Not as Elite as They Thought

British higher education is very definitely not a flat system. There is an enormous difference between Oxford or LSE and the University of Bolton or the University of East London in terms of research output and quality, graduate outcomes, public perceptions, student attributes and just about anything else you could think of.

The most obvious dividing line in the UK university world is between the post-1992 and pre-1992 universities. The former were mostly polytechnics run by local authorities that did not award their own degrees, provided sub-degree courses and did little research.

Another line was drawn in 1994. Named after the hotel (only four stars but it is "old", "famous", "grand" and "impressive") where the inaugural meeting was held, the Russell Group now has 24 members, including of course Oxford and Cambridge, and claims to include only elite research intensive universities. Definitely no riff-raff.



The home page of the group gives a good idea of its priorities:

Our universities are global leaders in research, but it is vital they receive sufficient funding and support

A high-quality, research-led education requires proper funding at both undergraduate and postgraduate level

Collaboration with business is a key part of the work of our universities but Government could foster more innovation

Our universities are global businesses competing for staff, students and funding with the best in the world.

Like all good clubs, membership is not cheap. In 2012 the Universities of Durham, Exeter and York and Queen Mary College University of London paid  £500,000 apiece to join.

They may have been wasting their money.

A paper by Vikki Boliver of Durham University, whose research does not appear to have received any sort of funding, finds that analysis of data on research activity, teaching quality, economic resources, academic selectivity and socioeconomic student mix reveals four tiers within UK tertiary education. They are:

• A very small premier league composed of Oxford and Cambridge
• A second tier composed of 22 members of the Russell Group plus 17 of the other old universities -- the first three alphabetically are  Aberdeen, Bath and Birmingham
• A third tier with 13 old and 54 post-1992 universities -- starting with Abertaye, Aberystwyth, and University of the Arts Bournemouth
• A fourth tier 4 of  19 post-1992  universities -- starting with Anglia Ruskin,  Bishop Grosseteste and University College Birmingham.

It looks like some of the Russell Group are in danger of descending into the abyss of the Tier Three riff-raff.

Incidentally, taking a look at the well known world  rankings, the US News Best Global Universities has a gap of 12 places between Cambridge, second of the Tier 1 universities, and Imperial College, best of the Tier 2 schools.

The Shanghai rankings similarly have a gap of ten places between Oxford and University College London.

But there are only four places in the THE World University Rankings between Cambridge and Imperial and one between Oxford and UCL in the QS world rankings.

Another finding is that the differences between teaching quality in the old and new universities are relatively minor compared to the amount and impact of research.

Does that explain why the Russell Group are so hostile to initiatives like AHELO and U-Multirank?

Are they trying to hide something?

Seven of the Australian Group of Eight elite universities have said that they have boycotted the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Graduate Employability Rankings which are due to be announced next week at the latest QS-Apple in Melbourne.

A spokesman for the Group, reported in The Australian, said:

“All of these rankings have their place and we are very happy to participate in them,” Ms Thomson said.

"However, the integrity and robustness of the data is critical in ensuring an accurate picture and we have some concerns around some of the data QS requested, particularly as it relates to student details and industry partners. These go to the heart of issues around privacy and confidentiality.
“We were also concerned about transparency with the methodology — we need to know how it will be used before we hand over information. There is no doubt that there are challenges in establishing a ranking of this nature and we will be very happy to work with QS in refining its pilot.”

I am not QS's number one fan but I wonder just how much the Group of Eight are really bothered about transparency and confidentiality. Could it be that they are afraid that such rankings might reveal that they are not quite as good at some things as they think they are?

Earlier this year the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey reported that graduates of younger universities such as James Cook and Charles Darwin and some technological universities had higher incomes than those from the Group .

Spokespersons for the Group were not amused. They were "perplexed" and "disappointed" with the results which were "skewed" and "clearly anomalous".

The counterparts of the Group of Eight in the UK's Russell Group and the League of European Research Universities (LERU) have already shown that they do not like the U-Multirank rating tool, which the League considers a "serious threat to higher education".

Universities such as those in the Ivy League, the Group of Eight, LERU and the Russell Group have a bit of a problem. The do a lot of things, research, innovation, political indoctrination, sponsorship  of sports teams, instruction in professional and scientific disciplines.

They also signal to employers that their graduates are sufficiently intelligent to do cognitively complex tasks. Now that A-levels and SATs have been dumbed down, curricular standards eroded, students admitted and faculty appointed and promoted for political and social reasons, an undergraduate degree from an elite institution means a lot less than it used to.

Still, organisations must survive and so the elite will continue to value rankings that count historical data like the Nobel awards, reputation, income and citations. They will be very uneasy about anything that probes too deeply into what they actually provide in return for bloated salaries and tuition fees.

Maybe QS were on to something

I recently posted on the implausibility of Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) putting the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University ahead of Yale and Columbia in the latest World University Rankings. This remarkable achievement was largely due to high scores for the reputation surveys and international students and faculty, none of which have very much validity.

But recent events at Yale suggest that maybe QS know something. Students there have been excited not about the persecution of religious minorities in Myanmar and the Middle East, the possibility of war in Eastern Europe, terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut or even the decay of public services in the US but by a sensible comment from an administrator about halloween costumes that appeared to presume too much about their maturity and intelligence.

It seems that the Master of Silliman College was insufficiently hysterical about  some cautious and diffident remarks about free speech by his wife and Assistant Master. A viral video showed him being screeched at by a student.

Later, there was some of the usual grovelling about failing students.

The students certainly have been failed. Their parents should have spoken to them about the right way to treat domestic servants and the university administration should have told them to grow up.

But the most interesting question is what is going to happen when Yale undergraduates become faculty and the current faculty become administrators. How can they possibly hope to compete with graduates, teachers and researchers from the rigorous and selective university systems that are developing in East and Southeast Asia?

Comparing Engineering Rankings

Times Higher Education (THE) have just come out with another subject ranking, this time for Engineering and Technology. Here are the top five.

1.   Stanford
2.   Caltech
3.   MIT
4.   Cambridge
5.   Berkeley

Nanyang Technological University is 20th, Tsinghua University 26th, and Zhejiang University 47th.

These rankings are very different from the US News ranking for Engineering.

There the top five are:

1.   Tsinghua
2.   MIT
3.   Berkeley
4.   Zhejiang
5.   Nanyang Technological University.

Stanford is 8th, Cambridge 35th and Caltech 62nd.

So what could possibly explain such a huge difference?

Basically, the two rankings are measuring rather different things. THE give a third of their weighting to reputation. Supposedly there are two indicators -- postgraduate teaching reputation and research reputation -- but it is likely that they are so closely correlated that they are really measuring the same thing. Another chunk goes to income in three flavors, institutional, research, and industry. Another 30% goes to citations normalised by field and year.

The US News ranking puts more emphasis on measures of quantity rather quality and output rather than input, and ignores teaching reputation, international faculty and  students and faculty student ratio. In these rankings Tsinghua is first for publications and Caltech 165th while Caltech is 46th for normalised citation impact and Tsinghua 186th.

On balance, I suspect that it is more likely that there will be a transition from quantity to quality than the other way round so we can expect Tsinghua and Zhejiang to close the gap in the THE rankings if they continue in their present form.