Times Higher Education (THE) launched its World Reputation Rankings at a British Council event in Tokyo last week. The British Council's Dr Halima Begum explains how it works and how international collaboration can improve an institution's reputation.
Rankings make the blood pressures of vice chancellors in the UK rise and fall according to where their institution is ranked. Meanwhile, in developing countries, rankings give struggling ministries of education a stick with which to ask for more resources from their governments; if not resources, more autonomy to let the universities compete, control their destinies and rise in the rankings.
Reputation is the single most important consideration for students in their choice of study destination, above fees and even course content, says THE editor-at-large Phil Baty, drawing on IDP's research from October 2012.
In general, rankings based on quality tend to follow the trend of those universities which score high on reputation, but sometimes there are differences. Reputations are built over many years, sometimes decades; and they can be ruined overnight. Reputation is known to be important but is fairly immature as a professional area.
What factors go into the measurement of reputation?
The THE's method is based on a survey carried out by IPSOS for Thomson Reuters. Their data is collected from 130 countries, using ten languages. There are specific questions on ‘research’ and ‘teaching’. At best, though, the survey measures subjective judgements of academics, though these are the considered expert judgements of peers who know best about their universities. The current THE method is divided into teaching (30 per cent), research (30 per cent), citation and research influence (30 per cent), industry income (2.5 per cent) and international outlook (7.5 per cent).
There are other ranking systems, and some that are now looking to measure the strength and quality of higher education systems, based on the observation that universities don’t exist as ivory towers but can be graded and assessed according to a number of factors related with investment and environments. The latter is important, as no amount of vision from one vice chancellor can turn around a reform process in a country where excessive regulation holds back university autonomy and governance. Burma, Indonesia and Vietnam are cases in point.
The main source of concern among ranking sceptics is that the rankings don't take into account teaching excellence, student satisfaction, student outcomes and overall impact on students. In other words, rankings reward research-intensive universities, which may explain why the usual suspects such as Harvard, MIT and Oxford score high.
The simplest way to improve this method is to acknowledge that some measures on the quality of teaching need to be built in, and this has to include a metric on what students think about the quality of teaching. Putting students at the heart of the higher education debate will be a necessary part of the improvements to the existing ranking metrics. This is a challenge, accepted and welcomed by THE and others who see the need to respond to the growing customer power of students in the 21st century, and the power of Generation Y in choosing or rejecting higher education altogether.
How are reputation rankings perceived in the UK and East Asia and how do you explain the differences?
Reputation is a new area of measurement, but is attracting widespread interest. Institutions in East Asia are waking up to the power of reputation rankings and take them even more seriously than their counterparts in the US and Europe. East Asia sees a high place in the rankings as a national honour and as part of managing the country’s reputation in teaching and learning. It is, for example, not about the University of Tokyo’s position in the rankings table but about Japan’s overall position. Rankings therefore have enormous geopolitical power, or, in our words, soft power.
What effects does such a ranking have?
Reputation helps attract the best staff and students, it affects funding to support research and it affects the partnerships forged by institutions. To build a reputation, institutions need to identify their strengths and link reputation management to the institution’s corporate strategy. Given the intense competition in higher education and a proliferation of new institutions, the ability to differentiate between them will be critical. Sir Michael Barber’s (Pearson) challenge -- 'What’s special about your particular university?' -- is one that university brand managers take very seriously. Brand management is in some ways more important for universities, as they are selling intangible assets (education, not soups). As any advertising professional will tell you, when goods and services are intangible, your reputation or brand (rather than the product itself) has to do a lot more of the selling.
What are the headline figures?
- US confirms supremacy as it takes eight of the top 10 positions and 46 of the top 100 – with Harvard University, MIT and Stanford University claiming the top three spots
- Some Asian institutions are making strong progress in the list of the world’s 100 most prestigious universities
- There's worrying evidence of reputational decline among UK institutions
- Six Anglo-American 'super-brands' continue to stand apart from the pack – but the gap is closing
- Seoul National University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology are identified as rising stars in the world’s biggest academic reputation survey
- Australia takes a hit in the global index of academic prestige
- Japan remains Asia’s leading nation in the prestige stakes, but the University of Tokyo falls out of the top 10 for the first time since the rankings were established
- Poor performance by France and Sweden; disappointment for Brazil
- Russia’s flagship university slips out of the top 50
What effects might such a ‘competition’ have on how institutions work together internationally?
In theory, the rankings should reinforce collaboration, as education enters a fiercely competitive higher education landscape. Institutions with high ranking power often are the ones with more internationalised research and deeper collaboration. For instance, 40 per cent of research papers published by the top 200 universities are internationally co-authored. Indeed, for some global universities such as the National University of Singapore, a global research-intensive university, forging global academic partnerships has become an important part of institutional reputation-building. University reputation is a proxy for choosing the right partners for collaboration.
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