2013 International Leadership Conference: Managing Global Universities

A reminder about this forthcoming conference taking place at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.

The 2013 event, which takes place from Monday 4 – Thursday 7 November 2013 will mark the third anniversary of the International Leadership Conference. The conference has previously welcomed delegates from the UK, Denmark, China, Colombia, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the US and Belgium. The event is designed for senior leaders to discuss and share best practice on important topics around the internationalisation of higher education.

Full details about the International Leadership Conference can be found here.

Tackling Education Corruption

Higher Education challenges in Indonesia.

University World Newshas a story on higher education corruption in Indonesia. It sounds like a challenging environment but it does seem like the issues are being tackled:

A graft watchdog in Indonesia has sounded a red alert for the education sector as it recorded some 40 cases of corruption in 2012, causing losses to the state of around Rp139 billion (US$14.4 million).

Corruption was found at all levels of education, from elementary schools to universities, and from local education agencies to the House of Representatives, said the non-profit Indonesia Corruption Watch, or ICW.

According to the group’s latest report, around a third of the country’s entire education budget was misappropriated during procurement of goods and services.

This does seem like an extraordinary position – one third of the total education budget being lost to corrupt activities. The story does seem to show that progress is being made but there is clearly a long way to go.

Launch of the nice university league table

New league table: nearly there.

A previous post noted the imminent arrival of the all new European non-ranking ranking. Well now it seems to be nearly complete with only a year to wait until the first ranking is produced. The public launch of the ‘multi-dimensional’ ranking, which is intended to cover a wider range of indicators than the existing main league tables. Whilst research is one of the factors, the ranking will also cover quality of teaching and learning, international orientation, success in knowledge transfer and contribution to regional growth. The core proposition it seems is that this table will somehow not be a ranking and will therefore be nicer than all those other nasty league tables which put institutions in order.

 

 

The press release from the launch noted:

Speaking ahead of the launch, Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth said: “Universities are one of Europe’s most successful inventions, but we cannot rest on our laurels. We need to think and act more strategically to realise the full potential of our universities. To do that, we need better information about what they offer and how well they perform. Existing rankings tend to highlight research achievements above all, but U-Multirank will give students and institutions a clear picture of their performance across a range of important areas. This knowledge will help students to choose the university or college that is best for them. It will also contribute to the modernisation and quality of higher education by enabling universities to identify their strengths or weaknesses and learn from each other’s experience; finally, it will give policy makers a more complete view of their higher education systems so that they can strengthen their country’s performance as a whole.”

A lot of work has gone into the new ranking:

An independent consortium will compile the ranking, led by the Centre for Higher Education (CHE) in Germany and the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) in the Netherlands. Partners include the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University (CWTS), information professionals Elsevier, the Bertelsmann Foundation and software firm Folge 3. The consortium will also work with national ranking partners and stakeholder organisations representing students, universities and business to ensure completeness and accuracy.

The ambition is there and the EU investment backs this up. Will it take off? Will the leading universities, who do so well in the current world rankings, want to join in? Will anyone really think it’s a nicer ranking? Time will tell.

Yet more support to help UK HE internationalise?

More international support for Higher Education.

A year ago HEGlobal, the new portal for helping universities develop transnational education capability, was launched:

There is a consensus across government that engaging in and promoting international education and skills is strategically important to the UK for three main reasons: firstly it presents potentially significant commercial opportunities; secondly, it is an important soft power tool which supports the UK’s image abroad; thirdly, integrally linked to the above, it is key to maintaining the reputation of the UK education sector as one of the best in the world. However, although the UK’s education and skills sector is already doing well internationally, evidence suggests that we risk not taking full advantage of growing global opportunities. Ministers in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and elsewhere want to improve coordination across government by tasking the UK Higher Education International Unit to lead on a sector-wide initiative to do more to help UK higher education institutions (HEIs) increase their transnational education (TNE) capability.

HEGlobal looked like a real sector/government joint effort, although I must admit to being a little sceptical at the time about the need for it.

One of those pictures with lots of logos on it

Leaving aside the contradiction in policy between supporting this form of internationalisation whilst at the same time imposing visa regulations which hamper international student recruitment to the UK and give the impression that we aren’t open for business, there is something amiss here. The last piece of news on the site seems to date from January 2012 and it rather looks like there hasn’t been anything of interest to update the sector on since then. That’s a bit of a worry in the fast-moving HE environment.

But now, stop press, we have another new support unit for UKHE, this time with UKTI in the driving seat on its own it seems. This new team has been established “to help UK exploit international opportunities in education exports”. Sound familiar?

Education UK will capitalise on the growth in demand for UK education abroad

A new team dedicated to capitalising on the growth of demand for UK education from abroad is being established, Skills Minister Matthew Hancock announced today.

Education UK will specifically target fast-growing markets such as India and the Middle East. The UK has an excellent reputation for education internationally, but isn’t currently exploiting this to the full.

This the approach we need to take with exports – if only we could market HE as successfully as this

So, we have another new unit dedicated to helping UKHE exploit our talents to the full (no information is yet available on the extent of the Princesses’ involvement though). You’d think we weren’t much good at it. You might also be slightly perplexed by the similarity to the British Council’s Education UK campaign which shares the same name and is intended to support international student recruitment (or education exports).

Confused? You will be.

The Imperfect University: Truly Transnational

There is something close to a genuinely international university

Last year Andrew Stewart Coats, commenting on his appointment and the interesting plans for the new partnership between Warwick and Monash Universities, asserted that in higher education:

there has been little or no globalization in how we organize ourselves; no global entity runs viable universities in multiple countries and no truly transnational offering for students and academics exists

He also noted what he described as the “outposts” of universities in China, South East Asia and the Middle East and questioned whether this could “in itself create a truly global university?”

As a member of a global university, with three truly international campuses, I have to disagree. I drafted this piece late last year at the University of Nottingham’s Malaysia Campus (UNMC), home to some 4,500 students and over 450 staff, located at the edge of Kuala Lumpur in a breathtakingly beautiful setting. After meetings with a range of senior staff and bumping into our UK-based Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Internationalisation who was visiting the campus prior to taking over as Provost I then headed off to the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) campus (5,000 students, over 400 staff). As anyone who has visited either campus will attest, these are no outposts. Both campuses are larger than a good number of UK HE institutions and are already, despite their relative youth (UNMC became the first overseas campus of any UK university some 12 years ago and UNNC was founded in 2004), they are already punching significantly above their weight in both research and teaching in their host countries.

Campus at University of Nottingham Ningbo China

OBHE, in its most recent report, identifies some 200 or so branch campuses around the world with another 37 at least in the pipeline.

However, very few of these are of the scale, breadth or depth of the Nottingham developments and many are the outposts Coats describes with teaching delivered in rented office accommodation by staff who fly in for a few weeks before flying back home again.

Nottingham actually has three international campuses at present; as well as those in China and Malaysia there is the original campus in the UK which is also strikingly international with over 9,000 international students from 150+ countries. The international ethos is embraced in all that we do and is strongly articulated in the University’s mission:

At the University of Nottingham we are committed to providing a truly international education, inspiring our students, producing world-leading research and benefiting the communities around our campuses in the UK, China and Malaysia. Our purpose is to improve life for individuals and societies worldwide. By bold innovation and excellence in all that we do, we make both knowledge and discoveries matter.

Our academic staff on all campuses are international in composition (25% are international) and outlook too. One in five of our undergraduates undertakes international mobility. 17% of published research outputs are internationally co-authored and 37% of our research funding is obtained internationally. We have strategic partnerships with other leading universities in over 25 countries and one of the largest scholarship programmes for students from the developing world.

University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus

When universities make claims about their global outlook and deep internationalization there is a tendency for the rhetoric significantly to oustrip the reality. Nottingham is, I think, a bit different. The evidence for the range and depth of the internationalization is pretty much everywhere and is now part of the fabric, culture and practice across the University.

Internationalisation both drives and supports our teaching and research mission, provides wider benefits for staff and students as well as facilitating access to a broad international talent pool. Internationalisation at Nottingham has many facets: it means an extraordinarily diverse staff and student body, outstanding campuses, significant staff and student mobility, a distinctive curriculum, unique international research activity (including, for example, field scale tropical crop trials as part of the Crops for the Future initiative which would simply impossible in the UK) and partnerships as well as the new collaborative Knowledge Without Borders Network which seeks to learn from and build upon all of these developments.

Can Nottingham claim to be a genuinely international institution? I think so. At the very least we are, as the Sunday Times observed, “the closest Britain has to a truly global university”. It is not enough simply to have outstandingly successful and growing international campuses or to host visits from the British and Malaysian Prime Ministers or the then Chinese Premier (as happened at UNMC and UNNC respectively last year) it has to permeate the institution from top to bottom. In short, it is all about delivery and Nottingham has delivered and continues to deliver real international higher education. This is the experience at our global institution. It’s not perfect and there is still a long way to go to develop fully the potential of all three of our international campuses in Malaysia, China and the UK but I think it is real, meaningful, deep and sustained internationalisation. I wish Warwick and Monash well in their collaboration; I am sure we would be delighted to welcome Professor Coats to any of our campuses to see our truly transnational offering and experience a real global University.

Sustainability charts: UI GreenMetric World University Ranking 2012

Now out : the Green Metric World Ranking 2012

This world university league table first appeared in 2010 and was headed by University of California, Berkeley. Last year the University of Nottingham led the field (sadly down to second this year). In 2012 it is the turn of Connecticut. The rest of the top 10 is as follows (last year’s position in brackets):

1 University of Connecticut, US (3)

2 University of Nottingham, UK (1)

3 University College Cork, Ireland (4)

4 Northeastern University, US (2)

5 University of Plymouth, UK (-)

6 Universite de Sherbrooke Canada

7 University of California, Los Angeles, US (7)

8 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill US

9 University of Bath, UK (10)

10 University of California Merced, US (9)

The details of the table can be found at UI GreenMetric site. The aim of the ranking is, at least in part, to promote sustainability in universities:

The aim of this ranking is to provide the result of online survey regarding the current condition and policies related to Green Campus and Sustainability in the Universities all over the world. It is expected that by drawing the attention of university leaders and stake holders, more attention will be given to combating global climate change, energy and water conservation, waste recycling, and green transportation. Such activities will require change of behavior and providing more attention to sustainability of the environment, as well as economic and social problem related to the sustainability. We believe that the universities that are leading the way in this regard need to be identifiable and so we have decided to make a start in doing this. Initially, we will collect numeric data from thousands of universities world wide and process the data provided to arrive at a single score that reflects the efforts being made by the institution to implement environmentally friendly and sustainable policies and programs. Universities will be ranked according to this score. We hope that the rankings will be useful to university leaders in their efforts to put in place eco-friendly policies and manage behavioral change among the academic community at their respective institutions.

The methodology, criteria and scoring can be found here but in summary the approach is as follows:

We selected criteria that are generally thought to be of importance by universities concerned with sustainability. These include the collection of a basic profile of the size of the university and its zoning profile, whether urban, suburban, rural. Beyond this we want to see the degree of green space. The next category of information concerns electricity consumption because of its link to our carbon footprint. Then we want to know about transport, water usage, waste management and so on. Beyond these indicators, we want to get a picture about how the university is responding to or dealing with the issue of sustainability through policies, actions, and communication.

Overall a good result for Nottingham (and for Plymouth in 5th and Bath in 9th place). The number of institutions participating this year has increased significantly and it does rather look as if this league table is gaining a foothold.

Branch campus enrolments – some interesting UK data

Some interesting stats from the UK Higher Education International Unit

The International Unit recently published its summary of International higher education in facts and figures – Winter 2012-13. The report contains some interesting information which covers the majority of the UK higher education sector. One particular table (on page 9 of the report) caught my eye, the number of UK students involved in different forms of trans-national education (TNE):

(Note that the data covers the 2010-11 session.)

Three particular points of interest in here:

• Students registered at Oxford Brookes University accounted for 47.6% of the total population of the 2010-11 Aggregate Offshore record. The majority of these students were registered with an overseas partner on Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) programmes.
• In 2010-11 the University of Nottingham returned 7,797 students at its two overseas campuses, the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus and University of Nottingham Ningbo China, so nearly two thirds of the total number of students in this category are from Nottingham.
• The number and proportion of students following distance learning courses can only grow.

It’s historical data but no doubt the next set of figures will show growth across all of these categories.

More on Latin American rankings

More details on Latin America from the QS rankings

A post from some time ago noted the new found enthusiasm in Latin America for rankings. This has been borne out by the publication in 2011 and now 2012 of a specific Latin american league table by QS.

The introduction to the table notes that

QS University Rankings: Latin America was published for the first time in 2011, this generated a huge amount of interest, both within the region and further afield.

This is perhaps unsurprising: Latin America is a hugely dynamic, fast-growing continent, that has recently identified higher education as key to its development, yet in global rankings it has mostly been conspicuous by its absence.

…

As in 2011, the rankings adopt the principles of the QS World University Rankings, augmented with measures of particular regional application.

Academic and employer reputation surveys remain the backbone of our approach, in combination with data on research productivity and citations, student/faculty ratio, the proportion of staff with a PhD, and web presence.

It is an exciting period for Latin American universities, with the growth in scientific research, increased for higher education, increased student mobility and the rise of private universities all accelerating the pace of change.

This year’s rankings help further our understanding of the comparative performance of universities throughout the region.

They also shine a light on pockets of development that have previously been beyond the scope of international rankings.

So the top 20 from QS is as set out below (full details can be found here). And whilst the top institution here, the Universidade de São Paulo, is ranked at 139 in the world in the latest QS table the general trend seems to be an upward one.

1 Universidade de São Paulo – Brazil

2 Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile – Chile

3 Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) – Brazil

4 Universidad de Chile – Chile

5 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) – Mexico

6 Universidad de los Andes – Colombia

7 Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM) – Mexico

8 Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – Brazil

9 Universidad de Concepción – Chile

10 Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH) – Chile

11 Universidad de Buenos Aires – Argentina

12 Universidad Nacional de Colombia – Colombia

13 Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais – Brazil

14 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande Do Sul (UFRGS) – Brazil

15 Universidade Federal de São Paulo – Brazil

16 Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) – Mexico

17 Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho” (UNESP) – Brazil

18 Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro – Brazil

19 Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) – Mexico

20 Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina Santa María de los Buenos Aires – UCA – Argentina

How to take over the world

A handy guide to global domination

KPMG have produced a useful guide to universities looking to expand their international activities. Its Guiding Principles for Global Expansion offers some sensible advice for universities looking to develop their global operations and highlights a range of motivations for doing so:

Higher education institutions around the world are responding to the increasingly compelling drivers for the continued globalisation of their market, but, when planning transnational expansion, institutions do not always take the critical steps necessary to either maximize the opportunities or to manage the associated risks, according to ‘Extending the Campus,’ a new report from KPMG International.

The professional services firm asserts that transnational growth is driven by a host of factors:

• Emerging markets with a growing middle-class aiming to enhance their economic development by attracting foreign institutions as well as investing in their own local education capabilities.
• Institutions in mature markets, especially those impacted by austerity measures, responding to pressure on domestic enrolment and revenues by pursuing growth outside their immediate geographies.
• A drive for global brand enhancement (and protection) to attract the highest calibre academics and researchers.
• Increased demand by employers and students for global skills and experience. OECD data shows that growth in the number of students opting for an international higher education was at an annual rate of seven percent between 2000 and 2010.
• Increasing global collaboration on research activities.

An essential part of the answer is, of course, to hire some capable advisors if you’re in this game.

The full report is available here. it does contain some sensible advice and any university looking to establish a significant international footprint will undoubtedly look to follow this path in some form or other as those in the case studies in the report have done. One of the key points stressed in the report is that international partnership activity is a long game and the timescales for engagement need to go way beyond the life of the next strategic plan. It’s a well-made argument.

African Universities and the Global Rankings

Should African universities be concerned with the global league tables?

Inside Higher Ed has a really good piece on African universities and the impact of the international rankings. Essentially the challenge for Africa is that the global league tables use metrics which simply don’t favour the continent’s institutions:

Any observer of higher education in Africa would immediately realize that African universities, with the exception of a handful, stand no chance of appearing under the THE Rankings; or for that matter under other global university rankings such that the Shanghai Jiao Tong Ranking or the QS World University Rankings, which equally use criteria with a heavy bias on research, publications in international refereed journals and citations. African universities have to cope with huge student enrolment with limited financial and physical resources. They are short of academic staff, a large proportion of whom do not have a PhD. Not surprisingly, their research output and performance in postgraduate education are poor. It is clear that in the rankings race, they are playing on a non-level field.

But the more pertinent question is: should African universities attempt to be globally ranked? I believe not. It would be not only a waste of resources but also inappropriate. The priority for African universities at the moment should be to provide the skilled manpower required for their country’s development; to undertake research to solve the myriad problems facing Africa and to communicate their findings to the stakeholders in the most appropriate form, not necessarily through publications in international journals; and to engage with their community to meet the Millennium Development Goals and the Education For All targets. These do not fit the criteria for global rankings. They do, however, need assistance to improve the quality of their teaching provision, their research output and their service to the community. Their aim, and that of their government, should be that they be quality assured, not globally ranked.

Notwithstanding the recent success in the THE rankings of the University of Cape Town’s Medical Faculty (as reported in Business Day Live), this advice seems to me to be eminently sensible. Rather than chasing the rankings, where they will always be at a disadvantage, African universities should focus on delivering their regional and national missions in teaching, research and knowledge transfer. Improvements will happen over time and, hopefully, with support from universities in other parts of the world which will ultimately mean that institutions in Africa will be able to compete on the global stage. But chasing the rankings is not the way to go.

Where will they go? Student Destinations – Global Agent Survey

The latest survey of international recruitment agent views

Given that I am currently at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus on a brief visit I thought I would focus on an international story. ICEF (an international market intelligence outfit) and i-graduate have just published their 2012 global survey of international student recruitment agents’ views on destination countries. The headline figures are probably what you would expectwith the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand all showing well. But there are two particularly interesting points in this table and the commentary with it:

Year-over-year, the most remarkable change among leading destination countries can be found in Canada. Since 2008, Canada has risen fully 15 percentage points in its perceived attractiveness among education agents. Compare that to the US (a gain of 5 percentage points since 2008), the UK (a loss of 7 percentage points), Australia (a loss of 1 percentage point), and New Zealand (a gain of 3 percentage points). In 2008, Canada was tied with Australia in third place; in 2012, it is tied with the UK in second. Asian agents in particular registered a great surge in how attractive they consider Canada.

The first is the rise and rise of Canada as a destination. It is really impressive and this perceived attractiveness has, I believe, been confirmed in international student recruitment data. The second is the UK’s decline over the past five years but its stability in the most recent two years when the government’s significantly anti-immigration stance has been most pronounced. The fear must be though that this will get worse in future as the impact of visa restrictions and the reputational fall-out from the London Met debacle bites.

It will be really interesting to see how this plays out in future.

University Education – Free for Everyone?

Will everyone have free HE in 10 years’ time? Or is this just more MOOC hype?

An interesting piece in Time on “Why College May Be Totally Free Within 10 Years”. It’s a report of an interesting (but perhaps rather sinister sounding) TedEx style think tank event called the Nantucket Project.

 

The report commented on presentations by Peter Thiel and Vivek Wadhwa:

Thiel has gotten a lot of attention for his view that higher education is broken, and that many kids would be better off saving their money and going straight from high school into a trade or developing a business. His “20 under 20” fellowship grants high school graduates with a sound business idea $100,000 if they agree to skip college and go right to work on their idea.

Wadhwa’s views are less well known, even though he served as a counter-point interview last May on a 60 Minutes segment featuring Thiel. Wadhwa has unwavering faith in the power of technology to fix much of what is wrong with the world, and he believes that online courses will revolutionize higher education and cut the cost to near zero for most students over the next decade.

It’s probably not quite what they are campaigning for

Both interesting but really at the hyperbole-driven end of the debate. Then we have the voice of reason from Larry Summers:

Summers, a former president of Harvard, agrees that higher education is in transition. But he thinks Thiel is “badly wrong” about his bubble theory and that Wadhwa is severely underestimating the value of the total university experience. The gap between what college graduates and high school graduates earn is only widening, which speaks to the continuing value of a college degree—no matter what it costs. And, says Summers, “If you think higher education is expensive, try ignorance.”

There is a reason that people pay a lot of money to go to an event like the Super Bowl when it is free on TV, Summers offers. They get more out of it by being present. Something similar is true of an on-campus education, where you may attend extra-curricular events and engage more fully with faculty and other students.

For his part, Wadhwa allows that there will always be students able and willing to pay for a traditional college experience and for them it will be a worthwhile investment. But for the vast majority, from a financial standpoint that kind of education makes no sense and is fast becoming unnecessary. He believes the higher education revolution is coming soon and will happen fast—perhaps fast enough to keep the next generation from finishing school with debts they may never be able to pay.

It’s all breathlessly exciting of course but Summers is right to stress the value of the university experience. As has been noted in previous pieces here on MOOCS – on why they aren’t perhaps as revolutionary as some suggest and some reasons for universities not to panic about them – there is a long way to go before any universities are obliterated by the online wave. And there is a lot more to higher education than content delivery. It’s yet more hype and we’d better get used to it.

The Three World University League Tables of 2012/13

World University League Tables 2012/13

Following the publication of the THE world university rankings, we can put the three world league tables together, and in particular the UK placings, in a handy reference guide. They all offer their own unique take on world university placings.

Here they all are:

The Times Higher World University Rankings, including UK results.

QS World Rankings 2012 also with UK results.

Shanghai Jiao Tong World Rankings and UK placings too.

…all your world league table needs in one handy location.

One fascinating quirk of the world versus UK tables which demonstrates why caution is needed at all times when dealing with such data is that the University of Edinburgh appears higher in the world rankings in both the QS and Times Higher tables than it does in the recent domestic Sunday Times ranking (where it is 39th). Different indicators being used but it really does raise questions about the Sunday Times methodology.

THE World University Rankings 2013

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2012-13 are out

The final ranking of the season is now available from THE. The top 20 looks like this:

1 California Institute of Technology (1)

=2 Oxford University (4)

=2 Stanford University (2=)


4 Harvard (2=)


5 MIT (7)

6 Princeton (5)

7 Cambridge (6)


8 Imperial College London (8)

9 University of California, Berkeley (10)

10 University of Chicago (9)


11 Yale University (11)

12 ETH Zürich (15)


13 University of California, Los Angeles (13)

14 Columbia University (12)


15 University of Pennsylvania (16)

16 Johns Hopkins University (14)

17 University College London (17)

18 Cornell University (20)

19 Northwestern (26)

20 University of Michigan (18)

CalTech remains at number one for the second year in a row but not a great deal of movement generally in the top 20 and there are still four UK universities in there.

More details of the methodology and regional and subject variations are available on the THE World University Rankings site.

UK rankings

As the following shows, there are 10 UK institutions in the top 100 (two fewer than last year):

2= University of Oxford


7 University of Cambridge


8 Imperial College London

17 University College London

32 University of Edinburgh



39 LSE



49 University of Manchester

57 King’s College London



74 University of Bristol

80 Durham University

And 21 more in the second 100:

103 York

108 University of St Andrews

110= University of Sussex

110= University of Sheffield

119 Royal Holloway

120 University of Nottingham

124= Warwick

130= Southampton

139 University of Glasgow

142= Leeds



145= Lancaster University

145= Queen Mary

153 Exeter

158= Birmingham

171= Liverpool

176= Aberdeen

176= Reading

176= UEA

180= Newcastle

196= Leicester

200 Birkbeck

The overall analysis includes the proposition that universities in the West are losing ground to those in Asia. It is argued that greater investment in the East is benefitting those universities at the expense of European and US institutions which have suffered from government funding cuts. Whilst the rankings do show some change it is perhaps premature to attribute such movement to Western government policies on the basis of one year’s figures and given the relative stability of most of the indicators used (see below).

Some of the other highlights noted by THE:

• The highest-ranked institution outside of the US and UK is ETH Zürich, in Switzerland, in 12^th place

• Asia’s number one university is the University of Tokyo, in 27^thplace

• After the US and UK, the Netherlands is the next best represented nation in the top 200, with 12 institutions, but its highest-ranked institution, Leiden University, makes only 64^th place

• Of the so-called BRIC developing economies, Russia and India have no representatives in the top 200

• All of the Netherlands’ 12 universities improved their positions in the rankings

• Japan has five top 200 universities, more than any other Asian nation, but most of its representatives have slipped a little down the table while Asian rivals rise

• Ireland has just two top 200 institutions – and neither make the top 100

• Six countries have only one top 200 representative – Austria, Brazil, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa and Taiwan

• Australia increased its representation by one, and now has eight institutions in the table. Six of the eight improved their rankings

• The average top 200 US university fell 6.5 places, while the average UK institution fell 6.7 places

• The South Korean institutions in the top 200 rose a startling 23.5 place on average, and the Hong Kong institutions rose an average of 8.5 places

The data used is taken from five main areas as follows:

Industry Income – innovation
1. Research income from industry / Academic staff
Teaching – the learning environment
2. Reputation survey – Teaching
3. Staff-to-student ratio
4. PhDs awarded / Undergraduate degrees awarded
5. PhDs awarded / Academic staff
6. Institutional income / Academic staff
Citations – research influence
7. Citation impact (normalised average citations per paper)
Research – volume, income and reputation
8. Reputation survey – Research
9. Research income / Academic staff
10. Scholarly papers / (Academic staff + Research staff)
International Outlook – staff, students and research
11. International students / Total students
12. International academic staff / Total academic staff
13. Scholarly papers with one or more international co-authors / Total scholarly papers

All interesting stuff in any case.

(All of the above data is from the Times Higher Education with data supplied by Thomson Reuters.)

2012/13 QS World University Rankings

Latest QS world league table is out

A preview of the 2012/13 QS World University Rankings from John O’Leary, makes clear the impact that the league tables have. Not just on institutions but also on governments:

The rankings, which will be published on September 11, are intended primarily to guide international students, their parents and advisors in their choice of university. This year, there will be 700 institutions to compare on six different measures, with additional faculty-specific rankings to illustrate particular strengths.

But QS rankings are also used by governments from Denmark and Germany to Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Japan to evaluate the standing of their own and other countries’ universities. Positions are used in funding allocations, promotional material and even immigration decisions.

The German and Japanese governments have both used QS ranking positions as one of their performance measures in research budgeting. Thailand is one of a growing number of countries to use the rankings to shortlist the universities chosen for additional funding to help them compete internationally.

In the UK, the Browne Report on student fees used QS rankings to illustrate the high standing of the country’s universities. A Government-funded advertising campaign coinciding with the Olympic Games in London to promote the UK as a tourist or business destination also quoted the rankings.

Full details of the rankings can be found at the QS website. A summary of the world top 10 follows where we find a swap at the top as MIT replaces Cambridge at No 1 and four UK universities remain in the top 10:

Global top ten

2012	2011	Institution
1	3	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2	1	University of Cambridge
3	2	Harvard University
4	7	UCL (University College London)
5	5	University of Oxford
6	6	Imperial College London
7	4	Yale University
8	8	University of Chicago
9	13	Princeton University
10	12	California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

 

The UK also has 18 universities in the top 100:

Top UK universities

2	1	University of Cambridge	GB
4	7	UCL (University College London)	GB
5	5	University of Oxford	GB
6	6	Imperial College London	GB
21	20	University of Edinburgh	GB
26	27	King’s College London (KCL)	GB
28	30	University of Bristol	GB
32	29	The University of Manchester	GB
54	59	University of Glasgow	GB
58	50	The University of Warwick	GB
66	72	The University of Sheffield	GB
69	64	London School of Economics and Political Science	GB
72	74	The University of Nottingham	GB
73	75	University of Southampton	GB
77	67	University of Birmingham	GB
92	95	Durham University	GB
93	97	University of St Andrews	GB
94	93	University of Leeds	GB