Thursday, July 29, 2010

An Epic?

Times Higher Education (THE) has announced the completion of the collection of data for its forthcoming World University Rankings:
An epic effort by our world university rankings data supplier, Thomson Reuters, to collect information from hundreds of universities around the world concluded successfully last week.
I am not sure whether "epic" is the right word. The number of universities in the database does not seem much higher than that for which QS has collected information. The data does apparently include some information that QS has ignored such as institutional income and research income but has not included items counted by QS such as total student numbers or the number of postgraduate students other than doctoral candidates. Meanwhile, the number of respondents to the opinion survey has fallen far short of the original target of 25,000, even with a bit of topping up, like QS, from the Mardev mailing lists.

A proposal to rank universities by disciplines as specific as Agriculture has been dropped. Now, THE will rank universities in six disciplinary clusters, up from five in the THE-QS and QS rankings.

THE also give some idea of errors will be detected. That might be an improvement although I suspect that in many countries third party sources may not be as reliable as THE thinks.

One thing that is not mentioned is whether any universities have refused to participate in the data collection and what THE will do if there are any abstentions.

1 comment:

Phil Baty said...

Hi Richard.
The proposal was always to run six broad subject tables -- we never intended to rank at any deeper level, we were simply making the point that we were collecting reputation survey responses at a very deep subject level, to achieve more meaningful responses.
One of the key features this year is that we are only ranking those institutions which have actively opted in by providing data and signing it off. We respect the decision of all conscientious objectors (unlike other systems) but we are delighted to say that we have very, very few of these. The buy-in from the sector has been excellent.
We achieved 13,388 responses to our survey in its first year, in just three or four months. We are delighted with this achivement -- we obtained four times more responses in 2010 than achieved in 2009 under our old system.