Meanwhile over in Alexandria
One of the strangest results of the 2010 THE - TR rankings was the elevation of Alexandria University in Egypt to the improbable status of fourth best university in the world for research impact and 147th overall. It turned out that this was almost entirely the work of precisely one marginal academic figure, Mohamed El Naschie, former editor of the journal Chaos Solitons and Fractals, whose worked was copiously cited by himself, other authors in his journal and those in an Israeli - published journal  (now purchased by De Gruyter) of which he was an editor.

The number of citations collected by El Naschie was not outrageously high but it was much higher than usual for his discipline and many of them were within a year of publication. This meant that El Naschie and Alexandria University received massive credit for  his citations since Thomson Reuters' normalisation system meant comparison with  the international average in a field where citations are low especially in the first year of publication.

Alexandria was not the only university to receive an obviously inflated score for research impact. Hong Kong Baptist University received a score of 97.6 and Bilkent one of 95.7, although in those two cases it seems that the few papers that contributed to these scores did have genuine merit.

It should be remembered that the citation scores were averages and that a few highly cited papers could have a grossly disproportionate effect if the total number of published papers was low.

This year Thomson Reuters went to some length to reduce the impact of a few highly cited papers. They have to some extent succeeded. Alexandria's score is down to 61.4  for citations (it is in 330th place overall),  Bilkent's to 60.8 (222nd place overall) and HKBU's to 59.7 (290th place overall).

These scores are not as ridiculous as those of 2010 but they are still unreasonable. Are we really expected to believe that these schools have a greater research impact than the University of Sydney, Kyoto University, the London School of Economics, Monash University and Peking University who all have scores in the fifties for this indicator?

I for one cannot believe that a single paper or a few papers, no matter how worthwhile, can justify inclusion in the top 300 world universities.

There is another problem. Normalisation of citations by year is inherently unstable. One or two papers in a low citation discipline cited within a year of publication will give a boost to the citations indicator score but after a year their impact diminishes because the citations are now coming more than a year after publication.

Alexandria's score was due to fall anyway because El Naschie has published vary little lately so his contribution to the citations score has fallen whatever methodological changes were introduced. And if he ever starts publishing again?

Also, if Thomson Reuters are normalising by field across the board, this rises the possibility that universities will be able to benefit by simply reclassifying research grants, moving research centres fromone field to another, manipulating abstracts and key words and so on.

Who else is down ?

Just looking at the top 200 of the THE rankings, these universities have fallen quite a bit.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Sydney
Ecole Normale Superieure
Ecole Polytechnique
Trinity College Dublin
University College Dublin
William and Mary College
University of Virginia

Asian Decline?

The Shanghai rankings have shown that universities in Korea, China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong) and the Middle East  have been steadily advancing over the years. Did they get it wrong?

The latest  Times Higher Education -Thomson Reuters rankings appear to prove that Asian universities have inexplicably collapsed over the last year. Tokyo has dropped from 26th to 30th place. Peking has fallen twelve places to 49th. Pohang University of Science and Technology and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have slipped out of the top fifty. Bilkent and Hong Kong Baptist University are way down.The decline of China University of Science and Technology is disastrous, from 49th to 192nd. Asian universities are going to be dangerous places for the next few days with students and teachers dodging university administrators jumping out of office windows.

Of course, massive declines like this do not reflect reality: they are simply the result of the methodological changes introduced this year. 

Anyone accessing a ranking site or downloading an iPad app should be made to click on a box reading "I understand that the methodological changes in the rankings mean that comparison with last year's ranking is pointless and I promise not to issue a public statement or say anything to anyone until I have had a cup of tea and I have made sure that everybody else understands this."

New Arrivals in the THE Top 200.

Every time a new ranking is published there are cries for the dismissal or worse of vice-chancellors or presidents who allowed their universities to lose ground. There will no doubt be more demands as the results of this year's THE rankings are digested. This will be very unjust since there are reasons why universities might take a tumble that have nothing to do with any decline in quality.

First, Thomas Reuters, THE's data collectors, have introduced several methodological changes. In the top 20 or 30 these might not mean very much but lower down the effect could be very large.

Second, rankers sometimes make mistakes and so do those who collect  data for institutions.

Third, many new universities have taken part this year. I counted thirteen just in the top 200 and there are certainly many more in the 200s and300s. A university ranked 200 last year would lose 13 places even if it had exactly the same relative score.

The thirteen newcomers are Texas at Austin, Rochester, Hebrew  University of Jerusalem, University of Florida, Brandeis, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Nijmegan, Medical University of South Carolina, Louvain, Universite Paris Diderot vii, Queen's University, Canada, Sao Paulo, Western Australia.

Highlights of the THE rankings

Some interesting results.

57.  Ohio State University
103.  Cape Town
107 Royal Holloway
149. Birkbeck
184. Iowa State
197. Georgia Health Sciences University
201-225. Bilkent
201-225 University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey
226-250 Creighton University USA
226-250 Tokyo Metropolitan
251-275 Wayne State
276-300 University of Crete
276-300 University of Iceland
276-300 Istanbul Technical University
276-300 Queensland University of Technology
276-300 Tokyo Medical and Dental University
301-350 Alexandria
301-350 Aveiro University
301-350 Hertfordshire
301-350 Plymouth University, UK
301-350 Sharif University of Technology
301-350 National University of Ireland, Maynooth
301-350 Taiwan Ocean University
301-350 Old Dominion University, USA

THE Rankings Out

The THE 2011-12 rankings are out.

Here is the top 10.

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

THE Rankings: Caltech Ousts Harvard

This is from the Peninsula in Qatar

LONDON: US and British institutions once again dominate an annual worldwide league table of universities published yesterday, but there is a fresh name at the top, unseating long-time leader Harvard.
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) knocked the famous Massachusetts institution from the summit of the Times Higher Education (THE) league table for the first time in eight years, with US schools claiming 75 of the top 200 places.
Next is Britain, which boasts 32 establishments in the top 200, but an overhaul in the way in which the country’s universities are funded has raised concerns over its continuing success.
Asia’s increasing presence in the annual table has stalled, with 30th placed University of Tokyo leading the continent’s representation.
China’s top two universities hold on to their elite status, but no more institutions from the developing powerhouse managed to break into the top 200.
THE attributed Caltech’s success to “consistent results across the indicators and a steep rise in research funding”.

THE Rankings

Caffeineblogging

The Guardian appears to have heard something.

On Thursday, the Times Higher Education its global universities rankings. As usual, UK universities shine disproportionately. Altogether a dozen are in the top 100 in the world, with seven in the top 50.

Latin American Rankings

QS have produced their new Latin American rankings. The Top five are:

1. Universidade de Sao Paulo
2. Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
3. Unidersidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil
4. Universidad de Chile
5. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM)

Suggestion

In Times Higher Education, Terrance Karran claims that universities that do well in the THE rankings (and the other ones?) are those that show more regard for academic freedom, which is equated to "compliance" with the AAUP's academic freedom statement.

Perhaps an annual prize could be awarded to the university that has the most academic freedom. I propose that it be called the Lawrence Summers Prize

Expectation

David Willetts, the Brish minister for universities and science says that he expects that more British universities will be in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings top 200.

And if more British universities, then fewer........?

The US News rankings

The U.S. News rankings of American colleges and universities were released on September 13th. For more information go here.

The top 10 national unuiversities are:

1.  Harvard
2.  Princeton
3.  Yale
4.  Columbia
5 = Caltech
5 = MIT
5= Stanford
5= Chicago
5= University of Pennsylvania
10. Duke

Announcement from THE

Times Higher Education have just announced that they will only rank 200 universities this year. Another 200 will be listed alphabetically but not ranked.

Let us be clear: the Times Higher Education World University Rankings list only the world’s top 200 research-led global universities.

We stop our annual list at the 200th place for two reasons. First, it helps us to make sure that we compare like with like. Although those ranked have different histories, cultures, structures and sizes, they all share some common characteristics: they recruit from the same global pool of students and staff; they push the boundaries of knowledge with research published in the world’s leading journals; and they teach at both the undergraduate and doctoral level in a research-led environment.

We unashamedly rank only around 1 per cent of the world’s universities – all of a similar type – because we recognise that the sector’s diversity is one of its great strengths, and not every university should aspire to be one of the global research elite.

But we also stop the ranking list at 200 in the interests of fairness. It is clear that the lower down the tables you go, the more the data bunch up and the less meaningful the differentials between institutions become. The difference between the institutions in the 10th and 20th places, for example, is much greater than the difference between number 310 and number 320. In fact, ranking differentials at this level become almost meaningless, which is why we limit it to 200.

 

If THE are going to provide sufficient detail about the component indicators to enable analysts to work out how universities compare with each other this would be be a good idea. It would avoid  raucous demands that university heads resign whenever the top national university slips 20 places in the rankings but would allow analysts to figure out exactly where schools were standing.

 It is true, as Phil Baty says, that there is not much difference between being 310 and 320 but there is, or there would be if the methodology was valid, a difference between 310 and 210. If THE are just going to present us with a list of 200 universities that did not (quite?) make it into the top 200 a lot of usable information will be lost.

The argument that THE is interested only in the ranking of the leading research led institutions seems to run counter to THE's emphasis on its bundle of teaching indicators and the claim that normalization of citations data can uncover hidden pockets of excellence. If we are concerned only with universities with a research led environment then  a few pockets or even a single pocket should be of little concern.

One also wonders what would happen if disgruntled universities decided that it was not worth the effort of collecting masses of data for TR and THE if the only reward is to be lumped among 200 also rans.

700 Universities

QS have released a ranked list of 700 universities. See here.

QS: The Employer Survey

The employer survey indicator in the QS World University Rankings might be regarded as a valuable assessment tool since it provides an external check on university quality. There are, however, some odd things about this indicator in the 2011 QS Rankings.

Thirteen universities are given scores of 100, of which 10 are listed as in 4th= place, presumably meaning that they had scores that were identical down to the first or second decimal point. Then 15 schools are listed as being in 15th place with a score of 90, 48 in 51st place with a score of 59.4 and 52 in 100th= place with a score of 55.9.

This is probably something to do with a massive upsurge in responses from Latin America, although exactly what is not clear. QS report 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."

Baloney

The economist David Blanchflower has dismissed the QS rankings as "a load of old baloney".

Much of what he says is sensible, indeed obvious. But not entirely.

"This ranking is complete rubbish and nobody should place any credence in it."

A bit too strong. The QS rankings are not too bad in parts, having improved over the last few years, and are moderately accurate about sorting out universities within a country or region. I doubt that anyone seriously thinks that Cambridge is the best university in the world unless we start counting May balls and punting on the Cam but it is quite reasonable that it is better than Oxford or Durham. Similarly, I wonder if anyone could argue that it is rubbish that Tokyo is the best university in Japan or Cape Town in Africa.

"It is unclear whether having more foreign students and faculty should even have a positive rank; less is probably better."

Students yes, but if nothing else more international faculty does mean that a university is recruiting from a larger pool of talent.

Blanchflower does not mention the academic and employer surveys both of which are flawed but do provide another dimension of assessment or the faculty student ratio which is very crude but might have a slightly closer relationship to teaching quality than the number of alumni who received Nobel prizes decades ago.

He then goes on to compare the QS rankings unfavorably with the Shanghai rankings (That actually is Shanghai Jiao Tong University not what he calls the University of Shanghai). I would certainly agree with most of what he says here but I think that we should remember that flawed as they are the QS rankings do, unlike the Shanghai index, give some recognition to excellence in the arts and humanities, make some attempt to assess teaching and  provide a basis for discriminating among those universities without Nobel prize winners or Fields medalists.

Finally, I would love to see if Blanchflower has any comments on last year's THE-Thomson Reuters rankings which put Alexandria, Bilkent and Hong Kong Baptist University among the world's research superpowers.

Well Done, QS

 
QS have just indicated that they have excluded self-citations from their citations per faculty indicator in this year's World University Rankings. This is a very positive move that will remove some of the distortions that have crept into this indicator over the last few years. It would have been even better if they had excluded citations within journals and within institutions. Maybe next year.

It will be interesting to see if Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters do the same with their rankings in October.It would not be very difficult and it might help to exclude Alexandria University and a few others from an undeserved place in the world's top universities for research impact.

(By the way Karolinska Institute is not in the US)


Although it may not make very much difference at the very top of this indicator, it seems that some places have suffered severely and others have benefited  from the change. According to the QS intelligence unit:

• Of all of the institutions we looked at the institution with the largest absolute number of self-citations, by some margin, is Harvard with over 93,000 representing 12.9% of their overall citations count
• The top five institutions producing over 3,000 papers, in terms of proportion of self-citations are all in Eastern Europe – St Petersburg State University, Czech Technical University, Warsaw University of Technology, Babes-Bolyai University and Lomonosov Moscow State University
• The top five in terms of the difference in citations per paper when self-citations are excluded are Caltech, Rockefeller, UC Santa Cruz, ENS Lyon and the University of Hawaii
• And the top 10 in terms of the difference in citations per faculty when self-citations are included are:

#	Institution	Country
1	California Institute of Technology (Caltech)	United States
2	Rockefeller University	United States
3	Stanford University	United States
4	Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)	South Korea
5	Karolinska Institute	United States
6	Princeton University	United States
7	Leiden University	Netherlands
8	Harvard University	United States
9	University of California, San Diego (UCSD)	United States
10	University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)	United States

The Best University in the World
Update 8/9/2011 -- some comments added

For many people the most interesting thing about the QS rankings is the battle for the top place. The Shanghai rankings put Harvard in first place year after year and no doubt will do so for the next few decades. QS when it was in partnership with Times Higher Education also routinely put Harvard first. This is scarcely surprising since the research prowess of Cambridge has steadily declined in recent years. Still, Cambridge, Oxford and two London colleges did quite well mainly because they got high scores for international faculty and students and for the academic survey (not surprising since a disproportionate number of responses came from the UK, Australia and New Zealand) but not well enough to get over their not very distinguished research record.

Last year, however, Cambridge squeezed past Harvard. This was not because of the  academic and employer surveys. That remained at 100 for both places. What happened was that between 2009 and 2010 Cambridge's score for citations per faculty increased from 89 to 93. This would be a fine achievement if it represented a real improvement. Unfortunately, almost every university with scores above 60 for this indicator in 2009 went up by a similar margin in 2010 while universities with scores below 50 slumped. Evidently, there was a new method of converting raw scores. Perhaps a mathematician out there can help.

And this year?

Cambridge and Harvard are both at 100 for the academic and employer surveys just like last year. (Note that although Harvard does better than Cambridge in both surveys they get the same reported score of 100).


For the faculty student ratio Harvard narrowed the gap a little from 3 to 2.5 points. In citations per faculty Cambridge slipped a bit by 0.3 points. However, Cambridge pulled further ahead on international students and faculty.

Basically, from 2004 to 2009 Harvard reigned supreme because its obvious superiority in research was more than enough to offset the advantages Cambridge enjoyed with regard to internationalisation (small country and policies favouring international students), faculty student ratio (counting non-teaching research staff) and the academic survey (disproportionate responses from the UK and Commonwealth). But this year and last the change in the method of converting the raw scores for citations per faculty artificially boosted Cambridge's overall scores.

So, is Cambridge really the world's top university?

The THE-TR Rankings

The THE-TR World University Rankings will be published on October 6th.

There will be some changes. The weighting given to the citations indicator will be slightly reduced to 30% and internationalisation gets 7.5% instead of 5%.

There will be some tweaking of the citations indicator to avoid a repeat of the Alexandria and other anomalies. Let's hope it works.

In the research indicator there will be a reduction in the weighting given to the survey and public research income as a percentage of research income will be removed.

There will, unfortunately, be a slight increase in the percentage given of international students and a decline in that for international faculty.

Commentary on the 2011 QS World University Rankings

From India

"University of Cambridge retains its number one spot ahead of Harvard, according to the QS World University Rankings 2011, released today. Meanwhile, MIT jumps to the third position, ahead of Yale and Oxford.

While the US continues to dominate the world ranking scenario, taking 13 of top 20 and 70 of top 300 places, 14 of 19 Canadian universities have ranked lower than 2010. As far as Europe is concerned, Germany, one of the emerging European destinations in recent times, has no university making it to the top 50 despite its Excellence Initiative.

Asian institutions - particularly those from Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and China - have fared well at a discipline level in subject rankings produced by QS this year - this is particularly true in technical and hard science fields.

Despite the Indian government's efforts to bring about a radical change in the Indian higher education sector, no Indian university has made it to the top 200 this year. However, China has made it to the top 50 and Middle East in the top 200 for the first time.

According to Ben Sowter, QS head of research, "There has been no (relative) improvement from any Indian institution this year. The international higher education scene is alive with innovation and change, institutions are reforming, adapting and revolutionising. Migration amongst international students and faculty continues to grow with little sign of slowing. Universities can no longer do the same things they have always done and expect to maintain their position in a ranking or relative performance.""

Commentary on 2011 QS World University Rankings

 From Ireland 

SEÁN FLYNN, Education Editor

TCD AND UCD have continued to slide down the world university rankings in a trend which will concern Government, business and heads of colleges.

The latest QS rankings – published this morning – show a substantial drop in ranking for most Irish universities.

TCD drops down 13 places to 65; UCD is down 20 places from 114 to 134. NUI Galway suffers the most dramatic fall, down 66 places to 298. UCC bucked the trend, up marginally from 184 to 181.

The new international league table is a serious blow to the Irish university sector. Two years ago TCD was in the elite top 50 colleges, while UCD was in the top 100. Over the past two years both of Ireland’s leading colleges have lost significant ground.
The fall in Irish rankings was widely expected as the university sector has struggled to cope with a 6 per cent decline in employment and a funding crisis.

Commentary on the 2011 QS World University Rankings

From New Zealand

"In tough times, good news comes for Australian institutions in Eighth QS World University Rankings®

- Eighth annual QS World University Rankings® sees all of the Group of Eight featured in the top 300
- Australian National University (26) remains Australia’s best-performing university but falls by 6 places.
- Seventeen Australian institutions featured in the top 300
- Based on six indicators including surveys of over 33,000 global academics and 16,000 graduate employers, the largest of their kind ever conducted
- New in 2011: results published alongside comparative international tuition fee on www.topuniversities.com"

Commentary on the 2011 QS World University Rankings

 From Malaysia

"PETALING JAYA: Universiti Malaya (UM) is the only Malaysian institution that has made it to the top 200 of the QS World University Rankings 2011/12.
It moved up 40 places to 167 this year compared to 207 in 2010.

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) have all slid down the rankings (see table).

UKM is ranked 279 this year compared to 263 in 2010; USM at 335 (309), UPM 358 (319) and UTM at between 401 and 450 (365).
...
For the first time, the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) and Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) were included in the rankings at 451-500 and 601+ respectively."

Commentary on the QS 2011 World University Rankings

From Dubai

"Dubai: UAE University (UAEU) has moved up 34 places to come 338th in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, which looked at more than 2,000 institutions to come up with a top 500 list.

UAEU officials said the university is working toward a top 100 spot. The university was also ranked 299th in the Life Sciences & Medicine subject category.The University of Cambridge was ranked as the top university in the world followed by Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Yale University, University of Oxford.
Saudi Arabia's King Saud University (KSU) came 200th and tops the list among Middle East institutions with King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM) and King Abdul Aziz University (KAU) coming in second and fifth respectively. American University of Beirut came third and UAEU fourth."

QS Rankings Published

The rankings have now been published and can be accessed here.

The top 300 are included with total scores and tuition fees.

QS Rankings Update

Some highlights are provided by CNW


Highlights:

• Global:  University of Cambridge retains number one spot ahead of Harvard, while MIT jumps to third ahead of Yale and Oxford; 38 countries in top 300
• Government and private funding for technology-focussed research is eroding the dominance of traditional comprehensive universities. The average age of the top 100 institutions has dropped by seven years since 2010, reflecting the emergence of newer specialist institutions particularly in Asia
• US/Canada: US takes 13 of top 20 and 70 of top 300 places; McGill (17) and Toronto (23) both up, but 14 of 19 Canadian universities rank lower than 2010
• UK/Ireland: Oxford (5) and Imperial (6) leapfrog UCL (7), as four UK universities make the top 10; TCD (65) and UCD (134) both drop
• Continental Europe: ETH Zurich (18) leads ENS Paris (33), EPFL (35) and ParisTech (36); no German university in top 50 despite Excellence Initiative
• Asia: HKU (22) leads Tokyo (25), NUS (28) and Kyoto (32); India: IITB drops out of top 200; China: Tsinghua (47) joins Peking (46) in top 50
• Australia: Gap between ANU (26) and Melbourne (31) closes from 18 to five, ahead of Sydney (38); G8 all make top 100
• Middle East: King Saud University (200) makes top 200 for first time
• Latin America: USP (169) makes top 200 for first time; five universities in top 300 (Brazil, Chile and Argentina)

QS Rankings Update

The BBC reports on Scottish universities in the rankings.

The University of Glasgow has climbed 18 places in an international league table of higher education institutions.

Glasgow is now 59th in the QS World University Rankings, ahead of St Andrews which is in 97th place.
The University of Edinburgh is the highest ranked Scottish institution moving up two places to 20th position.
Principal of Glasgow, Professor Anton Muscatelli, said it had confirmed its position as one of the world's leading universities.

QS Rankings Update

The National reports that UAE University has risen from 372nd to 338th place.

QS Rankings 2011 Update

According to the Herald Sun, Cambridge has retained its place at the top of the QS rankings.


MELBOURNE is clawing its way up the ranks of the world's best universities, but Canberra is clinging on to top spot.
Australian National University is the nation's best tertiary institution, claiming 26th spot in the international league table.
But Melbourne University is hot on its heels - ranked 31st after jumping seven spots over the past year.
The UK's famed Cambridge University has claimed poll position, followed by Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University in the US.
Oxford University rounded out the top five, according to the QS World University Rankings, released yesterday.
Victoria's other top performers were Monash University, which jumped one spot to 60, and RMIT at 228.

QS Rankings Update

Although they have  not been released yet some news about the QS 2011 rankings is trickling out.

From Todayonline in Singapore

NTU [Nanyang Technological University] , NUS [National University of Singapore] climb the ladder in global university rankings 

 

NTU leaps 16 places to take 58th spot, while NUS moves up three notches to take 28th spot

The QS Rankings are Coming

QS will release their 2011 World University Rankings at 0101 GMT on Monday.They have already sent out fact files to the 600+ listed universities.

Things to look for.

Will Harvard regain it's position at the top from Cambridge? It might if QS revert to the previous method of converting the raw scores for the citations per faculty indicator.

Will spending cuts lead to a decline in the observed quality of British universities?

Will universities in China,Korea, Latin America and the Middle East repeat the successes they recorded in the Shanghai rankings?

Will Universiti Malaya return to the top 200? If it does will it be acknowledged as the number 1 Malaysian University?


Watch this space

Japanese Universities Send a Strong Request

A very interesting document from the top 11 Japanese research universities has appeared. They are unhappy with the citations indicator in last year's Times Higher Education -- Thomson Reuters World University Rankings.

"The purpose of analyzing academic research data, particularly publication and citation trends is to provide diverse objective information on universities and other academic institutions that can be used by researchers and institutions for various evaluations and the setting of objectives. The 2010 Thomson Reuters / THE World University Rankings, however, do not give sufficient consideration to the unique characteristics of universities in different countries or the differing research needs and demands from society based on country, culture and academic field. As a result, those rankings are likely to lead to an unbalanced misleading and misuse of the citation index.

RU11 strongly requests, therefore, that Thomson Reuters / THE endeavors to contribute to academic society by providing objective and impartial data, rather than imposing a simplistic and trivialized form of university assessment."

It is a tactical mistake to go on about uniqueness. This is an excuse that has been used too often by institutions whose flaws have been revealed by international rankings.

Still, they do have a point. They go on to show that when the position of Asian universities according to the citations indicator in the THE-TR rankings is compared with the citations per paper indicator in the 2010 QS Asian university rankings, citations per paper over an 11 year period from TR's Essential Science Indicators and citations per paper/citations per faculty in the 2010 QS World university rankings (I assume they mean citations per faculty here since the QS World University Rankings do not have a citations per paper indicator) leading Japanese universities do badly while Chinese, Korean and other Asian universities do very well.

They complain that the THE--TR rankings emphasise "home run papers" and research that produces immediate results and that regional modification (normalisation) discriminates against Japanese universities.

This no doubt is a large part of the story but I suspect that the distortions of the 2010 THE--TR indicator are also because differences in the practice of self citation and intra--university citation, because TR's methodology actually favors those who publish relatively few papers and because of its bias towards low--cited disciplines.

The document continues:

"1. The ranking of citations based on either citations per author (or faculty) or citations per paper represent two fundamentally different ways of thinking with regards to academic institutions: are the institutions to be viewed as an aggregation of their researchers, or as an aggregation of the papers they have produced?  We believe that the correct approach is to base the citations ranking on citations per faculty as has been the practice in the past.

2. We request a revision of the method used for regional modification. 

3. We request the disclosure of the raw numerical data used to calculate the citation impact score for the various research fields at each university."

I suspect that TR and THE would reply that their methodology identifies pockets of excellence (which for some reason cannot be found anywhere in the Japanese RU 11), that the RU 11 are just poor losers and that they are right and QS is wrong.

This question might be resolved by looking at other measures of citations such as those produced by HEEACT, Scimago and ARWU.

It could be that this complaint if was sent to TR was the reason for TR and THE announcing that they were changing the regional weighting process this year. If that turns out to be the case and TR is perceived as changing its methodology to suit powerful vested interests then we can expect many academic eyebrows to be raised.

If the RU 11 are still unhappy then THE and TR might see a repeat of the demise of the Asiaweek rankings brought on in part because of a mass abstention by Japanese and other universities.

The THE Citations Indicator

The Research Impact indicator in last year's Times Higher Education - Thomson Reuters World University Rankings led to much condemnation and not a little derision. Alexandria University was fourth in the world for research impact, with Bilkent, Turkey, Hong Kong Baptist University and several other relatively obscure institutions achieving remarkably high scores.

The villain here was Thomson Reuters' field and year normalisation system by which citations were compared with world benchmarks for field and year. This meant that a large number of citations within year of publication  to a paper classified as being in a low cited field could have a disproportionate  effect, which might be further enhanced if the university was in a region where citations were low.

Now THE have announced that this year there will be three changes. These are:

• raising the threshold for inclusion in the citations indicator from 50 publications per year to 200
• Extending the period for counting citations from five to six years
• Changing regional normalisation so that it takes account of subject variations within regions as well as the overall level  of citations.

Here are some things which Thomson Reuters apparently will not do:

• reducing the weighting given to citations
• not counting sell-citations, citations within institutions or citations within journals
• using a variety of indications to assess research impact, such as h-index, total citations, citations per paper
• using a variety of databases

So, everybody will have to wait until September to see what will happen.

Value for Money

Recently, the Higher Education Funding Council of England published data indicating the percentage of UK students at English universities with grades AAB at A level. Oxford and Cambridge were at the top with 99% and Wolverhampton, Staffordshire and Hertfordshire at the bottom with 2%.

Now Hertfordshire statisticians have produced graphs comparing performance on four British league tables with tuition fees. Hertfordshire offers best value for tuition money in its band. Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Derby and London Metropolitan do well in theirs. Liverpool John Moores, East London and Bedfordshire are among the worst.

It should be noted that at the moment the differences between tuition levels are relatively small so this table may not mean very much.

Perhaps They know Something You Don't

The Pew Research Center has issued a report showing that women are more likely than men to see the value of a college education. Men, says the report, are laggards. The implication is that women are more perceptive than men.

At a time when women surpass men by record numbers in college enrollment and completion, they also have a more positive view than men about the value higher education provides, according to a nationwide Pew Research Center survey. Half of all women who have graduated from a four-year college give the U.S. higher education system excellent or good marks for the value it provides given the money spent by students and their families; only 37% of male graduates agree. In addition, women who have graduated from college are more likely than men to say their education helped them to grow both personally and intellectually.

An article in Portfolio.com reviewing the report refers to another study from the Brookings Institute that finds that college is in fact an excellent investment .

Why then, are men apparently so uninformed about the benefits of higher education? The Pew report provides part of the answer when it discloses that men are much more likely than women to pay for college by themselves. A good investment, it seems, is even better when it is paid for by somebody else.

Also, let us compare the career prospects of men and women with average degrees in the humanities or social sciences. Even without affirmative action, men who are bored by diversity training, professional development, all sorts of sensitisation and other rituals of the feminised corporation and bureaucracy are unlike to get very far if anywhere.

And perhaps men are more likely to grow by themselves.

A Rising Crescent?

One advantage of the methodological stability of the Shanghai university rankings is that it is possible to identify long term changes even though the year by year changes may be quite small.

One trend that becomes apparent when comparing the 2003 and 2011 rankings is the increasing number of universities from predominantly Muslim countries.

In 2003 there was exactly one listed, Istanbul University.

This year there were six: King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, in the 201-300 band, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia, Tehran University and Istanbul University in the 301-400 band and Cairo University and Universiti Malaya in the 401-500.

In the next year or two King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, headed by a former president of the National University of Singapore, will probably join the list.

Another Twist in the Plot

The  relationship between Malaysian universities and international rankers would make a good soap opera, full of break-ups, reconciliations and recriminations.

It started in 2004  when the first THES - QS ranking put Universiti Malaya (UM) in the top 100 and Universiti Sains Malaysia in the top 200. There was jubilation at the UM campus with triumphant banners all over the place. Then it all came crashing down in 2005 when QS revealed that they had made a mistake by counting ethnic minorities as international students and faculty. There followed a "clarification of data" and UM was expelled from the top 100.

The  Malaysian opposition believed, or pretended to believe, that this was evidence of the unrelenting decline of the country's universities. The Vice-Chancellor of UM went off into the academic wilderness but still remained on QS's advisory board.

UM continued to pursue the holy grail of a top 200 ranking by the vigorous  pursuit of publications and citations. There was discontent among the faculty voiced in a letter to a local newspaper:

"The writer claimed that many have left UM and “many more are planning to leave, simply because of the expectations from the management”.

“UM is not what it used to be. The academic staff are highly demoralised and unhappy due to the management’s obsession and fixation with ISI publications, while research, consultancy, and contribution to the nation, such as training of PhD students are considered as secondary,” the letter said."

In 2007 the Malaysian government asked for plans from universities to be considered for APEX (Accelerated Program for Academic Excellence) status which would include a substantial degree of university autonomy. It boiled down to a fight between UM and USM, which was won by USM apparently because of its inspiring plans.

'"The selection committee evaluated each university's state of readiness, transformation plan and preparedness for change. The university that is granted apex status is theone that has the highest potential among Malaysian universities to be world-class, and as such, would be given additional assistance to compete with top-ranking global institutions,‘addedKhaled. "Apex is about accelerated change. It is not about business as usual –but business unusual""USM has been working on its own transformation plan –We started with the ‘Healthy Campus’concept, before moving on to the‘University in a garden’concept. We subsequently adopted the ‘Research University’concept."Tan Sri DatoProf DzulkifliAbdul RazakVice Chancellor, USMSelection Committee Chairman, Dr. MohamadZawawi, former Vice Chancellor of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak said the committee also paid special attention to the institutions’strategic intent and transformation plans. Visits were made to short-listed institutions where discussions were held with senior staff, academicians, students and staff associations to understand the prevailing campus’‘climate’and factors related to the proposed plans.With apex status, USM will be given the autonomy to have the best in terms of governance, resources and talent and is expected to move up in the World University Rankings with a target of top 200 in five years and in the top 100, if not 50, by 2020.'

Note that USM was expected to use its status to climb the international rankings. However, it is now refusing to have anything to do with the rankings, something that is understandable.

The issue of which university deserves APEX was reopened this morning when it was announced that Universiti Malaya  was in the top 500 of the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities.

This is unlikely to be a mistake like 2004. The Shanghai rankers have had methodological problems like what to do about merging or splitting universities but they do not change the basic methodology and they do not make serious mistakes. We are not going to hear next year about a clarification of data

UM's success is narrowly based. They have no Nobel prize winners, no highly cited researchers , only a handful of papers in Nature and Science but quite a lot of publications in ISI indexed journals. One might complain that there is too much emphasis on quantity but this is nevertheless a tangible achievement.

　

Press release from Shanghai

Here is the press release from Shanghai Jiao Tong University giving more details about this year's rankings.

Monday, August 15, 2011
Shanghai, People's Republic of China
The Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University released today the 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), marking its 9th consecutive year of measuring the performance of top universities worldwide.
Harvard University tops the 2011 list; other Top 10 universities are: Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Caltech, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford. In Continental Europe, ETH Zurich (23rd) in Switzerland takes first place, followed by Paris-Sud (40th) and Pierre and Marie Curie (41st) in France. The best ranked universities in Asia are University of Tokyo (21st) and Kyoto University (24th) in Japan.
Three universities are ranked among Top 100 for the first time in the history of ARWU: University of Geneva (73rd), University of Queensland (88th) and University of Frankfurt (100th). As a result, the number of Top 100 universities in Switzerland, Australia and Germany increases to 4, 4 and 6 respectively.
Ten universities first enter into Top 500, among them University of Malaya in Malaysia and University of Zagreb in Croatia enable their home countries to be represented, together with other 40 countries, in the 2011 ARWU list.
Progress of universities in Middle East countries is remarkable. King Saud University in Saudi Arabia first appears in Top 300; King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Saudi Arabia, Istanbul University in Turkey and University of Teheran in Iran move up in Top 400 for the first time; Cairo University in Egypt is back to Top 500 after five years of staggering outside.
The number of Chinese universities in Top 500 increases to 35 in 2011, with National Taiwan University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Tsinghua University ranked among Top 200.
The Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University also released the 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities by Broad Subject Fields (ARWU-FIELD) and 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities by Subject Field (ARWU-SUBJECT).Top 100 universities in five broad subject fields and in five selected subject fields are listed, where the best five universities are:
Natural Sciences and Mathematics – Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, Caltech and Cambridge
Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences – MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, UIUC and Georgia Tech
Life and Agriculture Sciences – Harvard, MIT, UC San Francisco, Cambridge and Washington (Seattle)
Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy – Harvard, UC San Francisco, Washington (Seattle), Johns Hopkins and Columbia
Social Sciences – Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Berkeley and Columbia
Mathematics – Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford and Cambridge
Physics – MIT, Harvard, Caltech,Princeton and Berkeley
Chemistry – Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, Cambridge and ETH Zurich
Computer Science – Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Princeton and Harvard
Economics/Business – Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Berkeley and Columbia
The complete listsand detailed methodologies can be found at the Academic Ranking of World Universities website at http://www.ShanghaiRanking.com/.
Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU): Starting from 2003, ARWU has been presenting the world top 500 universities annually based on a set of objective indicators and third-party data. ARWU has been recognized as the precursor of global university rankings and the most trustworthy list. ARWU uses six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific, number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance with respect to the size of an institution. More than 1000 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 are published.
Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CWCU): CWCU has been focusing on the study of world-class universities for many years, published the first Chinese-language book titled world-class universities and co-published the first English book titled world-class universities with European Centre for Higher Education of UNESCO. CWCU initiated the "International Conference on World-Class Universities" in 2005 and organizes the conference every second year, which attracts a large number of participants from all major countries. CWCU endeavors to build databases of major research universities in the world and clearinghouse of literature on world-class universities, and provide consultation for governments and universities.
Contact: Dr.Ying CHENG at ShanghaiRanking@gmail.com

Breaking News

The Shanghai rankings are out. Go here.

One interesting result is that Universiti Malaya is in the top 500 for the first time, mainly because of  a large number of publications.

America's Best Colleges

As the world waits anxiously for the publication of Princeton Review's Stone Cold Sober School Rankings (like everybody else I am praying the US Air Force Academy stays in the top ten), there are a few less important rankings like Shanghai's ARWU or the Forbes/CCAP (Center for College Affordabilty and Productivity) Rankings to study.

The latter, which have just been released, are designed for student consumers. The components are student satisfaction, post-graduate success, student debt, four-year graduation rate and competitive awards. They clearly fulfill a need that other rankings do not. It is possible that some of the indicators could be adopted for an international ranking. The top 10, a mix of Ivy League schools, small liberal arts colleges and service academies, are:

1.  Williams College
2.  Princeton
3.  US Military Academy
4.  Amherst College
5. Stanford
6.  Harvard
7.  Haverford College
8.  Chicago
9.  MIT
10. US Air Force Academy

The Missing Indicator

There is an interesting item in Times Higher Education. Apparently leading universities might be offering financial inducements in the form of scholarships to students with AAB at A level. For Americans that would be something like a 3.9 GPA.

Universities like to proclaim that they provide something to students that enables them to succeed in the post university world, training in critical thinking, soft skills or exposure to a diverse multicultural society for which massive tuition fees can be extracted from parents or government.  Whether they actually do is debatable. A book length study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift,  indicated that universities do little to teach students how to think.

Employers seem to have a rather different view of the matter. Many restrict themselves to recruiting from only the elite universities and are quite unconcerned with whether universities have established learning outcomes or whether they have created a safe space for diverse students. They simply wish to recruit the most intelligent students that they  can, with perhaps a bit of charm and likability for publicly visible positions.

Left to their own devices, universities would probably do their best to admit the most intelligent students available. The news that some are willing to pay for those with good A levels is a stark reminder that they are not being entirely honest in claiming that they provide an excellent education that is worth paying for. If that were the case, why not just put in a bit more effort and a few thousand pounds to turn an BBB or CCC student into an AAB. The answer is that while you might get a bit more out of a student by teaching reading and writing skills, basic numeracy and so on, recruiting from the top of the cognitive scale will bring much more to a university.

It is likely that calculating the average academic ability of students, or better still, their underlying intelligence might be an extremely valuable component in any international ranking system

Research Blogs has a table, derived from data from the Higher Education Funding Council of England,  of universities according to the percentage of UK students with AAB or better at A levels.

If it were possible to calculate equivalences between the standardised tests or qualifications in various countries with some sort of adjustment for national differences in education or literacy, then an global ranking of universities according to student quality would be quite feasible.


The second column in this table shows the position of the institution when ranked by size.

		Ranked by percentage	AAB+	UK %
1	3	University of Oxford	2568	99
2	4	University of Cambridge	2554	99
3	18	Imperial College London	1094	96
4	23	London School of Economics	686	93
5	2	University of Durham	2581	85
6	8	University of Bristol	2199	85
7	13	University College London	1648	82
8	9	University of Warwick	2068	81
9	7	University of Exeter	2368	74
10	15	University of Bath	1496	69
11	17	King's College	1238	68
12	57	Royal Veterinary College	195	60
13	86	Conservatoire for Dance & D	71	59
14	35	SOAS	353	57
15	5	University of Nottingham	2505	57
16	12	University of Southampton	1686	54
17	14	University of York	1538	53
18	1	University of Manchester	2776	51
19	11	University of Sheffield	1846	49
20	10	University of Birmingham	1883	48
21	6	University of Leeds	2376	47
22	16	University of Newcastle	1332	43
23	19	Loughborough University	1042	38
24	91	School of Pharmacy	59	37
25	21	Lancaster University	740	32
26	25	Royal Holloway, London	589	32
27	20	University of Liverpool	886	32
28	33	City University	414	31
29	26	University of Leicester	578	30
30	22	Queen Mary	702	29
31	24	University of Sussex	630	29
32	32	Aston University	429	25
33	27	University of East Anglia	538	25
34	93	Blackpool and the Fylde	52	24
35	30	University of Surrey	433	23
36	95	Blackburn College	51	22
37	29	University of Reading	455	19
38	58	Goldsmiths College	180	17
39	72	University of Chichester	114	13
40	37	Brunel University	325	12
41	84	University College Falmouth	78	11
42	31	University of the Arts London	430	11
43	28	University of Kent	480	10
44	76	University of Cumbria	105	10
45	89	Arts UC at Bournemouth	67	9
46	67	Bath Spa University	144	9
47	55	University of Essex	200	8
48	56	University of Teesside	197	8
49	43	Southampton Solent	254	8
50	69	University Creative Arts	136	8
51	48	University of Lincoln	232	8
52	68	University of Worcester	142	8
53	80	Liverpool Hope University	97	8
54	42	Coventry University	262	7
55	50	Bournemouth University	227	7
56	54	Oxford Brookes University	213	7
57	63	University of Bedfordshire	163	7
58	64	University of East London	157	7
59	79	Edge Hill University	97	7
60	51	University of Brighton	215	7
61	39	University of Northumbria	283	7
62	41	University of Plymouth	278	7
63	62	London South Bank	165	7
64	60	Birmingham City University	170	6
65	75	University of Northampton	110	6
66	36	Sheffield Hallam University	340	6
67	65	Anglia Ruskin University	156	6
68	34	Nottingham Trent University	357	6
69	49	University of Hull	228	6
70	78	Keele University	99	6
71	77	University of Chester	100	6
72	52	University of Huddersfield	214	6
73	40	Kingston University	280	6
74	44	University West of England	238	5
75	46	University of Westminster	235	5
76	70	University of Derby	133	5
77	92	University of Bolton	55	5
78	73	University of Bradford	112	5
79	87	Thames Valley University	68	5
80	38	Manchester Metropolitan	290	5
81	47	De Montfort University	232	5
82	45	London Metropolitan	237	5
83	53	Liverpool John Moores	213	5
84	71	Middlesex University	126	5
85	61	Central Lancashire	168	4
86	94	Roehampton University	51	4
87	83	University of Sunderland	79	4
88	90	University of Gloucestershire	65	4
89	59	University of Greenwich	178	3
90	66	University of Portsmouth	152	3
91	74	Leeds Metropolitan	111	3
92	88	University of Salford	67	3
93	85	University of Wolverhampton	76	2
94	82	University of Hertfordshire	85	2
95	81	Staffordshire University	91	2

Worth Reading

University World News has some new articles on rankings by Ellen Hazelkorn, Philip Altbach and Danny Byrne of QS. It also provides links to several older articles.

Ranking Fever Rages in the US

Forget Shanghai, QS and Times Higher. The really important ranking has just been released by Princeton Review.

Ohio University in Athens has replaced the University of Georgia in Athens as the top party school (one wonders if all the respondents could remember where they were).

Other number ones are:

Amazing College Campus: Elon University, NC
Top Online University: Penn State University World Campus 

And more to come.

Latest Webometrics Rankings

Webometrics have just released their latest rankings. These are based on the web-related activities of universities as measured by:

• the number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead
• the total number of unique external links received (inlinks)
• rich files in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt).
• data were extracted using Google results from the Scholar database representing papers, reports and other academic items

The Webometrics ranking might be considered a crude instrument but nonetheless it does measure something that, while not synonymous with quality, is still a necessary precondition.

Here are the top three in each region:

USA and Canada
1. MIT
2. Harvard
3. Stanford

Latin America
1.  Sao Paulo
2.  National Autonmous University of Mexico
3.  Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Europe
1.  Cambridge
2.  Oxford
3.  Southampton

Central and Eastern Europe
1.  Charles University in Prague
2.  Masaryk University in Brno
3.  Ljubljana, Slovenia

Asia
1.  National Taiwan University
2.  Tokyo
3.  Kyoto

South East Asia
1.  National University of Singapore
2.  Kasetsart, Thailand
3.  Chulalongkorn, Thailand

South Asia
1.  IIT Bombay
2.  IIS Bangalore
3.  IIT Kanpur

Arab World
1.  King Saud University
2.  King Fahd University of Petroleum and minerals
3.  Kng Abdul Aziz University

Oceania
1.  Australian National University
2.   Melbourne
3.  Queensland

Africa
1.  Cape Town
2.  Pretoria
3.  Stellenbosch

Rankings as Imperialism

A conference was held in Malaysia recently, ostensibly to "challenge Western stereotypes of knowledge."

There was a comment on international university rankings by James Campbell of Universiti Sains Malaysia.

"Others warn of the threats of new colonialism practices such as rankings exercises.

“This is another form of imperialism as universities have to conform with publishing in ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) journals in order to be ranked among the best in the world,” says Campbell."

There are many things wrong with rankings but this is not a valid criticism. The Shanghai rankings have shown the steady advance of Chinese and Korean and to a lesser extent Latin American and Southwest Asian universities. The QS rankings (formerly THE -QS) were notoriously biased towards Southeast  Asia with a heavy weighting being given to a survey originally based largely on the mailing lists of a Singapore based publishing company (that may no longer be the case) .

As for the the current THE - Thomson Reuters rankings, they have declared an Egyptian university to be the fourth best in the world for research impact.

The inadequacies of current rankings have been discussed here and elsewhere. But whether it is helpful to anyone to reject them altogether is very debatable.

Most of the conference was devoted not to rankings per se. but to supposed critiques of western science. Readers may judge these for themselves.

Pseudo-science in the academy

A comment by Ameen Amjad Khan in University World News draws attention to the continuing problem of pseudo-science in universities. He lists creationism. anti-evolutionism, magnetic healing, perpetual motion, quantum mysticisms, New Age physics, parapsychology, repressed memory, homeopathy and fake self-help schemes.

To which we could add some products of pseudo-social science such as multiple intelligences, emotional and spiritual quotient, Outcomes Based Education and just about anything related to management studies.

Off topic a bit
The Independent has an article by Alex Duval Smith, "the man who proved that everyone is good at maths"

It describes a French academician, Marc Chemillier, who has written a book , "Les Mathematiques Naturelles" that claims that maths is simple and rooted in human sensory intuition. He has travelled to Madagascar because "he believes that Madagascar's population, which remains relatively untouched by outside influences, can help him to prove this".

Smith quotes Chemillier as saying: "There is a strong link between counting and the number of fingers on our hands. Maths becomes complicated only when you abandon basic measures in nature, like the foot or the inch, or even the acre, which is the area that two bulls can plough in a day."

Ploughing a field with bulls is natural? Isn't that a little ethnocentric and chronocentric?

Smith goes on:

"To make his point, Mr Chemillier chose to charge up his laptop computer, leave Paris and do the rounds of fortune tellers on the Indian Ocean island [Madagascar] because its uninfluenced natural biodiversity also extends to its human population. Divinatory geomancy – reading random patterns, or sikidy to use the local word – is what Raoke does, when not smoking cigarettes rolled with paper from a school exercise book."

The idea that the population of Madagascar is untouched, even relatively,  by outside influences is rather odd. The ancestors of the Malagasy travelled across the Indian Ocean from Borneo, a voyage more arduous than those of Columbus. Since then, the island has received immigrants and ideas from and traded with East Africa, Arabia, Persia, India and Europe. Sikidy itself is a local adoption of the medieval Muslim art of divination, adapted to local conditions.

It is difficult to see how Raoke's abilty to recall complex patterns created by removing seeds in ones or twos from piles proves that everybody is good at maths. He has probably been divining for half a century and it is a safe bet that he has put in the ten thousand hours that Malcolm Gladwell thinks is necessary to turn anyone into a genius.

I suspect, however, that we are going to hear  more about the diviners of Madagascar as universities and schools throughout the world are relentlessly dumbed down. No need to study the needless complexities of calculus: a pile of seeds and illiterate intuition is all you need.

What do you do if you hold a quality initiative and nobody comes?

The Higher Education Commission of  Pakistan is proposing to rank all private and public universities in the country. Unfortunately, the universities do not seem very keen on the idea and most of them are not submitting data.


"An official of HEC told APP that all public and private Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) were asked to submit their data by July 15 for carrying out ranking process but around 10 out of 132 universities have submitted their data. HEC is taking the initiative of ranking the universities to help strengthen their indigenous quality culture and improve international visibility. The HEC has already directed the universities to meet the deadline for providing authentic data and those which failed to provide data will be ranked zero by placing them at the bottom in the ranking list to be published through print media.

HEC’ initiative to carry out quality based ranking of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is aimed at international compatibility, primarily based on the QS Ranking System acceptable widely across countries. The commission has taken various initiatives to bring HEIs of Pakistan at par with international standards and ranking is one of the measures to scale the success of efforts to achieve international competitiveness in education, research and innovation."


The problem of conscientious objectors and of universities that might simply not be able to collect data is one that has plagued global and national rankers from the beginning. Times Higher and Thomson Reuters allow universities to opt out but that is risky if those opting out include the likes of Texas at Austin. On the other hand, QS will collect data from third party and national sources if universities fail to cooperate.

What Global Rankings Ignore
(at least some of them)

Inside Higher Ed has an article by Indira Samarasekera, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Alberta, that voices some fairly conventional complaints about international university rankings. She has some praise for two of the rankers:

"The problems with national and international rankings are numerous and well known. So well known, in fact, that the world’s most powerful ranking organizations — the World’s Best Universities Rankings conducted by U.S. News & World Report in partnership with Quacquarelli Symonds and the Times Higher Education Rankings — have been working diligently to revise ranking measures and their methods in an attempt to increase the accuracy and objectivity of the rankings.

It should be pointed out that U.S. News & World report does not conduct any world rankings: it just publishes those prepared by QS. And I wonder how successful those diligent attempts will be.

She goes on:

"From my perspective, rankings are also missing the mark by failing to shine a light on some of the most significant benefits that universities bring to local, national and global societies. The focus of most rankings is on academic research outputs — publications, citations and major awards — that stand in as proxies for research quality and reach. While these outputs do a fairly good job of pinpointing the impact of a university’s contributions to knowledge, especially in science, technology, engineering and health sciences, they provide little indication of what kind of impact these advancements have on factors that the global community generally agrees are markers of prosperous and secure societies with a high quality of life.

Let me give you an example of what I mean: governments and policy makers everywhere now consider universities as economic engines as well as educational institutions. Public investments in research are increasingly directed toward research with the potential to translate into products, processes and policies — even whole new industries. This trend in research funding reveals a lot about the ways in which universities matter to governments, policy makers, regions and the public today, but the rankers aren’t paying attention.

Consider Israel. According to data on NASDAQ’s website, Israel has more companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange than any other country in the world except the U.S., and major companies such as Intel, Microsoft, IBM and Google have major research and development centers in Israel. Why? If you look at the data, you see a correlation between this entrepreneurial activity and the investments in and outputs from Israel’s universities.

Israel is among a handful of nations with the highest public expenditure on educational institutions relative to GDP, and it has the highest rate of R&D investment relative to GDP in the world. It also has the highest percentage of engineers in the work force and among the highest ratio of university degrees per capita. Many of the companies listed on NASDAQ were started by graduates of Israel’s universities: Technion, Tel Aviv University, Weizmann Institute and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to mention a few. Do international university rankings capture these economic impacts from research and postsecondary education in Israel? The answer is no. In spite of their tremendous impact and output, Israel’s universities are ranked somewhere in the 100 to 200 range."

In fact, the Shanghai rankings had the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 72nd position in 2010 and the percentage of Israeli universities in the Shanghai 500 was higher than any other country. So, the vice-chancellor's logic leads to the conclusion that Shanghai does at a better job at capturing this aspect of excellence than QS or THE.

Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem were not in the THE 200 or indeed the THE top 400. What happened is that Thomson Reuters either did not receive or did not ask for the information.