Universiti Malaya Again

In many countries performance in international university rankings has become as much a symbol of national accomplishment as winning Olympic medals or qualifying for the World Cup. When a local university rises in the rankings it is cause for congratulations for everyone, especially for administrators. When they fall it is an occasion for soul-searching and a little bit of schadenfreude for opposition groups.

Malaysia has been particularly prone to this syndrome. There was a magical moment in 2004 when the first THES-QS ranking put Universiti Malaya (UM), the country's first university, in the world's top 100. Then it went crashing down . Since then it has moved erratically up and down around the 200th position.

Lim Kit Siang, leader emeritus of the Malaysian opposition has this to say in his blog:

At the University of Malaya’s centennial celebrations in June 2005, the then Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak threw the challenge to University of Malaya to raise its 89th position among the world’s top 100 universities in THES-QS (Times Higher Education Supplement-Quacquarelli Symonds) ranking in 2004 to 50 by the year 2020.

Instead of accepting Najib’s challenge with incremental improvement of its THES ranking, the premier university went into a free fall when in 2005 and 2006 it fell to 169th and 192nd ranking respectively, and in the following two years in 2007 and 2008, fell out of the 200 Top Universities ranking altogether.

In 2009, University of Malaya made a comeback to the 200 Top Universities Ranking when it was placed No. 180, but in 2010 it again fell out of the 200 Top Universities list when it dropped to 207th placing.

For the 2011 QS Top 200 Universities Ranking, University of Malaya returned to the Top 200 Universities Ranking, being placed at No. 167.

In the THES-QS World University Rankings 2009, University of Malaya leapfrogged 50 places from No. 230 placing in 2008 to No. 180 in 2009; while in the 2011 QS World University Ranking, University of Malaya leapt 40 places from No. 207 in 2010 to No. 167 in 2011.

The QS World University Rankings 2012 will be released in 20 days’ time. Can University of Malaya make another leapfrog as in 2009 and 2011 to seriously restore her place as one of the world’s top 100 universities by before 2015?

The government has announced that in addition to Najib’s challenge to University of Malaya in 2005 to be among the world’s Top 50 universities by 2020, the National Higher Education Strategic Plan called for at least three Malaysian universities to be ranked among the world’s top 100 universities.

Recently, the U.S. News World’s Best Universities Rankings included five local universities in its Top 100 Asian Universities, but this is not really something to celebrate about.

The U.S. News World’s Best Universities Ranking is actually based on the QS 2012 Top 300 Asian University Rankings released on May 30 this year, which commented that overall, although University of Malaya improved its ranking as compared to 2011 ranking, the majority of Malaysian universities dropped in their rankings this year as compared to 2011.

There is a lot of detail missing here. UM"s fluctuating scores had nothing to do with failed or successful policies but resulted from errors, corrections of errors, or "clarification of data", changes in methodology and variations in the collecting and reporting of data .

UM was only in the top 100 of the THES-QS rankings because of a mistake by QS, the data collectors, who thought that ethnic minority students and faculty were actually foreigners and therefore handed out a massive and undeserved boost for the international faulty and international student indicators.

Its fall in 2005 was the result of QS's belated realisation of its mistake.

The continued decline in 2007 may have been because QS changed its procedures to prevent respondents to the academic survey voting for their own institutions or because of the introduction of Z scores which had the effect of substantially boosting the scores in citation per faculty for mediocre universities like Peking but only slightly for laggards like UM.

The rise in 2009 from 230th to 180th position was largely the result of a big improvement in the score for faculty student ratio comprising both a reported fall in the number of students and a reported rise in the number of faculty. It is unlikely that the university administration had thrown 6000 students into the Klang River:more probably somebody told somebody that diploma and certificate students need not be included in the data reported to QS.

Whether UM rises again in the QS rankings is less interesting than its performance in the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities. In 2011 it moved into the top 500 with.scores of 3.4 for highly cited researchers and 34.6 for ISI-indexed publications (compared to 100 for the front-runner Harvard) and 16 for per capita productivity (in this case the top scorer was Caltech).

In 2012 UM had the same score for highly cited researchers and registered a score of 38.6 for publications and a slight improvement to 16.7 for productivity. This meant that UM was now ranked in 439th place and that reaching the 300-400 band in  a few years time would not be impossible.

UM has managed to make it into the Shanghai rankings by actively encouraging research among its faculty and by recruiting international researchers, policies that are unpopular and in marked contrast to those of other Malaysian universities.

What will happen in the QS rankings when they come out next month? Something to watch out for is the employer survey, which has a weighting of ten per cent. In 2011 something odd was going on . Apparently there had been an enthusiastic response to the rankings in Latin America especially the employer survey so that QS resorted to capping the scores for many universities. They reported that:

"QS received a dramatic level of response from Latin America in 2011, these counts and all subsequent analysis have been adjusted by applying a weighting to responses from countries with a distinctly disproportionate level of response."

It seems that one effect of the inflated number of responses was to raise the mean score so that universities with below average scores saw a dramatic fall in their adjusted scores. If there is a further increase in responses this year universities like UM may see a further reduction for this indicator.

The Shanghai Rankings 2

The Shanghai Rankings get more interesting when we look at the individual indicators. Here are the 2012 top five for Almuni who have won Nobel and Fields awards.

1. Harvard
2. Cambridge
3. MIT
4. Berkeley
5. Columbia

In the top fifty for this indicator there are the Ecole Normale Superieure, Moscow State University, the Technical University of Munich, Goettingen, Strasbourg and the City University of New York City College.

Essentially, this indicator allows universities that have seen better decades to gain a few points from an academic excellence that has long been in decline. City College of New York is an especially obvious victim of politics and bureaucracy.

The top five in the Awards indicator, faculty who have won Nobel prizes and Fields medals, are:

1.. Harvard
2.  Cambridge
3.  Princeton
4.  Chicago
5.  MIT

The top fifty includes the Universities of Buenos Aires, Heidelberg, Paris Dauphine, Bonn, Munich and Freiburg. Again, this indicator may be a pale reflection of past glory rather than a sign of future accomplishments.

The Shanghai Rankings 1

The 2012 edition of Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities has been published. Here are the top ten, which are the same as last year's top ten.

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

It is necessary to go down to the 19th and 20th places to find any changes. Tokyo is now 19th and University College London 20th, reversing last year's order and restoring that of 2003.

What’s up at Wits?

 

The university of Witwatersrand is in turmoil. Faculty are going on strike for higher salaries, claiming that there has been a drastic decline in quality in recent years. Evidence for this decline is the university’s fall by more than a hundred places in the QS world rankings. The administration has argued that these rankings are not valid.

THE University of the Witwatersrand is one of SA's largest and oldest academic institutions. According to its strategic planning division, at the end of last year there were about 1300 academic staff, 2000 administrative staff and nearly 30000 students, with 9000 of these being postgraduates.

There is no doubt that Wits has pockets of excellence, and many talented academics who are players on the global stage. However, this excellence is being overwhelmed and dragged down by inefficient bureaucracy in its administrative processes.

There are more administrative staff than academic staff, and as one academic said: "It is impossible to get anything done."

David Dickinson, president of the Academic Staff Association of Wits University - which has more than 700 members and is threatening to strike, said: "Between 2007 and last year, we fell more than 100 places in the QS World University Rankings.. A significant problem is that the most important part of the university has been forgotten: its employees."

The university is ranked second in the country, after the University of Cape Town, but scraped into the top 400 in the world at 399th on the QS World University rankings for last year.

The faculty are correct about the QS rankings. Between 2007 and 2011 the university fell from 283^rd place to 399^th. The decline was especially apparent in the employer review, from 191st to below 301st and international faculty, from 69th to 176th.

But there is a problem. From 2007 to 2011 Wits steadily improved on some indicators in the Shanghai rankings, from 10.9 to 11.2 for publications in Nature and Science, from 26.2 to 29.9 for publications and from 14.8 to 16.3 for faculty productivity. The score for alumni winning Nobel prizes has declined from 23.5 to 21.2 but this was because the two alumni were being compared to an increase for front runner Harvard.

So which ranking is correct? Probably they both are because they refer to two different periods. The  alumni who contributed to the Alumni indicator in ARWU graduated in 1982 and 2002. Publications and papers In Nature and Science could reflect the fruits of research projects that began up to a decade earlier.

The QS rankings (formerly the THE-QS rankings) are heavily weighted towards two surveys of debatable validity. The declining score for Wits in the employer review from 59 points (well above the mean of 50) to 11 is remarkable and almost certainly is nothing to do with the university but is the result of a flooding of the survey by supporters of other institutions leading to a massive increase in the average number of responses.

The decline in other scores such as international faculty and faculty student ration could be the result of short term policy changes. However, if it is correct that research and teaching are being strangled by bureaucracy and mistaken policies then sooner or later we should start seeing indications in the Shanghai rankings.