Do schools (and universities) kill creativity?
Most of you will be familiar with TED (www.ted.com). It has been there in the back of my mind for some time, but I haven’t found the time to watch much of its extensive material. This video sees “creativity expert” Sir Ken Robinson talk about the role of education in suppressing or nurturing innate creativity. I found it entertaining and thought-provoking. His focus is at younger ages, but I would argue that much of his commentary is applicable to universities too and that it is increasingly unacceptable for them to simply accept that the damage has already been done. What do you think?
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
IREG-6 Conference Presentation and Paper
The QS Intelligence Unit is presenting today at the IREG-6 conference in Taipei
Our presentation focuses on the student as central to QS ranking and evaluation initiatives with a particular focus on the persistent inclusion of employability factors in our work. The slides and accompanying paper are available on the following links.
Do not solicit survey responses
The QS Intelligence Unit works very hard to produce impartial, objective and rigorous evaluations of universities worldwide. The majority of stakeholders, even those who may not entirely agree with our approaches increasingly respect the integrity of our efforts. The reputation of our work is central to its continued value to all who place value upon it.
We cannot tolerate institutions overtly soliciting specific responses to our surveys and any institution found doing so may have their survey responses for the given year invalidated. Our policy is documented here.
The above is an an anonymous example of an institution breaching these guidelines. This does not reflect well on the said institution and not only will it result in responses being invalidated, repeated breaches may result in our disclosing the identities of institutions undertaking such action.
Just don’t do it.
QSIU at AIEA Conference in Washington DC
Come and see us if you’re here too.
Number crunching
We have had a number of requests recently, enquiring how we get from A to B. THese fall into 2 categories:
1.SUBJECT AGGREGATION
University A only ranks 270 in the 2011/2012 university rankings and the faculty rankings rank her 48 in Social Sciences, 51 in Arts & Humanities, 59 in Life Sciences, 89 in Natural Sciences, 115 in Engineering & IT. Shouldn’t be better rank in the global 2011/2012 university rankings? Because we also can observe that some universities such as University B ranks 96 in the 2011/2012 university rankings and their faculty areas only rank 123 in Social Sciences, 66 in Arts & Humanities, 150 in Life Sciences, 210 in Natural Sciences, 244 in Engineering & IT. So, i can suppose the University A should be better ranked.
This case is simple. The faculty area rankings we produce are based on academic reputation only. When aggregated they contribute only 40% of the overall score with another five indicators making up the difference. In the above case University A will undoubtedly rank better for Academic Reputation but will be let down by aspects such as Faculty Student, Employer Reputation and Citations per Faculty which are only considered at an overall level
2. AGGREGATION BY INDICATOR RANK
Some institutions have questioned why their overall rank does not necessarily fall intuitively amongst the range of ranks for the indicators. This again, is relatively simple, the indicator ranks are not perfectly correlated, leading to the situation where institutions that are comparatively consistent across the board are likely to do better than institutions that might be dynamite in some areas and weak in others. Consider the following example:
Institution A is ranked 250th in all indicators and scores an overall rank of 225.
Institution B is rankined 230th in all indicators, except faculty student ratio where it ranks 610th, it has an overall rank of 270th.
This is a hypothetical simplified example to demonstrate the point. The individual indicator ranks for Institution A have been displaced by Institution B in all indicators but one and as a result of combining this with additional comparable examples that affect all indicators evenly (in this model) the rank of Institution A seems higher than intuition might expect.
Ultimately overall ranks are based on aggregated scores and the differeng characteristics of the indicators can easily produce circumstances where the overall rank may appear to not be an accurate aggregation of the separate indicator ranks.
Use of “web metrics” to evaluate universities
There are a number of different takes on how to evaluate universities out there. The most inclusive of these seems to be to use web metrics, this is most notably applied through Webometrics Ranking Web of Universities and through the more one-dimensional 4icu.
Due to their inclusiveness, Webometrics looks at over 20,000 institutions, we frequently refer to these sources when we consider the validity of inclusion of new institutions in our lists and tables, amongst other considerations. I have some misgivings about these measures at the top of the table – asserting that MIT is stronger than Harvard because more rich files can be found on their website or because more sites link there this year seems a little academic. Also at a global level there is such an overwhelming emphasis on English – in Webometrics there are only 4 institutions in the top 50 from countries where the prevalent language is something other than English.
However, were we looking at a region where no country has an overt advantage towards English – such as Latin America, or Arabic countries the results may be more discerning. In this context, the volume of content in English could be seen as a measure of openness and international influence and since all subject institutions would have equal advantage this may have merit – particulalry in parts of the world where databases and institutional systems may not be as sophisticated as others and comprehensive data may not be available.
Next month, QS is due to publish its inaugural QS University Rankings – Latin America and we have been given unique access to Webometrics results for the region to examine whether or not they could work as an effective indicator in that context.
The current thinking is, that if we strip out the Google Scholar component, as it arguably overlaps with our analysis of SciVerse Scopus, we may have an interesting input.
Comments and input welcome.
The lowdown on self-citations
Self-citations are often a point of discussion when it comes to ranking season, and never more than this year when, for the first time, we have had access to the necessary data to be able to remove self-citations from our consideration thanks to additional data supplied by Elsevier from SciVerse Scopus this year, but what does that really mean?
Simply put, a self-citation is an author citing their own previous work. Many leading academics may have every reason to do so having been responsible for some of the seminal works in their field, other academics may engineer opportunity to do so in order to influence their personal h-index or their institutional metrics. Either way, self-citations are a fact of life and can potentially be used contructively to trach threads of research and map academic careers.
As with many things there are a number of different ways the impact of self-citations can be viewed:
- Of all of the institutions we looked at the institution with the largest absolute number of self-citations, by some margin, is Harvard with over 93,000 representing 12.9% of their overall citations count
- The top five institutions producing over 3,000 papers, in terms of proportion of self-citations are all in Eastern Europe – St Petersburg State University, Czech Technical University, Warsaw University of Technology, Babes-Bolyai University and Lomonosov Moscow State University
- The top five in terms of the difference in citations per paper when self-citations are excluded are Caltech, Rockefeller, UC Santa Cruz, ENS Lyon and the University of Hawaii
- And the top 10 in terms of the difference in citations per faculty when self-citations are included are:
| # | Institution | Country |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | California Institute of Technology (Caltech) | United States |
| 2 | Rockefeller University | United States |
| 3 | Stanford University | United States |
| 4 | Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) | South Korea |
| 5 | Karolinska Institute | United States |
| 6 | Princeton University | United States |
| 7 | Leiden University | Netherlands |
| 8 | Harvard University | United States |
| 9 | University of California, San Diego (UCSD) | United States |
| 10 | University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) | United States |
Caltech have been perennially number one, amongst institutions featured in the main ranking, for this indicator and nothing has changed this year, although due to the impact of removing self-citations the gap has closed somewhat in the underlying ratios and for some institutions further down the tables, this revision in the methodology may be felt more keenly.
Record survey responses fuel QS World University Rankings 2011/2012
Tomorrow sees our latest results emerge on www.topuniversities.com. This year we have had the good fortune to attract record survey responses both of Academics and Employers. Over the 33,000 academics and over 16,000 employers have contributed their views to form this year’s response base. More detail on the survey responses is available here:
Fact files have been delivered this year with more detail than ever and international media are poised to publish and reflect on the results in the morning. You will notice something different about the presentation of our tables this year – and that is the emphasis on fees. Wherever we have been able to track down data we are publishing average undergraduate and postgraduate, domestic and international fees this year – giving prospective international students – particulalry those in countries where domestic fees are escalating – an invaluable resource to help make the best decisions.
More analysis here over the next few days.
QS Classifications refined to embrace age dimension for 2011 and beyond
First seen alongside the 2009 edition of the QS World University Rankings® the QS Classifications have become part of the annual fabric. In 2010 we evolved the notation to be a little more versatile and (we hope) intuitive, and in 2011 we have added a fourth dimension – that of age.
These classifications were initially inspired by the far more sophisticated Carnegie Classification system familiar to those with knowledge of higher education in the US. The inclusion of the age dimension was inspired by some fascinating work we have conducted this year on the influence of institutional age on development trajectory and performance in international evaluations.
The age dimension breaks down like this:
| Age | ||
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Historic | >= 100 years old |
| 4 | Mature | < 100 years old |
| 3 | Established | < 50 years old |
| 2 | Young | < 25 years old |
| 1 | New | < 10 years old |
Age is currently determined by largely self-submitted data on foundation year. We are aware that there can be some ambiguity here – is foundation year the year a foundation stone was laid for the first university building; the year the institution got university status; the date of the last merger that led to the institution taking its present shape; the year of first student intake; or the year the first cohort graduated. We will be working with our system and institutions themselves to refine this measure over the coming months.
The complete methodology for the classifications is available here.
2011/2012 Fact Files Released
Fact files for this years rankings have been distributed to institutions this evening.
Fact files are intended to give institutions fair warning of their results – for better or worse – enabling them to prepare press releases or brace themselves for tough questions. Sadly not everyone can go up and for every success story there is a setback. The whole world moves and institutions have to be progressive to maintain a position. For example, in the last year alone, the average proportion of international students amongst top 200 universities has increased by 5.8%.
The HTML fact files we have distributed look a little more basic than this more graphical example and include key links to specific resources we thought might be of interest, but this fictional example should give you an idea of what you can expect.
