Philippine Universities and the QS English Rankings

The QS subject rankings have produced quite a few surprises. Among them is the high position of several Philippine universities in the 2012 English Literature and Language ranking. In the top 100 we find Ateneo de Manila University, the University of the Philippines and De La Salle University. Ateneo de Manila in 24th place is ahead of Birmingham, Melbourne, Lancaster and University College Dublin.

How did the Philippine universities do so well? First, the subject rankings are based on different combinations of criteria. Those for English Literature and Language rankings have a 90 per cent weighting for the academic survey conducted in 2011 and 10 percent for the employer survey. There is, unlike the natural sciences, nothing for citations. Essentially then the English ranking is a measure of reputation in that subject and these universities were picked by a large number of survey respondents..

One feature of the QS academic survey is that respondents can choose to nominate universities globally or by region. Ateneo de Manila's performing better than Birmingham or Melbourne in this subject most probably means that it was being compared with others in Asia while the latter were assessed internationally.

Also, the category English Literature and Language is an extremely diverse one, covering scholars toiling away at a critical edition of Chaucer, post-modern cultural theorists and researchers in language education. I suspect that the high scores for Ateneo de Manila and the other universities came from dozens of postgraduate TESOL students in the US and Australia. It would be a good idea for QS to have separate rankings for English literature and English language education.

As usual, university administrators seem to be somewhat confused  about the rankings. The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the University of Santo Tomas is reported as saying;

The University, he pointed out, did not get any request for data from QS, the London consultancy that comes out with annual university rankings:
“With due respect to the QS, I think we should also know how the data is being collected, because as far as we are concerned, we are the academic unit taking care of arts and humanities and philosophy and literature,” he told the Varsitarian.
The QS survey may have been perception-based, and data gathering could have relied on what’s available on the Internet, Vasco added. “The question is, how do they source the data? Do they simply get it from the general information known about the University? Do they simply get it from the website? What if the website is not updated? What information will you get there?” he asked.
Vasco also said it would be difficult to compete in other clusters of the Arts and Humanities category of the QS subject rankings, namely Philosophy, Modern Languages, Geography, History, and Linguistics.
“[We] do not offer the same breadth of programs being surveyed under the arts and humanities cluster in the QS survey,” Vasco said.
The growing number of participants in the QS survey has contributed to the general decline of Philippine schools in various QS rankings, the Artlets dean noted. “More and more international universities from highly industrialized countries are participating, like universities from Europe, North America, and even Asia-Pacific,” he said. “Chances are, Philippine schools will slide down to lower rankings.”

For once, QS is being unfairly treated. The methodology of the subject rankings is explained quite clearly here

QS Stars

University World News (UWN) has published an article by David Jobbins about QS Stars, which are awarded to universities that pay (most of them anyway) for an audit and a three year licence to use the stars and which are shown alongside the listings in the  QS World University Rankings. Participation is not spread evenly around the world and it is mainly medioce universities or worse that have signed up according to a QS brochure. Nearly half of the universities that have opted for the stars are from Indonesia.

Jobbins refers to a report in Private Eye which in turn refers to the Irish Examiner. He writes:

The stars appear seamlessly alongside the listing for each university on the World University Rankings, despite protestations from QS that the two are totally separate operations.

The UK magazine Private Eye reported in its current issue that two Irish universities – the University of Limerick and University College Cork, UCC – had paid “tens of thousands” of euro for their stars.

The magazine recorded that UCC had told the Irish Examiner that the €22,000 (US$26,600) cost of obtaining the stars was worthwhile, as it could be recouped through additional international student recruitment.

The total cost for the audit and a three-year licence is US$30,400, according to the scheme prospectus.

 The Irish Examiner article by Neil Murray is quite revealing about the motivation for signing up for an audit:

UCC paid almost €22,000 for its evaluation, which includes a €7,035 audit fee and three annual licence fees of €4,893. It was awarded five-star status, which it can use for marketing purposes for the next three years.

The audit involved a visit to the college by QS researchers but is mostly based on analysis of data provided by UCC on eight criteria. The university’s five-star rating is largely down to top marks for research, infrastructure, internationalisation, innovation, and life science, but it got just three stars for teaching and engagement.
About 3,000 international students from more than 100 countries earn UCC approximately €19 million a year.

UCC vice-president for external affairs Trevor Holmes said there are plans to raise the proportion of international students from 13% — one of the highest of any Irish college — to 20%.

"Should UCC’s participation in QS Stars result in attracting a single additional, full-time international student to study at UCC then the costs of participation are covered," he said.

"In recent times, unlike many other Irish universities, UCC has not been in a position to spend significant sums on marketing and advertising domestically or internationally. QS Stars represents a very cost-effective approach of increasing our profile in international media and online."

So now we know how much a single international student adds to the revenue of an Irish university.

So far, there is nothing really new here. The QS Stars system has been well publicised and it probably was a factor in Times Higher Education dropping QS as its data collecting partner and replacing them with Thomson Reuters.

What is interesting about the UWN article is that a number of British and American universities have been given the stars without paying anything. These include Oxford and Cambridge and 12 leading American institutions that are described by QS as "independently audited based on publicly available information". It would be interesting to know whether the universities gave permission to QS to award them stars in the rankings. Also, why are there differences between the latest rankings and the QS brochure? Oxford does not have any stars in last year's rankings but is on the list in the brochure. Boston University has stars but is not on the list. It may be just a matter of updating.

It would probably be a good idea for QS to remove the stars from the rankings and keep them in the university profiles.

New International Ranking

 A new ranking has appeared, the CWUR World Universities Rankings published by the Center for World University Ranking in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The top ten are:

1.  Harvard
2.  MIT
3.  Stanford
4.  Cambridge
5.  Caltech
6.  Princeton
7.  Oxford
8.  Yale
9.  Columbia
10. UC Berkeley

The criteria are:

• Quality of Faculty. This is based on full time faculty members who have won a variety of awards, including the Nobel Prize and the Fields Medal, as in the Shanghai rankings, and     others such as the Abel, Templeton and World Food Prizes. Weighting of 4.
• Quality of research: Publications in top journals. For science and the social sciences top journals are those included in the ISI journal citation reports weighted according to the Article Impact Score (AIS). For the humanities, the list of journals is compiled from the INT1 set of prestigious international journals published by the European reference Index for the Humanities. Weighting of 1.
• Quality of Research: Highly influential research. This is based on the number of publications in journals multiplied by the journals' AIS. Weighting of 1.
• Quality of Research: Citations. This includes citations from journals in science, the social sciences and the arts and humanities. Weighting of 1.
• Quality of Research: Patents. Weighting of 1.
• Alumni who have won awards -- listed under Quality of Faculty -- relative to the institution's size, which is determined by current enrollment.Weighting of 4.
• Number of alumni who are heads of companies in the Forbes Global 2000 list. Weighting of 4.

Basically, this is an expanded and elaborated version of the Shanghai ARWU. Like the Shanghai rankings, the CWUR rankings claim to assess quality of teaching by the accomplishments of alumni although they use many more international prizes. Similarly, faculty quality is assessed by the number of staff who have won these prizes. The quality of research is measured by four factors rather than three and these may be more resistant to manipulation than the highly cited researchers indicator in the Shanghai rankings. In addition, the new rankings include publications and citations in the arts and humanities.
 
The top 100 includes several medical schools and graduate only and specialised institutions like Rockefeller University and UC San Francisco. There are five Japanese universities and one Korean  but none from Hong Kong or mainland China. A indication of the ranking's objectivity is that Israeli schools do well.


It is disappointing that the new rankings include only 100 institutions. Also, they do not give scores but only rank order for the various indicators, something that will make it difficult to track performance if further editions appear.

If the CWUR rankings had appeared in 2003 at the same time as the Shanghai rankings they would have been judged to be more comprehensive and valid.  But, after nine years Shanghai is the market leader for research-based rankings and catching up will be a difficult task.

If you want to be a millionaire, go to...

Skandia Millionaire Monitor has conducted a survey of millionaires in several countries. British millionaires were asked which university they had attended. The top five were:

1.  London
2.  Oxford
3.  Cambridge
4.  Leeds
5.  Manchester

Something interesting is that at every university except St. Andrews, including Oxford and Cambridge, state school educated millionaires outnumbered those with a private education.