Are International Students an Indicator of Quality?

From BBC News

Some 2,600 foreign students affected by the London Metropolitan University (LMU) visa ban have been given until at least 1 December to find a new course.

The UK Border Agency says it will write to students after 1 October and "will ensure you have 60 days" to make a new student application or leave the UK.

On Thursday, the UKBA revoked LMU's licence to authorise non-EU visas. Ministers said it was failing to monitor student attendance. 

Apparently a substantial number of students did not have valid visas or had not been properly tested for spoken English and in many cases it was not possible to even tell if they were attending class.

From LMU's home page

At London Metropolitan University we believe that everyone has the right to an affordable quality education. Our fees for 2012/13 have been set at levels significantly lower than other Universities, and our courses recently received top marks from the UK's Quality Assurance Agency. We are committed to delivering affordable quality education, and are proud of the diversity & achievements of our students, alumni and staff.

Here at London Met we put our students at the centre of all we do.

London Met is a great place to study, located in the heart of one of the world's most exciting cities.
We stand out because we offer courses of quality, in a vibrant, socially diverse environment, which will help launch your career.

We are committed to transforming lives, meeting needs and building careers. 

Notice the bit about everyone.

Never trust a university that talks about transforming lives.

The Shanghai Rankings 4

The publications indicator in the Shanghai ARWU simply measures all science and social science publications in the ISI Science and Social Science Indexes over the previous year. The Arts and Humanities Index is excluded.

It is safe to assume that developing universities will start producing large numbers of publications before work that is of sufficient quality to justify a Nobel or Fields award or publication in Science or Nature. This indicator should then tell us something about that universities that are likely to forge ahead in the coming decade.

The top five for this indicator are:

1.  Harvard
2.  Toronto
3.  Michigan at Ann Arbor
4.  Tokyo
5.  Sao Paulo

Among the rising stars in the top fifty for this indicator are Seoul National University (15th), Peking (27th), National Taiwan University (36th) and Tsinghua (44th).

The Productivity per Capita indicator is one that is rather incoherent as it combines the scores for the other indicators, which may represent achievements from years or decades ago or from last year, and divides them by the current number of senior faculty, including those in the humanities whose papers are not counted. This is one indicator where spending cuts could actually have a positive effect.

For once, Harvard is second and first place is taken by Caltech. The top fifty contains an assortment of specialised institutions such as Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa, Ecole Normale Superieure Paris, Stockholm School of Economics and the Technical University of Munich. 

Moving Up

Every so  often political and academic leaders announce plans for getting into the top 50  or 100 or 200 of the global rankings.  The problem is that it is not always clear which rankings they are talking about. Not only do the various league tables have different indicators but doing well in one can actually have negative effects in another. Racking up a large number of publications in ISI-indexed journals would be great for the Shanghai rankings but could be detrimental for the THE World University Rankings until those publications start getting citations that are above average for year, field and country.

A paper by Angela Yung Chi Hou and Chung-Lin Chiang of Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan, and Robert Morse of US News & World Report has been published by Higher Education Research and Development. Here is the abstract

Since the start of the twenty-first century, university rankings have become
internationalized. Global rankings have a variety of uses, levels of popularity and
rationales and they are here to stay. An examination of the results of the current
global ranking reveals that well-reputed world-class universities are amongst the
top ranked ones. A major concern for university administrators in many parts of
the world is how to use the global rankings wisely in their mid-term and longterm
strategic planning for building their institutions into world-class
universities. Four major global rankings have been developed: the Academic
Ranking of World Universities, the World University Rankings, the
Webometrics Ranking of World Universities and the Performance Ranking of
Scientific Papers for World Universities. The main purpose of this paper is to
explore the most influential indicators in these global university rankings that
will affect the rank mobility of an institution. Based on an analysis of correlation
coefficients and K-means clustering, a model of strategic institutional planning
for building a world-class university is proposed.

The paper shows that for universities wishing to stay in the top 30 in various rankings, the most influential indicators are Nobel and Fields Awards in the Shanghai ARWU, Citations per Faculty and Faculty Student Ratio in the QS World University Rankings, Visibility in Webometrics and Citations in the Last Two Years in HEEACT.

For the ambitious intent on moving up the rankings, the indicators to watch out for are Papers in Nature and Science and Productivity per Capita in ARWU, the Academic Survey in QS, Visibility in webometrics and H-index in HEEACT

An International Student Bubble?

Something of a mania for international students seems to be developing. In a single issue of University World News there are stories from Canada, China and Poland about plans to recruit students from abroad.

From Canada

A new report urging Canadian universities to nearly double international student enrolment by 2022 signals a fundamental policy change in Canada.

The report, released last week, recommends that Canada increase the number of foreign students from 240,000 in 2011 to 450,000 by 2022.

The government-appointed panel led by Amit Chakma, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Western Ontario, also laid out a blueprint for how the federal government ought to support universities in their recruitment efforts.

From China

China has been wooing foreign universities and foreign students in a bid to internationalise its universities and as part of a ‘soft power’ policy to project itself internationally.

“China wants to be seen as a major player internationally in terms of education,” said Anthony Welch, a professor of international education at the University of Sydney.

“There is a clear national policy in China of ‘soft power’ using education. I would argue that is a good thing for all partners,” said Yang Rui, an assistant professor in Hong Kong University’s faculty of education.

The article by Yojana Sharma also refers to efforts by universities and governments in Malaysia and Singapore to recruit more students from abroad

From Poland

Polish universities have introduced a free iPhone and iPad app to spread information internationally about opportunities in Polish higher education, and an Android version is promised soon.

The use of the latest technology will move the promotion of Polish higher education to a completely new level, according to a Polish Press Agency report quoting Dr Wojciech Marchwica of the Perspektywy Educational Foundation (Fundacja Edukacyjna Perspektywy), coordinator of the Study in Poland programme.

The universities are hoping to attract high-quality students from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

A few years ago, Ukraine was declared by the Study in Poland coordinating committee to be a priority source country, as it is tied to Poland by history, culture and geographical proximity.

The effort has already brought measurable results: the number of students from Ukraine grew from 1,989 in 2005 to 6,321 in 2012, an increase of more than 300%. In 2009 Study in Poland opened its first foreign office in Kyiv, at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.

China, Canada, Poland, Singapore and Malaysia are  not the only places struggling for more international students.

So why is there such a craze for moving students back and forth across international borders?

One reason for adding more international students is that it is probably the easiest  way to rise in the rankings (excluding ARWU) and the one with the quickest returns for universities outside the top 200 or 300. Getting faculty to do research and write papers is not always popular and may produce a backlash especially if senior staff have political connections. Writing papers that are  readable and citeable is even more difficult. Recruiting faculty to boost faculty student ratios can be expensive and may have an adverse impact on other indicators. The QS surveys are rather opaque and the THE citations indicator painfully complicated. But finding students who can cross a frontier to get a degree is comparatively easy and may even pay for itself. For University College Cork just one international student would pay for the cost of joining the QS Stars.

There are other reasons. Canada appears to be hunting for students from abroad as proxy for a meritocratic immigration policy. The problem here is that those talented engineers and computer scientists may be followed by not so talented spouses, siblings and cousins. China appears to be using universities to further diplomatic objectives and Poland seems to be trying to challenge Russian cultural hegemony.