sutton092

The previous post was the 1,000th.

This comment is by Christian Schulz of the University of Hamburg. He points that the University of Hamburg's rise in the Shanghai rankings was not the result of highly cited researchers moving from other institutions but the improvement of research within the university. If this is something that applies to other German universities, then it could be that Germany has a policy of growing its own researchers rather than importing talent from around the world. It seems to have worked very well for football so perhaps the obsession of British universities with importing international researchers is not such a good idea.. I just wanted to share with you, that  we did not  acquire  two researchers to get on the HCR List to get a higher rank in the Shanghai Ranking. Those two researchers are Prof. Büchel and Prof. Ravens-Sieberer. Prof. Büchel is working at our university for over a decade now and Prof. Ravens-Sieberer is at our university since 2008. Please also aknowledge, tha...

This post is by Pablo Achard of the University of Geneva. It refers to  the Shanghai subject rankings. However, the problem of outliers in subject and regional rankings is one that affects all the well known rankings and will probably become more important over the next few years How a single article is worth 60 places We can’t repeat it enough: an indicator is bad when a small variation in the input is overly amplified in the output. This is the case when indicators are based on very few events. I recently came through this issue (again) with Shanghai’s subject ranking of universities. The universities of Geneva and Lausanne (Switzerland) share the same School of Pharmacy and a huge share of published articles in this discipline are signed under the name of both institutions. But in the “Pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences” ranking, one is ranked between the 101 st and 150 th position while the other is 40 th . Where does this difference come from? Comparing the scores obtained ...

In the previous post I referred to the vulnerabilities that have developed in the most popular world rankings, THE, QS and Shanghai ARWU, indicators that have a large weighting and can be influenced by universities that know how to work the system or sometimes are just plain lucky. In the latest QS rankings  four universities from Mexico, Chile, Brazil and Argentina have 90+ scores for the academic reputation indicator, which has a 40% weighting. All of these universities have low scores for citations per faculty which would seem at odds with a stellar research reputation. In three cases QS does not even list the score in its main table. I have spent so much time on the normalised citation indicator in the THE world and regional rankings that I can hardly bear to revisit the issue. I will just mention the long list of universities that have achieved improbable glory by a few researchers, or sometimes just one, on a multi-author international physics, medical or genetics project. T...

There is a problem with any sort of standardised testing. A test that is useful when a score has no financial or social significance becomes less valid when coaching industries workout how to squeeze a few points out of docile candidates and motivation becomes as important as aptitude. Similarly, a metric used to rank universities may be valid and reliable when nobody cares about the rankings. But once they are used to determine bureaucrats' bonuses, regulate immigration, guide student applications and distribute research funding then they become less accurate. Universities will learn how to apply resources in exactly the right place, submit data in exactly the right way and engage productively with the rankers. The Trinity College Dublin data scandal, for example, has indicated how much a given reported income can affect ranks in the THE world rankings. All of the current "big three" of global rankings have indicators that have become the source of volatility and that ar...

Universitas 21 (U21) produces an annual ranking not of universities but of 50 national university systems. There are 25 criteria grouped in four categories, resources, connectivity, environment and output. There is also an overall league table. The resources section consists of various aspects of expenditure on tertiary education. Output includes publications,  citations,  performance in the Shanghai rankings, tertiary enrolment, graduates and graduate employment . The top five in the overall rankings are USA, Switzerland, UK, Denmark and Sweden. No surprises there. The biggest improvements since 2013 have been by China, Malaysia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and South Africa. It is interesting to compare resources with output. The top ten for resources comprise six European countries, three of them in Scandinavia, Canada, the USA, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. The bottom 10 includes two from Latin America, four, including China, from Asia, three from Eastern Europe, and Sou...

In view of the remarkable performance of Veltech University in the THE Asian Rankings, rankers, administrators and publishers need to think seriously about the impact of self-citation, and perhaps also intra-institutional ranking. Here is the abstract of an article by Justin W Flatt, Alessandro Blassime, and Effy Vayena. Improving the Measurement of Scientific Success by Reporting a Self-Citation Index Abstract :   Who among the many researchers is most likely to usher in a new era of scientific breakthroughs? This question is of critical importance to universities, funding agencies, as well as scientists who must compete under great pressure for limited amounts of research money. Citations are the current primary means of evaluating one’s scientific productivity and impact, and while often helpful, there is growing concern over the use of excessive self-citations to help build sustainable careers in science. Incorporating superfluous self-citations in one’s writings requires litt...

From the E conomist ranking of British universities , which is based on the difference between expected and actual graduate earnings.  That, as Basil Fawlty said in a somewhat different context, explains a lot.   "Many of the universities at the top of our rankings convert bad grades into good jobs. At Newman, a former teacher-training college on the outskirts of Birmingham, classes are small (the staff:student ratio is 16:1), students are few (around 3,000) and all have to do a work placement as part of their degree. (Newman became a university only in 2013, though it previously had the power to award degrees.) Part of Newman’s excellent performance can be explained because more than half its students take education-related degrees, meaning many will work in the public sector. That is a good place for those with bad school grades. Indeed, in courses like education or nursing there is no correlation between earnings and the school grades a university expects." 

Malaysia has had a complicated relationship with global university rankings. There  was a fleeting moment of glory in 2004 when Universiti Malaya, the national flagship, leaped into t he top 100 of the THES-QS world rankings . Sadly, it turned out that this was the result of an error by the rankers who thought that ethnic minorities were international faculty and students. Since then the country's leading universities have gone up and  down , usually because of methodological changes rather than any merit or fault of their own. Recently though, Malaysia seems to have adopted sensible, if not always popular , policies and made steady advances in the Shanghai rankings . There are now three universities in the top 500, UM, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). UM has been rising since 2011 although it fell a bit last year because of the loss of a single highly cited researcher listed in the Thomson Reuters database. The Shanghai rankings rely ...

I have just come across a site, ACCESS, that includes a lot of excellent material on university rankings by Ruth A Pagell, who is Emeritus Faculty Librarian at Emory University and Adjunct Faculty at the University of Hawaii. I'll provide specific links to some of the articles later Go here  

It is reported that the Philippines is introducing free tuition in state universities.It will not really be free. The government will have to find P100 billion from a possible  "re-allocation of resources." If there is a graduate premium for degrees from Philippine universities then this measure will increase existing social inequalities and result in a transfer of wealth from the working class and small businesses to the privileged educated classes. Unless lecturers work for nothing and buildings and facilities materialize, Hogwarts style, out of nothing, tuition is never free.

According to T imes Higher Education (THE), the UK has educated more heads of state and government than any other country. The USA is a close second followed by France. No doubt this will get a let of publicity as the THE summit heads for London but, considering the state of the world, is it really something to be proud of?

America's Top Colleges is published by Forbes business magazine. It is an unabashed assessment of institutions from the viewpoint of the student as investor. The metrics are post-graduate success, debt, student experience, graduation rate and academic success. The top three colleges are Harvard, Stanford and Yale. The top three liberal arts colleges are Pomona, Claremont McKenna and Williams. The top three low debt private colleges are College of the Ozarks, Berea College and Princeton. The top three STEM colleges are MIT, Caltech and Harvey Mudd College.

Hobsons, the education technology company, has produced a ranking of global university rankings . The information provided is very limited and i hope there will be more in a while. Here are the top five according to a survey of international students inbound to the USA. 1.    QS World University Rankings 2.    THE World University Rankings 3.     Shanghai ARWU 4.     US News Best Global Universities 5.     Center for World University Rankings (formerly published at King Abdulaziz University).        

George Holmes, vice-Chancellor of the University of Bolton with a salary of GBP 220,120 and owner of a yacht and a Bentley, is not ashamed of his salary. According to an article by Camilla Turner in the Daily Telegraph , he says that he has had a very successful career and he hopes his students will get good jobs and have Bentleys. The university is ranked 86th in the Guardian 2018 league table which reports that 59.2% of graduates have jobs or in postgraduate courses six months after graduation. It does not appear in the THE or QS world rankings. Webometrics puts it 105th in the UK and 1846th in the world so I suppose he could claim to be head of a top ten per cent university. Perhaps Bolton should start looking for the owner of a private jet for its next vice-Chancellor. it might do even better.