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Proceedings

The Hon Julie Bishop MP, Minister for Education, Science and Training

Message to the symposium on international trends in university rankings and classifications on Monday 12 February 2007

Dr Marguerite Clarke

Impact of international and national rankings on student access, choice, and opportunity

Over the past two decades, rankings of higher education institutions and programs have emerged around the world. Produced by magazines, newspapers, research centres, and even governments, these rating systems play an increasingly important role as information tools for prospective students as well as marketing devices for institutions. While there has been considerable research on the indicators and weights used to create these listings, far less attention has been paid to their impact on students. This ‘consequential aspect’ of the rankings phenomenon relates to both their intended and unintended effects on students, whether positive or negative. As a step toward addressing this gap in the research literature, this presentation synthesizes the available evidence on rankings' impact in three important areas: student access, choice, and opportunity. While the focus is on findings for the U.S. (the system for which the most data were available), comparisons are also made to findings for other countries. The presentation concludes with emerging evidence on the effects of so-called 'world' or 'international' rankings on access, choice, and opportunity outcomes globally.

Professor Nian Cai Liu

Academic ranking of world universities: methodologies, problems and impact

To find out the gap between Chinese universities and world-class universities, the Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University has tried to rank research universities in the world by their academic or research performance based on internationally comparable data that everyone could check. Ranking indicators include the alumni and staff winning major international awards, highly cited researchers in major research fields, articles published in selected top journals, articles indexed by major citation indexes, and performance per capita. Methodological problems discussed include quantitative versus qualitative evaluation, evaluation of research versus education, variety of institutions, language of publications, selection of awards, and studying or working experience of award winners. Technical problems such as definition of institutions, name expression of institutions, merging and splitting of institutions, searching and attribution of publications are discussed. The impact of ranking will also be discussed.

Professor Simon Marginson

Global university comparisons: The second stage

Status is 'the aristocracy of culture' as Bourdieu reminds us. Where is the research university that can resist its lure? The desire for prestige is pervasive in higher education, more profound than the desire for revenues. All too readily it displaces attention from teaching, scholarship and research, which at best become seen as the means to a greater end, the glory of the university (and perhaps nation) in which they are housed. But a world wide status market has few winners, largely confined to the USA and the UK, and many losers. National and institutional priorities are readily distorted: only factors that drive the indicators are valued. Most seriously, perhaps, universities everywhere (even while being admonished for their shameful failure to be number one) run the risk of losing control over their identity and mission. This paper draws in part on research conducted in 12 different national research universities in 12 countries. It evaluates the existing rankings systems and their consequences for policy and behaviour; maps the geo-strategic effects, which vary substantially by nation, and considers the potential for more constructive forms of international evaluation and comparison.

Mr Ben Sowter

THES - QS World University Rankings: background, context, approach, results and maximising effectiveness

Over the last two decades the practice of comparing educational institutions from primary level through to universities and business schools has exploded, firstly on a domestic scale and in the last few years across borders. Rankings tend to provide a simple interface to a very complex conundrum and as a result must be conducted with the utmost transparency and responsibility.

This talk will outline the background of QS, establishing its credentials as a reputable and consistent provider of intelligence to and from the higher education sector; it will examine the context in which demand for international benchmarking between comparable institutions has arisen; it will go into depth about the THES-QS approach to meeting this demand; it will present and explain the results, in particular, those most relevant to your home market and it will provide understanding on how to best interact with the rankings and the team behind them to maximise their effectiveness, both to educators in understanding their position relative to other institutions and to the world at large.

Professor Marijk van der WENDE

Institutional diversity: rankings and classifications in higher education

Europe has also been confronted with the phenomenon of global rankings. The position of continental European institutions in the ranks is creating quite some turbulence, particularly since continental Europe has no tradition in rankings of its own. Ranks have provoked institutional responses to enhance their position in the global market (e.g. the Manchester case and the LERU network), national policies on creating stronger international players (e.g. in Denmark, the Netherlands and in Germany) and also European level initiatives of this kind (e.g. the creation of the European Institute of Technology). European approaches to ranking are gaining importance, notably the CHE system, widely recognised as a better alternative to existing ranking practices and gradually growing into a European model. As diversity should be based on a multitude of institutional missions and profiles, the initiative is taken to develop a typology of higher education institutions in Europe. Underlying questions are related to the shaping of the European Higher Education and Research Area and lead to policy issues that will need to be addressed in designing the post Bologna period (>2010).

Professor Ross Williams and Dr Nina van Dyke

Measuring university performance at the discipline/departmental level

Rating universities as single entities can hide pockets of excellence (and weakness). It is the standing of individual disciplines within institutions that is important for many purposes, such as postgraduate students and researchers deciding on where to locate, and funding agencies wishing to promote excellence. We evaluate the international academic standing of disciplines in Australian universities using both qualitative and quantitative measures. The disciplines included are Arts & Humanities, Business & Economics, Education, Engineering, Law, Medicine, and Science. We obtain qualitative rankings and ratings by surveying leading scholars in the fields, both within Australia and overseas. The quantitative measures of performance we use are publications and citations from Thomson Scientific, academy membership, success in national competitive grants, downloads of papers, doctoral completions, student entrance scores, student evaluations, and staff-student ratios. We rank thirty-nine universities separately by the survey results and by an overall performance measure. We find very high correlation between the survey results and actual performance. The results indicate that in about 25 cases disciplines in Australian universities rate in the top 100 in the world; the standout performers are Science at ANU and Medicine at the University of Melbourne.

Background papers

Clarke, Marguerite (2006) 'The impact of higher education rankings on student access, choice and opportunity' (PDF 158k), Background paper prepared for the Institute for Higher Education Policy and the Lumina Foundation for Education, USA.

Clarke, Marguerite (2005) 'Quality assessment lessons from Australia and New Zealand' (PDF 230k), Higher Education in Europe, vol 30, no 2 (July), pp 183-97.

Clarke, Marguerite M (2004) 'International issues in quality assessment: limitations of the weight-and-sum approach to ranking the academic quality of institutions of higher education (PDF 194k)', AUQA occasional publication proceedings of the Australian universities quality forum 2004, AUQA, Melbourne.

Clarke, Marguerite (2002) 'Some guidelines for academic quality rankings' (PDF 3m), Higher Education in Europe, vol XXVII, no 4, pp 443-59.

Liu, N C & Cheng, Y (2005) 'Academic ranking of world universities - methodologies and problems (PDF 115k)', Higher Education in Europe, vol 30, no 2.

Marginson, Simon & van der Wende, Marijk (2006) 'To rank or to be ranked: the impact of global rankings in higher education', University of Twente, The Netherlands (PDF 157k).

Van Dyke, N (2005) 'Twenty years of university report cards (PDF 302k)', Higher Education in Europe, vol 30 no 2.

Vught, F van, Bartelse, J; Bohmert, D, Burquel, N, Divis, J, Huisman, J & Wende, M van der (2005) 'Institutional profiles. Towards a typology of higher education institutions in Europe (PDF 3.8m)', CHEPS report, Enschede, 31 pp.

Williams, Ross & Van Dyke, Nina (2006) 'Rating major disciplines in Australian universities: perceptions and reality', University of Melbourne, Parkville (PDF 33k).

Williams, R and Van Dyke, N (2005) 'Measuring the international standing of universities with an application to Australian universities (PDF 219k)', Higher Education, (forthcoming).