this is not a blog post
David Cohen
Ranking the world's 'best' universities
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Interesting to see that one of the world’s great research specialists, Thomson Reuters, has just signed an agreement to provide the data from now on for the Times Higher Education’s annual survey of the world’s “best” universities.
The move will be of some interest here in New Zealand where the media exercise is avidly followed by the country’s eight universities.
The Times magazine tries to measure the excellence of its nominated academic institutions by quantifying their achievements.
About half of the editorial weighting is therefore given to reviews submitted by academic respondents and employers, this year numbering 9386 and 3281 respectively.
The compilers also award relative scores based on the percentage of international faculty and students at a college, the average number of journal citations for each faculty and an institution’s overall student/faculty ratio, the last of which — suggesting as it does that ratios are a proxy for academic quality — seems frankly ludicrous.
The University of Auckland was placed 61st equal in this year's list — down from 46th a couple of years ago — while the Universities of Otago and Canterbury, trailed at 125th and 188th respectively.
About 40 jurisdictions appear in the latest charts. As fascinating as the results may be in the old British Commonwealth countries, however, one of the more striking things about the survey is how little attention is paid to it in the country from which a majority of the top institutions are drawn: the United States.
As in previous surveys, American colleges dominate this year’s THE chart, with Harvard and Yale Universities in the top five and 11 other stateside institutions featured among the top 20.
Go to most of their websites, however, and one would be lucky to even see mention of the great media accolade.
Recently, we spoke with a senior representative of Caltech (ranked 10th in the world) who was unaware of the survey’s existence. So it will be fascinating to see whether or if — and how — the Thomson Reuters deal changes things.
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Comments
Ranking reflective of funding
Ranking and outputs generally relate to levels of funding and staffing. (Harvard is the richest university in the world. Their endowment funds even own forests in the cental North Island.) While NZ university staff are expected to research and publish, they also have to teach more courses than faculty in the 'better' universities elsewhere. In remuneration, NZ senior lecturers and senior primary school teachers receive about the same level of salary, therefore, it is little wonder that many of our younger, up-and-coming academics opt to work abroad.
Paid too Much!!
As an ex-academic I am well placed to state that many academics in NZ universities are just on the gravy train for a cosy career away from the pressures of the 'real world'. The minority do genuine research that is seriously targetted at expanding the body of knowledge in areas that will benefit humankind. Many others are just looking for 'any topic' that might help feed a few esoteric and mainly 'useless' areas of research to help justify their existence. Personally I was a little bit embarrassed when I was an academic as it felt like a paid holiday, closeted away from normal business pressures. Most secondary and primary teachers have infinitely more pressure (they are teaching kids who don't want to learn, have less 'down time', and are also required to deal with a raft of social problems) that university academics. 'Bout time some of these academics got off their pedestals and instead try to contribute to society!
Reply from a contributing academic
We have a saying amongst academics, "Education is the easiest thing in the world to do poorly, and the most difficult to do well." I'd place "Anonymous" as an example of the first category. I worked 30 years in international marketing and systems support in IT and mangement, and have taught at university for more than 11 years. In industry I put in 60 hour weeks in order to provide my customers with exceptional service. In teaching I put in 70 hour weeks providing what I hope is sufficient service to my students.
Ranking
I note that in the first six, 67% are in the UK
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