sutton092

If you are applying to a British university and you are concerned not with personal transformation, changing your life or social justice activism but with simple things like enjoying your  course and finishing it and getting a job what would you look for? Performance in global rankings? Staff salaries? Spending? Staff student ratios? Starting with student satisfaction, here are a few basic correlations between scores for overall student satisfaction on t he Guardian UK rankings and a number of variables from the Guardian rankings, the  Times Higher Education  TEF simulation  (THE), the  Hefce survey of educational qualifications, and the THE survey of vice-chancellor's pay. Average Entry Tariff ( Guardian )   .479** Staff student ratio ( Guardian ) .451** Research Excellence Framework score (via THE)  .379** Spending per student ( Guardian )  .220 * Vice chancellor salary (via THE) .167 Average salary (via THE) .031 Total staff (via THE) .099...

The higher education industry tends to respond to global rankings in two ways. University bureaucrats and academics either get overexcited, celebrating when they are up, wallowing in self-pity when down, or they reject the idea of rankings altogether. Bahram Bekhradnia of the Higher Education Policy Institute in the UK has  published a report on international rankings which adopts the second option. University World News has several comments including a summary of the report by Bekhradnia. To start off, his choice of rankings deserves comment. He refers to the "four main rankings", Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) from Shanghai, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education (THE) and U- Multirank. It is true that the first three are those best known to the public, QS and Shanghai by virtue of their longevity and THE because of its skilled branding and assiduous cultivation of the great, the good and the greedy of the academic world. U- Multirank is chosen ...

The University of Ottawa (UO) has been a great success over the last few years, especially in research. In 2004 it was around the bottom third of the 202-300 band in the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities . By 2016 it had reached the 201st place, although the Shanghai rankers still recorded it as being in the 201-300 band. Another signing of a highly cited researcher, another paper in Nature , a dozen more papers listed in the Science Citation Index and it would have made a big splash by breaking into the Shanghai top 200. The Shanghai rankings have, apart from recent problems with the Highly Cited Researchers indicator , maintained a stable methodology so this is a very solid and remarkable achievement. A look at the individual components of these rankings shows that UO has improved steadily in the the quantity and the quality of research. The score for publications rose from 37.8 to 44.4 between 2004 and 2016, from 13.0 to 16.1 for papers in Nature and Science, and fro...

A plague is sweeping the Universities of the West, rankophilia or an irrational and obsessive concern with position and prospects in global rankings and a unwillingness to exercise normal academic caution and scepticism. The latest victim is Newcastle University whose new head, Chris Day, wants to make his new employer one of the best in the world. Why does he want to do that? "His ambition - to get the university into the Top 100 in the world - is not simply a matter of personal or even regional pride, however. With universities increasingly gaining income from foreign students who often base their choices of global rankings, improving Newcastle’s position in the league tables has economic consequences." So Newcastle is turning its back on its previous vision of becoming a "civic university" and will try to match its global counterparts. It will do that by enhancing its research reputation. 'While not rowing back from Prof Brink’s mantra of “what are we good a...

There has been a lot of talk lately about the quality of teaching and learning in universities. This has always an been an important element in national rankings such as the US News  America's Best Colleges and the Guardian and Sunday Times in the UK, measured by things like standardised test scores, student satisfaction, reputation surveys, completion rates and staff student ratio. There have been suggestions that university teaching staff need to be upgraded by attending courses in educational theory and practice or by obtaining some sort of certification or qualification. The Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) has just published data on the number of staff with educational qualifications in English higher educational institutions. The university with the largest number of staff with some sort of educational qualification is Huddersfield which unsurprisingly is very pleased. The university's website   reports HEFCE's assertion that “information about ...