The Euro-Rankings

The U-Multirank project has slowly crept past the feasibility study stage. While any attempt to undermine the triopoly of the big three global rankers, ARWU (Shanghai), QS, Times Higher Education, is welcome, it does seem to be taking a long time. One wonders whether it will get going before the Eurozone disintegrates. Still the project does have its defenders.

"Jordi Curell, director of lifelong learning, higher education and international affairs at the directorate general for education and culture, conceded that there was opposition to its development.

"When we started working on the project of U-Multirank, many people from the higher education community were opposed to it,” he told an international symposium on university rankings and quality assurance in Brussels on 12 April.

But the system had intrinsic value, he said, because it would provide an evidence-based measure of the performance of European universities that would help them improve.

According to Curell, if higher education is to help Europe emerge from its current financial and economic crisis, the EU needs to know how its universities are performing and universities need to know how they are doing.
"Rankings which are carefully thought out are the only transparency tools which can give a comparative picture of higher education institutions at a national, European and global level," he told the symposium."

There are critics of course. One of them is a committee of the British House of Lords which has argued that U-Multirank is a waste of money. Four million Euros sounds rather a lot but considering what the EU has spent money on, it is trivial.

And as for wasting the taxpayer's money, well, the committee could look at the other house and think about a  floating duck island, pantyliners, nappies, soundproofed bedrooms and so on and so on.

The Ranking Business

In INSIDE HIGHER ED, Kris Olds comments on the growing commercialisation of university rankings.

US Faculty Salaries

The Chronicle of Higher Education features a report from the AAUP on faculty salaries, along with data on student faculty ratio. Predictably, Harvard, where the average fill professors gets $198,000 per annum, is at the top.

If anyone ever has the time, it ought to be  possible to work out the productivity of faculty with regard to publications, citations , students taught and graduated.

News from Australia

There is now a website MyUniversity that allows anyone to compare Australian public universities for  attributes such as staff qualifications, student to staff ratio, graduate employment and so on.

Of course, the value of the site will be little better than the quality of the information uploaded. Perhaps someone could take a look at the site and see how accurate the data is.

According to University World News , the Australian faculty staff union is not happy.

'Rea said that if students were looking to base their choice of institution on whether a campus had an automatic teller machine, the site might be useful. But if they wanted an indication of the quality of teaching and research at any given institution, the information provided relied on a set of indicators that had been under question for many years.

The union had been critical for some time of the misuse of statistical data, such as graduate employment outcomes and student satisfaction results, in determining the quality of learning and teaching. Yet these were included as measurable indicators of quality by the website.

“The use of student satisfaction scores in particular is prone to manipulation and does not reflect quality in teaching. Indeed, if institutions based their courses on whether students liked their subjects, which is essentially what these metrics capture, they would risk driving down the quality of degrees from Australian universities.

“There is always a danger of teaching to the test – or the survey, in this case,” Rea said.

She said the diversity of Australian universities made it difficult to attempt any comparisons. Although the union believed students should be able to make an informed choice of where best to study, it should be just that – an informed choice based on accurate, clear and transparent information.

“This can only happen if the indicators or measures used to create this information are specific, widely understood and agreed, and incapable of institutional manipulation.” '