Should graduation rates be included in rankings?

There is a noticeable trend for university rankings to become more student- and teaching-centred. Part of this is a growing interest in using graduation rates as a ranking metric. Bob Morse of US News says "[t]his is why we factor in graduation rates. Getting into college means nothing if you can't graduate."

The big problem though is that if universities can influence or control standards for graduation then the value of this metric is greatly diminished. A high graduation rate might mean effective teaching and meritocratic admissions: it might also mean nothing more than a relaxation of standards.

But we do know that dropping out or not finishing university is the road to poverty and obscurity. Think of poor Robert Zimmerman, University of Minnesota dropout, singing for a pittance in coffee bars or Kingsley Amis toiling at University College Swansea for 13 years, able to afford only ten cigarettes a day, after failing his Oxford B Litt exam. Plus all those other failures like Mick Jagger (LSE) and Bill Gates (Harvard). So it could be that graduation rates as a ranking indicator are here to stay.

Job Application

A few years ago an elderly school teacher told me about a pupil who when asked to write an application for a dream job chose Archbishop of Canterbury "because I believe in God and know lots of Bible stories." These days he'd probably be over-qualified but never mind.

So I think it's time to start sending out applications to Ranking Task Forces and the like. I know those zeros at the end of a number are important, that I should click submit AFTER filling in the data field, and that Stellenbosch is in Africa.

Update: Corrected a spelling error in the title without a complaint from anyone.

Trinity College Shoots Itself in the Other Foot

The story so far. Trinity College Dublin (TCD) has been flourishing over the last decade according to the Shanghai and Round University Rankings (RUR) world rankings which have a stable methodology.  The university leadership has, however, been complaining about its decline in the Times Higher Education (THE) and QS rankings, which is attributed to the philistine refusal of the government to give TCD the money that it wants.

It turns out that the decline in the THE rankings was due to a laughable error. TCD had submitted incorrect data to THE, 355 Euro for total income, 111 for research income and 5 for income from industry instead of 355 million, 111 million and 5 million. Supposedly, this was the result of an "innocent mistake." 

Today, the Round University Rankings released their 2017 league table. These rankings are derived from Global Institutional Profiles Project (GIPP) run by Thomson Reuters and now by Clarivate Analytics and used until 2014 by THE. TCD has fallen from 102nd place to 647th, well below Maynooth and the Dublin Institute of Technology. The decline was catastrophic for the indicators based on institutional data and very slight for those derived from surveys and bibliometric information.

What happened? It was not the tight fists of the government. TCD apparently just submitted the data form to GIPP without providing data. 

No doubt another innocent mistake. It will be interesting to see what the group of experts in charge of rankings at TCD has to say about this.

By the way, University College Dublin continues to do well in these rankings, falling a little bit from 195th to 218th.