Salaries, rankings, academic quality, racism, sexism, and heightism at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute

From time to time the question of the salaries of university administrators resurfaces. Last August the issue of the salary of the yacht and Bentley owning  vice-chancellor of the University of Bolton in the UK received national prominence. His  salary of GBP 260,500, including pension contributions and healthcare benefits, seemed to have little relationship to the quality of the university which was not included in the QS and THE world rankings and managed a rank of 1,846 in Webometrics and 2,106 in University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP). A poll in the local newspaper showed 93% of respondents opposed to the increase.

A previous post in this blog reported  that vice chancellors salaries had no statistically significant relationship to student satisfaction in the UK although they had more than average faculty salaries and the number of faculty with teaching qualifications.

This issue has cropped up in the US where it has been noted that the highest paid university president is Shirley Ann Jackson of the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

She has come under fire for being overpaid, autocratic and allowing RPI to go into academic decline. Her supporters have argued that her critics are guilty of residual racism, sexism and even heightism.  A letter in the Troy Times Union from David Hershberg uses the Times Higher Education (THE) world rankings to chastise Jackson



"RPI was always in the top 5 of undergraduate engineering schools. Now it's No. 30 in U.S. News and World Report's latest rankings. Despite the continued loss of stature of my alma mater, the school's president, Shirley Ann Jackson, is the highest paid president of a university by far and on some 10 other boards that supplement her $7 million salary and other compensation. This is RPI's rankings the last eight years in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings: 2011, 104; 2012, 144; 2013, 174; 2014, 181; 2015, 226-250; 2016, 251-300; 2017, 251-300; and 2018, 301-350. Further, U.S. News & World Report has RPI at No. 434 globally and No. 195 engineering school. This warrants a change at the top. This is what matters, not gender or race."

It seems that for some people in the USA international rankings, especially THE's,  have become the measure of university excellence..

First, it must be said that the THE World University Rankings are not a good measure of university quality.  These rankings have seen dramatic rises and falls in recent years. Between 2014-15 and 2015-16, for example, Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara fell from 85th place to the 501-600 band while many French, Japanese, Korean and other Turkish universities fell dozens of places. This had nothing to do with the quality of the universities and everything to do with methodological changes, especially to the citations indicator.

The verdict of the US News America's best Colleges is simple. RPI was 42nd in 2007 and it is 42nd in the 2018 rankings, although apparently alumni giving has gone.down.

Comparing data from US News in 2007 and 2015, RPI is more selective with more applicants of whom a smaller proportion are admitted. SAT scores are higher and more students come from the top 10% of their high school. There are more women and more international and out of state students.

The school may, however, have become less equitable. The percentage of Black students has fallen from 4% to 2% and that of students needing financial aid from 70% to 65%.

As a national university with an undergraduate teaching mission RPI is certainly not declining in any sense although it may be less welcoming for poor and Black students and it is definitely becoming more expensive for everybody.

The international rankings, especially those based on research, tell a different story. RPI is slipping everywhere: from 243 in 2014 to 301 in 2017 in the CWUR rankings, from 589 in 2010-11 to 618 in 2017 in URAP, from 341 in 2013 to 390 in 2017 in Nature Index, from 128 in 2010 to 193 in 2017 in the Round University Rankings.

In the Shanghai rankings, RPI fell from the 151-200 band to the 501-600, partly because of the loss of a couple of highly cited researchers and the declining value of a Nobel winning alumnus .

RPI's fall in the global rankings is largely a reflection of the general decline of the US and the rise of China, which has overtaken the US in research output and supercomputing. But there is more. In the indicator that measures research quality in the CWTS Leiden ranking, percentage of papers in the top 10% of journals, RPI has fallen from 23 in 2011-12 to 194 in 2017.

It seems that RPI is holding its own or a bit more as an American teaching university. Whether that is worth the biggest salary in the country is for others to argue about. But it is definitely losing out to international competition as far as research quality is concerned. That, however, is an American problem and RPI's difficulties are hardly unique.

Rankings and the financialisation of higher education

University rankings are now being used for purposes that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. The latest is supporting the large scale borrowing of money by UK universities.

The Financial Times has an interesting article by Thomas Hale about the growing financialisation of British higher education. He reports that some universities such as Portsmouth, Bristol, Cardiff and Oxford are resorting to capital markets for financing supposedly because of declining government support.

The University of Portsmouth has borrowed GBP 100 million from two North American institutional investors. The placement agent was Lloyds and  PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) the advisors.

"The money will be spent on the first phase of “estate development”. It is expected to involve a number of buildings, including an indoor sports facility, the extension of a lecture hall, and a flagship “teaching and learning building”."

It seems that this is just part of a larger trend.

"The private placement market – by definition, more opaque than its public counterpart — is a particularly attractive option for universities, and a popular target of investment for US pension and insurance money seeking long-term projects. Lloyds estimates that more than £3bn has been borrowed by UK universities since 2016 on capital markets, with around half of that coming via private placements.

The market is small by the standards of capital markets, but significant in relation to the overall size of the country’s higher education sector, which has a total annual income of close to £30bn, according to the Higher Education Funding Council for England. "

The press release explicitly referred to Portsmouth as being first in the UK for boosting graduate salaries, by which is meant earning above expectations based on things like social background and exam results. That could reflect credit on the university although a cynic might wonder whether that is just because expectations were very low to start off with. In addition, the university is ranked 37th among UK universities in the Guardian University Guide and in the top 100 in the Times Higher Education (THE) Young Universities Rankings.

If millions of pounds have been advanced in part because of a 98th place in the THE young universities rankings that might not be a wise decision. These rankings are quite credible for the top 20 or 30 but go down a bit more and in 74th place is Veltech University in India which has a perfect score for research impact based entirely on the publications of exactly one serial self-citer.

The profile of the University of Portsmouth shows a fairly high score for citations and a low one for research, which is often a sign that its position has little to do with research excellence and more to do with getting into high-citation, multi-author astrophysics and medical projects. That does appear to be the case with Portsmouth and it could mean that the university's place in the young university rankings is precarious since it could be undermined by methodological changes or by the departure of a few highly cited researchers.

The role of PwC as advisor is interesting since that company is also charged with auditing the THE world rankings.

Are the rankings biased?

Louise Richardson, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford has published an article in the Financial Times proclaiming that British universities are a national asset and that their researchers deserve that same adulation as athletes and actors.

"Listening to the public discourse one could be forgiven for thinking that the British higher education system is a failure. It is not. It is the envy of the world."

That is an unfortunate phrase. It used to be asserted that the National Health Service was the envy of the world.

She cites as evidence for university excellence the Times Higher Education World University Rankings which have three British universities in the world's top ten and twelve in the top one hundred. These rankings also, although she does not mention it here, put Oxford in first place.

There are now, according to IREG, 21 global university rankings. One wonders why a world-class scholar and head of a world-class university would choose rankings that regularly produce absurdities such as Anglia Ruskin University ahead of Oxford for research impact and Babol Noshirvani University of Technology its equal.

But perhaps it is not really surprising since of those rankings THE is the only one to put Oxford  in first place. In the others it ranges from third place in the URAP rankings published in Ankara to seventh in the Shanghai Rankings (ARWU), Webometrics (WEB) and Round University Ranking (RUR) from Russia

That leads to the question of how far the rankings are biased in favor of universities in their own countries.

Below is a quick and simple comparison of how top universities perform in rankings published in the countries where they located and in other rankings.

I have looked at the rank of the top scoring home country university in each of eleven global rankings and then at how well that university does in the other rankings. The table below gives the overall rank of each "national flagship" in the most recent eleven global university rankings. The rank in the home country rankings is in red.

We can see that Oxford does better in the Times Higher Education (THE) world  rankings where it is first than in the others where its rank ranges from 3rd  to 7th. Similarly, Cambridge is the best performing UK university in the QS rankings where it is 4th. It is also 4th in  the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), now published in the UAE, and 3rd in ARWU. In the other rankings it does less well.

ARWU, the US News Best Global Universities (BGU), Scimago (SCI), Webometrics (WEB), URAP, the National Taiwan University Rankings (NTU), and RUR do not seem to be biased in favour of their country's flagship universities. For example, URAP ranks Middle East Technical University (METU) 532nd which is  lower than five other rankings  and higher than three.

CWUR  used to be published from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia but has now moved to the Emirates so I count the whole Arabian peninsula as its home. The top home university is therefore King Saud University (KSU), which is ranked 560th, worse than in any other ranking except for THE.

The GreenMetric Rankings, produced by Universitas Indonesia (UI), have that university in 23rd place, which is very much better than any other.

It looks like THE, GreenMetric and, to a lesser extent QS, are biased towards their top home country institutions.

This only refers to the best universities and we might get different result looking at all the ranked universities.

There is a paper by Chris Claassen that does this although it covers fewer rankings.

	THE	ARWU	QS	BGU	SCI	WEB	URAP	NTU	RUR	CWUR	GM
Oxford	1	7	6	5	6	7	3	5	7	5	6
Tsinghua	35	48	25	64	8	45	25	34	75	65	NR
Cambridge	4	3	5	7	16	11	9	12	9	4	NR
Harvard	6	1	3	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	NR
Barcelona	201-250	201-300	156	81	151	138	46	64	212	103	180
METU	601-800	701-800	471-480	314	489	521	532	601-700	407	498	NR
NTU	195	151-200	76	166	342	85	100	114	107	52	92
Lomonosov  MSU	188	93	95	267	342	235	194	236	145	97	NR
KSU	501-600	101-150	221	377	NR	424	192	318	460	560	NR
UI	600-800	NR	277	NR	632	888	1548	NR	NR	NR	23