QS Best Student Cities 2012
The first global ranking of student cities will be published by QS during February, in response to worldwide demand for more independent information on the locations of the leading universities.
Surveys of international students, in particular, have shown that location is second only to the perceived quality of a university and its courses as an influence on study choices. Until now, however, there has been no specialist global comparison of university cities.
The new QS ranking will compare the major international study locations – those with more than one world-ranked university – from a student’s perspective. Among the 11 indicators will be affordability and employer activity, as well as independent assessments of the quality of living. Continue Reading
Japanese universities move towards new era
By Martin Ince, convener of the QS Academic Advisory Board
Japan is a safe, developed country whose culture has global appeal, an international centre for design and style. Just the place that students might flock to from around the world.
Except that they don’t. As Japan’s university profile shows, Japanese universities do well on four of the six criteria we use to compile the World University Rankings, but fare miserably on the other two, attractiveness to international students and faculty.
There are deep-seated reasons for Japan’s inability to attract foreign academics, and indeed foreign labour in general. But universities are now doing something about their low appeal to overseas students. For while there are many reasons for Japan’s lack of allure foreign students, one of the big ones is within the universities’ own control.
It is simply that they start their academic year in April. That means that foreign students wanting to go to a Japanese university face a gap of almost a year before they can get started. And when they leave, they are again out of sync with other nations. While some Japanese universities already offer a limited autumn intake, moves for more radical change are gaining pace.
Now Tokyo University, 25 in the World University Rankings and standard-bearer for the nation’s higher education sector, has taken charge by proposing a move to autumn admissions. Continue Reading
UK universities challenged to rank in QS top 100
By John O’Leary, QS Academic Advisory Board
Ministers in the UK have become the latest to use QS rankings as a measure of universities’ performance. David Willetts, who is responsible for higher education in England, has challenged the country’s universities to win more places in the top 100 of the QS, Times Higher Education and Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings.
The initiative is intended to boost innovation, another part of the minister’s brief. The UK government is using QS rankings alone to illustrate the excellence of its universities in a poster campaign to promote the country ahead of the London Olympics, quoting the UK’s four representatives in the world’s top ten. Mr Willetts acknowledged in his speech that the three main rankings used different methodologies, but set a target for UK representation in the top 100 to grow.
The minister said all the rating agencies agreed that the UK university system was second only to the United States. He endorsed the view of Professor Eric Thomas, President of Universities UK, that “if the British economy has been a stagecoach stuck in the mud then our universities are one of the horses that can pull it out.”
As part of his innovation drive, Mr Willetts invited leading overseas universities to set up in the UK in partnership with domestic universities to conduct research in science and technology and offer postgraduate courses. The proposal mirrors the establishment in New York of a graduate school focused on science and technology by Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, which is based in Haifa. Unlike the New York development, any equivalent in the UK will not receive public funding.
Mr Willetts said private finance would be required, possibly with sponsorship from businesses that were keen to recruit more British graduates, although he hoped local councils might donate land in an effort to attract a graduate school. Mr Willetts has also been trying to mitigate the damage done to international student recruitment by tougher visa regulations introduced by his own government. His department has published new research demonstrating the labour market successes of overseas graduates educated in the UK. A survey conducted by i-graduate 30 months after graduation showed those who had studied in the UK earning substantially more than those who took degrees in their home country.
The report is consistent with the QS Global Employer Survey Report last year, which showed employers in most countries putting a premium on an international student experience.
The Leiden Ranking
By Martin Ince, convener of the QS Global Academic Advisory Board
At the QS World University Rankings®, we are always keen to see how other people go about looking at universities. This month has been notable for the appearance of the Leiden ranking, which offers a highly specific view of academic excellence as expressed through citations.
Paul Wouters, director of CWTS at Leiden and director of the Leiden ranking, says that it uses a methodology which allows research at institutions of radically different size and subject mix to be compared fairly. It is also intended to compensate for the different characteristics of English and non-English publishing, and for the potential distorting effects of a few much-cited outlier papers. We asked Paul how the Leiden Ranking fits into the world ecology of university rankings, especially the HEEACT and Shanghai rankings, which are also designed to look at high-level research performance.
He said: “There are a number of fundamental differences. Most rankings combine performance on very different dimensions in a single number, in particular educational performance and scientific performance. HEEACT is similar to our ranking in that it focuses on scientific performance. Another issue is that Shanghai and HEEACT are strongly size-dependent. Larger universities will almost always outperform smaller ones in these rankings.” The Leiden Ranking focuses on the average performance of a university for each of the publications it produces. This means that the large differences in citation behaviour between scientific fields are corrected for.
Next, we asked, how does the system cope with the different publishing cultures of different subjects? Paul replied: “We apply a correction for the differences between citation behaviour in different scientific fields. In addition, our ranking uses fractional counting indicators. Publications co-authored by multiple universities are assigned fractionally to each of the universities involved. In the full counting approach used by most rankings, co-authored publications are fully assigned to each university involved, causing double counting of these publications.
The use of fractional counting is another way of making fields with different publication and citation cultures more comparable.” Paul says that when the results came in, his team’s biggest surprise was the difference which the fractional counting approach makes. Universities with a strong medical orientation tend to fall in a ranking where fractional counting is used, while universities with a technical focus do better. In the Netherlands, for instance, differences between universities that are apparent using the full counting approach disappear almost completely with fractional counting.
The Leiden methodology agrees with its competitors about the excellence of the top US universities. It has 42 of them in its top 50, led by MIT, Princeton and Harvard. Only two non-US universities make it into the top 20: EPFL and ETH, the Francophone and German-speaking federal institutions of Switzerland, at 12 and 18 respectively.
Cambridge, top in the QS ranking, appears here in 31st place. It is one of four UK institutions in the top 50 along with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (33), Oxford (36), and Durham (42). The only other non-US institutions in the top 50 are the Weizmann Institute (Israel) at 25 and the Technical University of Denmark at 45. The ranking shows the top 500 universities, with Moscow and St Petersburg in the last two places.
The table also shows the volume of publications for each institution found in the Web of Science database and used for the ranking. The total among the top 50 ranges from 33511 for Harvard to 1652 for the LSHTM. The ranking is at www.leidenranking.com, and CWTS is at www.cwts.nl.
Count your saints: a new ranking criterion?
By John O’Leary, executive member of the QS Global Academic Advisory Board
University vice-chancellors and presidents have put forward all sorts of measures that would improve their institution’s standing in rankings – from academic prizes to community projects and student exchanges. But the rector of the University of Santo Tomas (UST), in Manila, came up with a truly unique proposal at the QS-APPLE conference, which his institution hosted.
Perhaps only half jokingly, he suggested that the number of saints produced by a university should be adopted as a measure in the QS World University Rankings®. Not surprisingly, UST, the largest single-campus Catholic university in the world and the oldest university in Asia, would do extremely well in the canonisation table.
Father Rolando De la Rosa said the university had 30 saints to its name, as well as several presidents and prime ministers of the Philippines – “the better ones,” according to Fr De la Rosa. Further research suggests that most universities are shamefully ignorant of their tally of saints, if indeed they have any, possibly because they had not expected them to become an indicator in rankings. No doubt, tenuous links to long-forgotten saints will soon be discovered at universities all around the world if Fr De la Rosa’s idea catches on.
Oxford should do well, laying claim to at least a dozen saints and martyrs, including Thomas of Hereford, who was Chancellor of the university in the 13th century, when he was said to have “applied firm discipline and confiscated weapons”, as well as being generous to poor students. But can any university rival UST?
Public spending and university quality: is there a link?
by Martin Juno
Broadly speaking, higher education systems range from those relaying almost entirely on public funding to those mainly supported by private sources. Of course, there are a variety of options between those extreme points and most countries try mixed schemes.
Which system provides the better outcomes in terms of university teaching and research quality?
An interesting exercise that may provide a general answer to this question is to compare the relative performance of institutions operating in different funding environments. In order to conduct this analysis we used the higher education finance indicators provided by UNESCO (available here) , establishing four range groups (or quartiles) of public spending on tertiary education as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the countries . Then the top 400 QS World University Rankings (QSWUR) institutions – available on topuniversities.com- were distributed among each spending level quartile and the average scores for every group were calculated.
Continue Reading
2012 Employer Survey sign-up facility
Employer Reputation contributes to the graduate employability aspect, which is one of the six key aspects utilized to compile the QS World University Rankings®. Respondents are asked to identify universities they consider to be best at preparing their graduates for the workplace. Please voice your opinion and register your interest here. It will only take a minute.
2012 Academic Survey sign-up facility
by Baerbel Eckelmann
Academic Reputation is one of the six key aspects utilized to compile the QS World University Rankings® and it is considered as the world’s most viewed global evaluation of university research strength. The views of the most informed stakeholders count.
Over 2,700 academics have signed up since the process was launched in February 2010, so, please join these faculty members, university leaders and administrators and register your interest here. It will only take a minute.
Supplement QS University Rankings: Latin America 2011/2012
Supplement 2011/2012 for the first QS University Rankings: Latin America
- Ben Sowter introduces this year’s research and the results tables.
- Danny Byrne reflects on the results of the rankings and looks at some of the issues surrounding access to higher education for students from low-income backgrounds.
- John O’Leary introduces QS Stars, a new university rating system that has been implemented during 2011.
- Liliana Casallas looks at the status of collaboration agreements between Latin American universities and those elsewhere in the world.
HE News Brief 18.10.11
by Abby Chau
- UK: A new report outlining the higher education outlook
- LATIN AMERICA: A new rankings of the region has raised questions about governmental spending habits
- INDIA: Foreign branches must adhere to too many restrictions
- US: Some institutions have closed foreign branches
- AUSTRALIA: Trends for international student numbers Continue Reading
-
Recent articles
