Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2012/13 - Ask the editor

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Hi Phil,

Some questions:
(1)Do you think UG students should base their decisions to go to Uni on the rankings? If yes/no, why? Isn't it a fact that the rankings signal how good the Uni in research, not teaching, which the latter is the (main) concern for UG students?
(2)What are the flaws or weaknesses do you think the rankings have? List them please.
(3)What are the drawbacks going to Uni base on rankings?
(4)If you were a parent, would you advice your children to decide a Uni base on rankings? Why?

Reply 41

Phil Baty

Original post by CJ

A question of my own - how much feedback do you get from Universities, post-publication?

Do you get any requests to review any of the rankings either pre or post publication (assuming universities are shown the ranking before the public).

I have had to hire a full time staff member to deal with the global interest in the rankings. I've had 100 or so emails since I started this conversation an hour ago. We are keen to be as transparent as possible and that means explaining ourselves and being as transaprent as possible with every institution involved in the rankings.

I'm afraid that my time is now up. But thanks for the interest and engagement. All the new rankigns results are live at http://bit.ly/thewur

Reply 42

oxymoronic

Hi,

My question is in two parts:

If you had a child who was applying to university for 2013, how much emphasis would you tell them to place on rankings such as this one when making their decisions?

Secondly, do you believe that the publishers of such rankings have a role to play in ensuring that applicants are educated in how/when/why they should/should not use university rankings as part of their decision making? I'd also like it if you could extend your answer to talk about why you do/do not believe this to be the case.

Thanks :smile:

Reply 43

0404343m

Original post by Phil Baty

There is no science bias, but there is a research bias: research indicators do dominate as this is a ranking of research-intensive world-class universities. So that means small liberal arts colleges which may be offering a great undergradaute experience may not do so well against our metrics.

OK- we're from completely different ends of the spectrum here, but I accept and respect your views and points (see my edited version above about disclaimers which I hadn't finished updating when you replied). I will say one final thing though: There is fantastic research going on that's highly influential in fields that these broad measures can't hope to pick up on. History journals are lucky to generate ten citations. Professors are lucky to write 20 papers in a career. That doesn't mean the work isn't valuable or world leading, it just means it's drowned out by 500 papers from a nearby drugs lab that generate citations whether good, bad, or indifferent. Georgetown and Dartmouth are not small, liberal arts colleges teaching solely undergraduates, either.

Thanks for your time and answers.

(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 44

Joinedup

Did you get the quote used on the cover of the print version;'an outstanding guide for prospective students' vc uni of bath. Before or after you told her Bath had moved up to 3?

Just comments really...
I think the best/worst features in the opinion of the su presidents isn't very useful. E.g. The guy at derby moaned about travel between campus sites, which isn't something undergrads need to do for their course, though he'll have had to trek around for hustings.

Probably you should explore the nss in greater depth, some potential applicants seem to think it's a totty and beer index.

Reply 45

kaboon-supreme

Hello Mr.P Baty

I am in the process of applying to a University for an engineering course, and i am torn between two choices. The first choice being Bristol University which has a ranking domestically and the second choice which is University of Manchester which has a good reputation. upon completing the degree i would like to look for employment abroad so can you please inform me which of these institutions would be wise to choose and their international reputation, also which one employers prefer.

Reply 46

heyimbored

Original post by RK

Hi Phil. Thanks for coming on to TSR.

There sometimes seems to be quite a bit of movement in some universities form one year to the next. Take my old university for example:

The University of York has ranked 81st in 2010-11, 121st in 2011-12 and then back up to 103rd this year.

Can an institution really vary so much from year to year? Or should we take the table as a guide of where a university sits, perhaps averaging out over several years, or looking at trends as opposed to an absolute position in one year?

This wasn't answered (from what I saw when flicking down the pages), but I have a response for it which may explain it to you.

I think you just need to look at it in a different way; instead of thinking 'it's dropped 40 places, that's a lot', think of it relative to the other universities on the list, is there really that much of a difference between 80th and 120th?

Think of it in terms of the national league tables first; there's always the same 5 or 6 sitting at the top year upon year, with maybe a few of them swapping places. Then you have the next 20 or so, and you could probably put them in any order without raising too many eyebrows, maybe with a couple of exceptions that need to be in the 8-20 kind of range. For example if Nottingham were 18th one year and 12th the next, would anyone really care? Or Manchester is currently 29th in the complete university guide, but if it was even as high as 10th next year, would anyone say anything? Probably not. It's quite simply the fact that these institutions are all of a pretty high standard, and are really all on a comparable level.

Move that up to the global tables and it's all just scaled up; you've got the top 5 'elite' places from UK, a whole host of countries in the rest of Europe, Canda, the US (which could probably be expanded to a top 10), as well as places like Japan, Australia etc...as well as the one or two top global places in other countries, and the rising places in Asia etc...The top 60 or so is probably complied pretty much entirely from them and with maybe the very top places needing to make up the top 5-10 ones, the rest could probably be swapped around quite a bit because they're all comparable. Then you have the next 10-20-30 places in all of those countries as well, which probably goes well into the 200s at least, again all of a similar level.

These are all of the worlds top institutions and it must be hard to separate them; St Andrews is 108th, but is regularly put in the same league as Oxbridge domestically.

Just think; 5 places in the domestic rankings doesn't really mean anything, it's the same in the global rankings but on a much larger scale because there are so many more universities.

Reply 47

Smack

Volunteer Team

Original post by 0404343m

Finally: Why?

To make money, of course. A lot of teenagers would like to believe that enrolling in certain universities will entitle them to certain jobs above those who enrolled in other universities, or that employers will use the opinion of a journalist in helping select for positions, and newspaper league tables tap into this market by "ranking" universities in order based on arbitrary weightings of data that is often of absolutely no relevance to undergraduates.

Reply 48

Doglamlico

Original post by Phil Baty

They are! Moving up into the top 40 in the world -- about 0.25 % of all higher education institutions seems pretty decent to me.

why is not higher? when you rank by social sciences, suddenly it moves up to the top 5 in many rankings, and nationally it's consistently in the top 5. Why is it, then, that UCL and Imperial rank so highly compared to it, when LSE is considered to be on par with them?

Reply 49

Eboracum

Original post by Phil Baty

There is no bias. This is simply what our data shows. The US has some of the very best universities inthe world. Look at funding: the US spends 2.6 per cent of its GDP on tertiary education. The UK spends 1.3 per cent. This explains a lot. It is remarkable how well the UK does given the limited funding universities receive.

Funding does not guarantee that something is better. A different field but to give you statistics on healthcare, The US spends 17.4% of GDP on healthcare and has an average life expectancy of 78.2 where as the UK spends 9.8% of GDP on healthcare and has an average life expectancy of 80.1.

Isn't the truth that all world rankings heavily favour US universities given their reputation when in actual fact for example, our 15th placed university is going to be better than their 15th place ranked university in terms of quality?

Reply 50

mc1000

Original post by Phil Baty

A Loughborough student I guess? There's quite a lot of weight beind our analysis. 50 million research paper citations give us a pretty solid basis for our research.

A former Loughborough student. Now a postgrad at QMUL; and even though QMUL performs well in these tables, I still consider the methodology to be flawed.

Does it not strike you as odd that Loughborough is ranked a respectable 26th (28th overall, but 26th of all the non-specialist teaching institutions) in the 2008 RAE, yet, worldwide, is ranked so far below other equivalently-ranked universities (e.g., Exeter, Newcastle, Birmingham...), all of which are firmly in the top 200? Even Leicester which is ranked over 20 places below Loughborough for research, is ranked in the top 200; while places like LJMU, mediocre universities, somehow are ranked similarly. It thoroughly defies the expected correlation.

Inevitably, research citations are an incredibly arbitrary and ambiguous methodology. The question we must ask is; to what extent do citations actually determine research quality? Putting the criterion citations of your 50 million journal articles as one of your highest priorities has its problems, and is something that - until it is rectified - shall continue to make the THE far less reliable than seemingly far more logical QS.

Fundamentally, a large number of citations do not necessarily mean that a piece of research is of greater quality than one with fewer citations, and vice-versa. More citations does not necessarily indicate a more important piece of research. More citations does not necessarily indicate the extent to which a piece of research pushes boundaries and progresses the world forward. Inevitably, citations will also unfairly benefit the world's most famous universities, while unfairly disadvantaging (to varying degrees) those that haven't made a name for themselves outside of their own countries.

Research output is another factor which cannot properly determine research quality or research importance. Hypothetically, if I was an academic who decided for some reason to re-write the entirety of my undergraduate degree courseworks (while writing scores of other papers of similar standard) and submit them all as separate articles for top journals (and on the hypothetical assumption that they would be accepted for publication (in reality they obviously wouldn't)), then I'd have produced a lot of research, but frankly it would all be crap. This is just a gross exaggeration of what happens in reality; obviously all academic papers in journals are of an adequate quality for publication, but there is still plenty of variation in quality (and as has already been said, isn't necessarily accounted for by citations or 'influence') - and research output is a therefore a thoroughly inaccurate criterion. Also, similarly to citation numbers, both research influence and reputation will unfairly advantage the world-famous institutions.

The THE just seems to me to be a completely biased, inaccurate table. 50 million journal articles is no doubt a good sample size; but if the data continue to be manipulated in this way, and the criteria remain the way they are, I think I'll just continue to stick with QS for the 'best of a bad situation' when it comes to assessing the quality of universities throughout the world.