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<td><FONT SIZE=2 FACE=Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif><b>Francis Hult</b> (<a href='mailto:fmhult@dolphin.upenn.edu'>fmhult@dolphin.upenn.edu</a>) suggested you might be interested in this <a href='http://theaustralian.news.com.au'>http://theaustralian.news.com.au</a> report. <br>Message: "Jiao Tong research performance is dominated by the English-speaking nations, which have 71 of the world's top 100 research universities, and particularly by the US, which has 17 of the top 20 and 54 of the top 100 this year. "</font><br></td>
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<p><FONT SIZE=3 FACE=Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif><b>Rankings ripe for misleading</b></font><br>
<FONT SIZE=1 FACE=Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif>Simon Marginson</font><br>
<FONT FACE=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=1>06 December 2006</FONT><br><br>
<FONT SIZE=2 FACE=Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif>IN 2004 the oldest public university in Malaysia, the University of Malaya, was ranked by the Times Higher Education Supplement at No.89 in the world. The vice-chancellor ordered huge banners declaring "UM a world's top 100 university" placed around the city.</font><br>
<p><FONT SIZE=2 FACE=Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif>But last year the THES changed the definition of Chinese and Indian students at UM from international to national and the university's position in the reputational surveys that comprise 50 per cent of the THES index also declined. The result was that UM dropped from 89 to 169. The university's reputation abroad and at home was in free fall. When the VC's position came up for renewal by the Government last March, he was replaced.
<p>But it wasn't just the vice-chancellor whose reputation had been trashed by the THES; it was UM, long established and one of the two strongest universities in an emerging knowledge economy with substantial virtues and strengths. UM had dropped 80 places without any decline in its performance (aside from spending too much on hubristic banners perhaps). </p>
<p>Some will argue that it does not matter whether the effects of rankings are desirable: reputational league tables are too potent to set aside. Perhaps. Yet these always incomplete and sometimes capricious systems define higher education to the world at large. Externally generated rankings begin to determine the purposes and outputs and values of higher education. </p>
<p>Do we want the rankings agencies to define the mission and identity of the model university? Once entrenched, rankings systems are hard to undo. </p>
<p>The first worldwide ranking by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Institute of Higher Education was in 2003. The sole focus is research. The Jiao Tong group argues that the only data sufficiently reliable for ranking purposes are broadly available and internationally comparable data of measurable research performance. It is considered impossible to compare teaching and learning across universities. And the Jiao Tong group does not want to employ subjective measures of opinion or data sourced from universities. </p>
<p>The bulk of the index - 60 per cent - is determined by publication and citation, principally in the science-based disciplines with some attention to social sciences and humanities. Another 30 per cent is determined by the winners of Nobel prizes in the sciences and economics and Fields medals in mathematics. The remaining 10 per cent is determined by dividing the total derived from the above data by the number of faculty. </p>
<p>Jiao Tong research performance is dominated by the English-speaking nations, which have 71 of the world's top 100 research universities, and particularly by the US, which has 17 of the top 20 and 54 of the top 100 this year. </p>
<p>For the most part the Jiao Tong index is methodologically sound and a valid basis for global comparisons. It measures only real outputs rather than subjective assessments of reputation, which may or may not be solidly grounded. Its methods are transparent and the collection has improved through time. </p>
<p>However, the chief problem with the Jiao Tong data lies not in its intrinsic validity but its use. For the most part it is understood across the world not as a ranking of university research performance but as a holistic ranking of the universities concerned and a marker of reputation in the emerging global university market. Harvard becomes understood not as No.1 research site according to Shanghai Jiao Tong University, but as No.1 university according to Shanghai Jiao Tong University. </p>
<p>Yet the Jiao Tong calculations favour universities large and comprehensive enough to amass strong research performance across a broad range of fields while carrying few research inactive staff. They favour universities that are strong in the sciences, universities from English-language nations because English is the language of research and universities from the US because Americans tend to cite Americans. </p>
<p>Whereas the main problem of the Jiao Tong index is in the way it is misused, the THES rankings are a sadder story. </p>
<p>The first world university rankings were published in 2004. In contrast with Shanghai Jiao Tong, the explicit aim is to produce a holistic ranking. Half of the THES index is comprised by university reputation with no necessary link to university performance. As well as the 40 per cent comprised by a reputational survey of academics, another 10 per cent is determined by a reputational survey of global employers.</p>
<p>In addition there are two internationalisation indicators: the proportion of students who are international (5 per cent) and the proportion of staff (5 per cent). Another 20 per cent is determined by the student-staff ratio, a quantity measure that is used as a proxy for teaching quality. The remaining 20 per cent is comprised by research citation performance. <br /><br />Methodologically, the index is open to some criticism. It is not specified who is surveyed or what questions are asked. The student internationalisation indicator rewards entrepreneurial volume building but not the quality of student demand or the quality of programs or services. Teaching quality cannot be adequately assessed using student-staff ratios. Research plays a lesser role in this index than in most understandings of the role of universities. The THES rankings reward a university's marketing division better than its researchers. Further, the THES index is too easily open to manipulation. By chang
ing the recipients of the two surveys, or the way the survey results are factored in, the results can be shifted markedly. <br /><br />This illustrates the more general point that rankings frame competitive market standing as much or more than they reflect it. <br /><br />Results have been highly volatile. There have been many sharp rises and falls, especially in the second half of the THES top200 where small differences in metrics can generate large rankings effects. Fudan in China has oscillated between 72 and 195, RMIT in Australia between 55 and 146. In the US Emory has risen from 173 to 56 and Purdue fell from 59 to 127. They must have let their THES subscriptions lapse. <br /><br />Second, the British universities do too well in the THES table. They have done better each successive year. This year Cambridge and Oxford suddenly improved their performance despite Oxford's present problems. The British have two of the THES top three and Cambridge has almost closed the gap
on Harvard. Yet the British universities are manifestly under-funded and the Harvard faculty is cited at 3 1/2 times the rate of its British counterparts. It does not add up. But the point is that it depends on who fills out the reputational survey and how each survey return is weighted. <br /><br />Third, the performance of the Australian universities is also inflated. <br /><br />Despite a relatively poor citation rate and moderate staffing ratios they do exceptionally well in the reputational academic survey and internationalisation indicators, especially that for students. My university, Melbourne, has been ranked by the 3703 academic peers surveyed by the THES at the same level as Yale and ahead of Princeton, Caltech, Chicago, Penn and University of California, Los Angeles. That's very generous to us but I do not believe it. <br /><br />Australia has 13 of the THES top 200 and appears as the third strongest system in the world, ahead of Japan, Canada, Germany and weste
rn Europe. <br /><br />Yet the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has correctly taken Australia to task for the size of its long-term reduction in public funding. Having done casework recently in research universities in Canada and The Netherlands, I can testify that on all objective indicators except the number of international students, leading universities in those countries are stronger than their Australian counterparts. <br /><br />No system of evaluation can encompass all the public and private benefits created by higher education or measure numerically all that it can encompass. Holistic rankings become an end in themselves without regard to exactly what they measure or whether they contribute to institutional and system improvement. The desire for rank ordering overrules all else. Once a rankings system is understood as holistic and reputational in form, it fosters its own illusion as a level playing field, obscuring the specific criteria used an
d the manner in which they favour some institutions and nations. National Jiao Tong performance correlates closely with levels of national investment in research. <br /><br />Rankings divert performance-oriented strategies from certain areas that, while central to university mission, are excluded because they are difficult or impossible to measure. Few comparisons focus on teaching and learning as such, though various proxies for teaching quality are used. Reputation-based rankings such as those of the THES favour universities already well known regardless of merit. One study of ranking found that one-third of those who responded to the survey knew little about the institutions concerned apart from their own. In the absence of soundly based knowledge, known university brands generate halo effects. The classic example is the US survey of students that found Princeton law school was ranked in the top 10 law schools in the country. But Princeton did not have a law school. <br /
><br />The ultimate question raised by holistic and homogenising rankings is the scope for self-determining diversity and innovation. <br /><br />The Shanghai Jiao Tong and THES rankings tend to boost the position of the comprehensive research intensive universities: the Jiao Tong because it is based on research, the THES because it is based on prestige and research universities enjoy most of that. <br /><br />The THES also favours entrepreneurial universities with strong marketing departments and large commercialised international education programs. <br /><br />Both ranking systems tend to downgrade most smaller specialist institutions, those whose work is primarily local and primarily technical and vocational. Within the category of research-intensive university, both rankings' norm is a particular type of research-intensive university at its peak in the US and Britain. The model global university is English speaking and science oriented. Only wealthy nations can provide
the necessary scientific infrastructure to conduct basic research at sufficient scale, mostly via government funding and in a few cases also through philanthropy. <br /><br />Meanwhile, the emergence of English as the global academic language has handed a rankings advantage to universities from nations whose first language is English in competition with western Europe and the emerging science nations in east Asia and Singapore. English is not the only language of research but it is the primary language of research publication and the only one with global standing. <br /><br />In some countries the effect of global rankings is to render venerable national universities less attractive and more vulnerable to their own people. Once their research performance is globally referenced, it becomes less worthy and a sign of their subordination within the global order. Their best clients, the students from leading families, are increasingly likely to cross the border and slip from thei
r grasp. <br /><br />This is especially damaging for leading universities in emerging nations that lack the capacity in research and communications technologies to make a ready transition to the global era. <br /><br />Although only certain kinds of universities are able to do well in global rankings, other institutions are pushed towards imitation regardless of the distance between their position and the leaders. <br /><br />In other words, once annexed to the process of formation of a worldwide reputational market, the Jiao Tong and THES indexes tend to reproduce global competition and the competitors in their own likeness. <br /><br />It is in Europe that an alternative method of university comparison has emerged. The system of rankings developed by the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE) in Germany and issued in conjunction with publisher Die Zeit began with all higher education institutions in Germany and is spreading to The Netherlands, Belgium and elsewhere.
CHE collects survey data from faculty and students. This is used to generate specific comparisons between institutions of research, teaching and services within each separate discipline and function. The CHE data is provided via an interactive web-enabled database that permits each student to examine and rank identified programs and-or institutional services based on their own chosen criteria. Those interrogating the data decide how the different objectives should be weighted, thereby acknowledging that quality is in the eye of the beholder. <br /><br />The CHE rankings dispense with the holistic rank ordering of institutions, noting that there is no one best university across all areas and "minimal differences produced by random fluctuations may be misinterpreted as real differences". <br /><br />These rankings provide a much more extensive range of useful comparative data, evade holistic comparisons and the damage they bring with them, and generate a dynamic of
continuous improvement that potentially operates on a win-win basis. This is healthier. <br /><br />In sum, a better approach to university rankings may involve: <br /><br />* Rejection of all rankings explicitly based onreputation. <br /><br />* Rejection of holistic rankings of institutions. <br /><br />* Rejection of all composite approaches that involve arbitrary weightings of heterogeneous purposes of higher education. <br /><br />* Recognition that comparisons of research performance such as those of Shanghai Jiao Tong University provide useful data that can encourage improved performance, but concentrating research comparisons at the level of discipline and inter-disciplinary clusters rather than institution-level measures. <br /><br />* Fostering of rankings tailored to specific and transparent purposes and interpreted only in the light of those purposes, such as those developed by CHE, which can provide useful data for student choice-making, university reflexivity a
nd public accountability. <br /><br />* Commitment by institutions to maximumopenness. <br /><br />* The use of independent agents to collect and analyse data. <br /><br />This is an edited text of a paper given in Bonn, Germany, last Monday at an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development workshop on Institutional Diversity: Rankings and Typologies in Higher Education. Simon Marginson is professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne. <br /></p></font></p>
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