Monday, January 09, 2017

Outbreak of Rankophilia

A plague is sweeping the Universities of the West, rankophilia or an irrational and obsessive concern with position and prospects in global rankings and a unwillingness to exercise normal academic caution and scepticism.

The latest victim is Newcastle University whose new head, Chris Day, wants to make his new employer one of the best in the world. Why does he want to do that?
"His ambition - to get the university into the Top 100 in the world - is not simply a matter of personal or even regional pride, however. With universities increasingly gaining income from foreign students who often base their choices of global rankings, improving Newcastle’s position in the league tables has economic consequences."
So Newcastle is turning its back on its previous vision of becoming a "civic university" and will try to match its global counterparts. It will do that by enhancing its research reputation.
'While not rowing back from Prof Brink’s mantra of “what are we good at, but what are we good for?”, Prof Day first week in the job saw him highlighting the need for Newcastle to concentrate on improving its reputation for academic excellence." '
It is sad that Day recognises that the core business of a university is not enough and that what really matters is proper marketing and shouting to rise up the tables.

Perhaps Newcastle will ascend into the magic 100, but the history of the THE rankings over the last few years is full of universities -- Alexandria, University of Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan University, University of Copenhagen, Royal Holloway, University of Cape Town, Middle East Technical University and others -- that have soared in the THE rankings for a while and then fallen, often because of nothing more than a twitch of a methodological finger.

Meanwhile Cambridge is yearning to regain its place in the QS top three and Yale is putting new emphasis on science and research with an eye on the global rankings.




Sunday, January 01, 2017

Ranking Teaching Quality

There has been a lot of talk lately about the quality of teaching and learning in universities. This has always an been an important element in national rankings such as the US News America's Best Colleges and the Guardian and Sunday Times in the UK, measured by things like standardised test scores, student satisfaction, reputation surveys, completion rates and staff student ratio.

There have been suggestions that university teaching staff need to be upgraded by attending courses in educational theory and practice or by obtaining some sort of certification or qualification.

The Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) has just published data on the number of staff with educational qualifications in English higher educational institutions.

The university with the largest number of staff with some sort of educational qualification is Huddersfield which unsurprisingly is very pleased. The university's website  reports HEFCE's assertion that “information about teaching qualifications has been identified as important to students and is seen as an indicator of individual and institutional commitment to teaching and learning.”

The top six universities are:
1.  University of Huddersfield
2.  Teesside University
3.  York St John University
4.  University of Chester
5= University of St Mark and St John
5= Edge Hill University.

The bottom five are:
104=   London School of Economics
104=   Courtauld Institute of Art
106.    Goldsmith's College
107=   University of Cambridge
107=   London School of Oriental and African Studies.

It seems that these data provide almost no evidence that a "commitment to teaching and learning" is linked with any sort of positive outcome. Correlations with the overall scores in the Guardian rankings and the THE Teaching Exercise Framework simulation  are negative (-550 and -410 [-204 after benchmarking]).

In addition, the correlation between the percentage of staff with teaching qualifications and the Guardian indicators is negative for student satisfaction with the course (-161, insignificant), student satisfaction with teaching (-.197, insignificant), value added (-.352) and graduate employment (-.379).

But there is a positive correlation with student satisfaction with feedback (.323).

The correlations with the indicators in the THE simulation were similar: graduate employment -.416, (-.249 after benchmarking), -449 completion (-.130, insignificant, after benchmarking), and -.186 student satisfaction, insignificant (-.056 after benchmarking, insignificant).

The report does cover a variety of qualifications so it is possible that digging deeper might show that some types of credentials are more useful than others. Also, there are intervening variables: Some of the high scorers, for example, are upgraded teacher training colleges with a relatively low status and a continuing emphasis on education as a subject.

Still, unless you count a positive association with feedback, there is no sign that forcing or encouraging faculty to take teaching courses and credentials will have positive effects on university teaching.