THES - QS World University Rankings

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The THES - QS World University Rankings is an annual publication of university rankings around the world, published by The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). The full listings feature on the QS website and on the THES website. They have been running since 2004 and are broken down by subject and region.

The ranking weights are:

  • Peer Review Score (40%)
  • Recruiter Review (10%)
  • International Faculty Score (5%)
  • International Students Score (5%)
  • Faculty/Student Score (20%)
  • Citations/Faculty Score (20%).

Contents

[edit] THES - QS World University Rankings (Top 20)

2007 rankings 2006 rankings 2005 rankings 2004 rankings University Country Average score
01 01 01 01 Harvard University US 01
02= 02 03 06 University of Cambridge UK 03
02= 03 04 05 University of Oxford UK 04
02= 04= 07 08 Yale University US 05
05 09 13 14 Imperial College London UK 10
06 10 09 09 Princeton University US 09
07= 07 08 04 California Institute of Technology US 06
07= 11 17 13 University of Chicago US 12
09 25 28 34 University College London UK 24
10 04= 02 03 Massachusetts Institute of Technology US 05
11 12 20 19 Columbia University US 15
12 21 24 21 McGill University Canada 19
13 13 11 52 Duke University US 22
14 26 32 28 University of Pennsylvania US 25
15 23 27 25 Johns Hopkins University US 22
16 16 23 16 Australian National University Australia 18
17 19= 16 12 University of Tokyo Japan 16
18 33 41 39 University of Hong Kong China 33
19 06 05 07 Stanford University US 09
20= 35= 44 38 Carnegie Mellon University US 34
20= 15 14 23 Cornell University US 18

[edit] Commentary

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The THES rankings have been publicized in mainly by the UK periodicals: The Guardian[1] and The Times[2].

Several universities in the UK and the Asia-Pacific region (where the Times is well-known) have also commented on the rankings. Vice-Chancellor of Massey University, Professor Judith Kinnear says the THES-QS ranking is a “wonderful external acknowledgement of several University attributes, including the quality of its research, research training, teaching and employability.“ She says the rankings are a true measure of a university’s ability to fly high internationally: “The Times Higher Education ranking provides a rather more and more sophisticated, robust and well rounded measure of international and national ranking than either New Zealand’s Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) measure or the Shanghai rankings.” [3]

Ian Leslie, the pro-vice chancellor for research at Cambridge University said: "It is very reassuring that the collegiate systems of Cambridge and Oxford continue to be valued by and respected by peers, and that the excellence of teaching and of research at both institutions is reflected in these rankings." [4]

The vice-chancellor of Oxford University, John Hood, said: "The exceptional talents of Oxford's students and staff are on display daily. This last year has seen many faculty members gaining national and international plaudits for their teaching, scholarship and research, and our motivated students continue to achieve in a number of fields, not just academically. Our place amongst the handful of truly world-class universities, despite the financial challenges we face, is testament to the quality and the drive of the members of this universitys environment." [5]

Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wollongong in Australia, Professor Gerard Sutton, said the ranking was a testament to a university’s standing in the international community, identifying… “an elite group of world-class universities.” [6]

[edit] Controversy

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The THES - QS World University Rankings had attracted criticisms ever since it was first published in 2004 as being “non-representative” and “self-promoting” because of using categories that would highly favour British universities. Notably, 2-3 British universities consistently rank among the top five in the world in the THES ranking, which are often not ranked in the top ten according to other global university rankings (Cambridge University being the exception). [7] The Academic Ranking of World Universities by Shanghai University has been suggested to be more respectable despite its perceived bias towards the natural sciences.[8] [9] The THES Rankings have been criticized[7] for placing too much emphasis on peer review, which receives 40% of the overall score. Some have expressed concern on the manner in which the peer review has been carried out. In a certain report[8], Peter Wills from the University of Auckland, New Zealand wrote of the QS-THES Ranking:

"But we note also that this survey establishes its rankings by appealing to university staff, even offering financial enticements to participate (see Appendix II). Staff are likely to feel it is in their greatest interest to rank their own institution more highly than others. This means the results of the survey and any apparent change in ranking are highly questionable, and that a high ranking has no real intrinsic value in any case. We are vehemently opposed to the evaluation of the University according to the outcome of such PR competitions."

Some errors have also been reported on the faculty-student ratio used in the ranking. At the 16th Annual New Zealand International Education Conference held at Christchurch, New Zealand in August 2007, Simon Marginson presented a paper[10] which outlines the fundamental flaws underlying the QS-THES Rankings. A similar article[11] (also published by the same author) appeared in The Australian newspaper in December 2006. Some of the points mentioned include:

"Half of the THES index is comprised by existing reputation: 40 per cent by a reputational survey of academics (‘peer review’), and another 10 per cent determined by a survey of ‘global employers’. The THES index is too easily open to manipulation as it is not specified who is surveyed or what questions are asked. By changing the recipients of the surveys, or the way the survey results are factored in, the results can be shifted markedly."

  1. The pool of responses is heavily weighted in favour of academic ‘peers’ from nations where the Times is well-known, such as the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and so on.
  2. 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.
  3. The performance of the Australian universities is also inflated. 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. Australia has 13 of the THES top 200 and appears as the third strongest system in the world, ahead of Japan, Canada, Germany and western Europe (the G7 nations). This makes sense in relation to Australia’s international marketing but not all round performance or reputation.

Although THES-QS had introduced several changes in methodology in 2007 which were aimed at addressing some of the above criticisms[12], the ranking has continued to attract criticisms. In an article[13] in the peer-reviewed BMC Journal authored by several scientists from USA and Greece, it was pointed out:

"If properly performed, most scientists would consider peer review to have very good construct validity; many may even consider it the gold standard for appraising excellence. However, even peers need some standardized input data to peer review. The Times simply asks each expert to list the 30 universities they regard as top institutions of their area without offering input data on any performance indicators. Research products may occasionally be more visible to outsiders, but it is unlikely that any expert possesses a global view of the inner workings of teaching at institutions worldwide. Moreover, the expert selection process of The Times is entirely unclear. The survey response rate among the selected experts was only <1% in 2006 (1 600 of 190 000 contacted). In the absence of any guarantee for protection from selection biases, measurement validity can be very problematic."

Alex Usher, Vice President of the Educational Policy Institute in USA, commented:[9]

"Most people in the rankings business think that the main problem with the Times is the opaque way it constructs its sample for its reputational rankings - a not-unimportant question given that reputation makes up 50% of the sample. Moreover, this year's switch from using raw reputation scores to using normalized Z-scores has really shaken things up at the top-end of the rankings by reducing the advantage held by really top universities - University of British Columbia (UBC) for instance, is now functionally equivalent to Harvard in the Peer Review score, which, no disrespect to UBC, is ludicrous. I'll be honest and say that at the moment the THES Rankings are an inferior product to the Shanghai Jiao Tong's Academic Ranking of World Universities."

The latest criticism of the QS-THES league tables came from Andrew Oswald, Professor or Economics at University of Warwick:[14]

"Such claims do us a disservice. The organisations who promote such ideas should be unhappy themselves, and so should any supine UK universities who endorse results they view as untruthful. Using these league table results on your websites, universities, if in private you deride the quality of the findings, is unprincipled and will ultimately be destructive of yourselves, because if you are not in the truth business what business are you in, exactly? Worse, this kind of material incorrectly reassures the UK government that our universities are international powerhouses. Let us instead, a bit more coolly, do what people in universities are paid to do. Let us use reliable data to try to discern the truth. In the last 20 years, Oxford has won no Nobel Prizes. (Nor has Warwick.) Cambridge has done only slightly better. Stanford University in the United States, purportedly number 19 in the world, garnered three times as many Nobel Prizes over the past two decades as the universities of Oxford and Cambridge did combined. "

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Oxbridge closes gap on Harvard in world university rankings"
  2. ^ "Britain and America dominate list of best universities"
  3. ^ Flying high internationally
  4. ^ "Oxbridge closes gap on Harvard in world university rankings"
  5. ^ "Oxbridge closes gap on Harvard in world university rankings"
  6. ^ "UOW listed in Top 200 World University Rankings"
  7. ^ a b The THES University Rankings: Are They Really World Class? by Richard Holmes
  8. ^ a b Response to Review of Strategic Plan by Peter Wills
  9. ^ a b The THES Rankings and the Dawn of Global Higher Education Data Standards by Alex Usher
  10. ^ Rankings: Marketing Mana or Menace? by Simon Marginson
  11. ^ Rankings Ripe for Misleading by Simon Marginson
  12. ^ Sowter, Ben (1 November 2007). THES – QS World University Rankings 2007"
  13. ^ International ranking systems for universities and institutions: a critical appraisal by John Ioannidis et. al.
  14. ^ There's nothing Nobel in deceiving ourselves by Andrew Oswald, The Independent on Sunday

[edit] See also

[edit] External links