sutton092

Getting ready for next year's university rankings.

The Japan Times recently published an article by Takamitsu Sawa, President and Distinguished Professor at Shiga University, discussing the apparent decline of Japan's universities in the global rankings. He notes that in 2014 there were five Japanese universities in the top 200 of the Times Higher Education  (THE) world rankings but only two in 2016. He attributes Japan's poor performance to the bias of the citations indicator towards English language publications and the inability or reluctance of Japanese academics to write in English. Professor Sawa seems to be under the impression that THE does not count research papers not written in English, which is incorrect. It is, however, true that the failure of Japanese scholars to write in English prevents their universities doing better in the rankings. He also blames lack of funding from the government and the Euro-American bias of the THE reputation survey. The most noticeable thing about this article is that the author talk...

The US News Online Program Rankings will be published on January 9th, 2018

My previous post on the City University of Hong Kong has been republished in the Hong Kong Standard . So far I can find no reference to anyone asking about the City University of Hong Kong's submission of student data to THE or data about faculty numbers for any Hong Kong university. I also noticed that the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is not on the list of 500 universities in the QS Employability Rankings although it is 12th in the one published in THE . Is there a dot here? 

Global university rankings are now well into their second decade. Since 2003, when the first Shanghai rankings appeared, there has been a steady growth of global and regional rankings. At the moment most global rankings are of two kinds, those that focus entirely or almost entirely on research and those such as the Russian Round Rankings, Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) that claim to also measure teaching, learning or graduate quality in some way, although even those are biased towards research when you scratch the surface a little. The ranking industry has become adept at measuring research productivity and quality in various ways. But the assessment of undergraduate teaching and learning is another matter. Several ranking organisations use faculty student ratio as a proxy for quality of teaching which in turn is assumed to have some connection with something that happens to students during their programmes. THE also count institutional income, research inc...

The Times Higher Education  (THE) Asian Universities Summit will be held at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzen, China, 5th-7th February, 2018. The 2018 THE Asian universities rankings will be announced.