sutton092

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has been slower than some others to jump on the rankings train but it seems to be making up for lost time. In addition to the standard world rankings there are now MENA (or Arab world or region) university rankings from Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education (THE),  US News (USN)  and Webometrics. Taking methodologies developed to rank elite western universities and applying them to regions with different traditions, resources and priorities is no easy task. For most Arab universities, research is of little significance and attaining international prominence is something that only a few places can reasonably hope for. But there is still a need to differentiate among those institutions that are focussed largely on teaching. Alex Usher of HESA has spoken of the difficulty of using metrics based on research, expenditure, and student quality. I agree that institutional data is not very helpful here. However, measures of s...

A regular story in the ranking world is the rise of Asia, usually as a warning to stingy Western governments who fail to give their universities the money that they desperately need to be world-class. Sometimes the rise of Asia turns out to be nothing more than a methodological tweaking or a bug that allows minor fluctuations to be amplified. Asia often turns out to be just East Asia or sometimes even just Shanghai and Peking. But it still remains true that China, followed perhaps by South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, is steadily becoming a scientific superpower and that the USA and Europe are entering a period of relative decline. This blog has already noted that China has overtaken the West in supercomputing power and in the total output of scientific publications . David Goldman of Asia Times, writing in Breitbart , has reported another sign of the rise of China: the number of doctorates in STEM subjects is well ahead of the USA. And we should remember that many of those...

Pok Wong, or Fiona Pok Wong, a graduate of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in Cambridge,  wants 60,000 pounds for a breach of contract and fraudulent misrepresentation and false imprisonment after a protest at the graduation ceremony. ARU has appeared in this blog before following its spectacular performance in the research impact indicator in the THE world rankings. It has had the common sense to keep quiet about this rather quirky result. Ms Wong has claimed that her degree in International Business Strategy was just a "Mickey Mouse" degree and that the teaching was of poor quality with one lecturer coming late and leaving early and sometimes even telling the students to self study in the library. She is reported to claim that "since graduating ... it has been proven that the degree ... does not play a role to help secure a rewarding job with good prospects." It seems that in 2013 she had a job as a Financial Planner with AIA International so her degree from ARU...

From time to time the question of the salaries of university administrators resurfaces. Last August the issue of the salary of the yacht and Bentley owning  vice-chancellor of the University of Bolton in the UK received national prominence. His  salary of GBP 260,500 , including pension contributions and healthcare benefits, seemed to have little relationship to the quality of the university which was not included in the QS and THE world rankings and managed a rank of 1,846 in Webometrics and 2,106 in University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP). A poll in the local newspaper showed 93% of respondents opposed to the increase. A previous post in this blog reported  that vice chancellors salaries had no statistically significant relationship to student satisfaction in the UK although they had more than average faculty salaries and the number of faculty with teaching qualifications. This issue has cropped up in the US where it has been noted that the highest paid univ...

University rankings are now being used for purposes that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. The latest is supporting the large scale borrowing of money by UK universities. The Financial Times has an interesting article by Thomas Hale about the growing financialisation of British higher education. He reports that some universities such as Portsmouth, Bristol, Cardiff and Oxford are resorting to capital markets for financing supposedly because of declining government support. The University of  Portsmouth has borrowed GBP 100 million from two North American institutional investors. The placement agent was Lloyds and  PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) the advisors. "The money will be spent on the first phase of “estate development”. It is expected to involve a number of buildings, including an indoor sports facility, the extension of a lecture hall, and a flagship “teaching and learning building”." It seems that this is just part of a larger trend. "The private placem...