544
 1
 .738
 .581
 .588
 .825
Nature
& Science
 .708
 .751
 .738
 1
 .628
 .687
 .925
publications
 .439
 .403
 .581
 .628
 1
 .394
 .733
PCP
 .612
 .686
 .588
 .687
 .394
 1
 .757
Total
 .783
 .846
 .825
 .925
 .733
 .757
 1










All correlations are significant at the 0.01 level (2 tailed).
N is 500 in all cases except for Nature and Science where it is 497