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« What does the iPhone mean for the future of mobile services? | Main | Well done RSA » October 15, 2007Watchdog defends universities' low ranking in leaguesSo - I saw this report in the Irish Independent The basis of the story is that the old universities (TCD, UCD, UCC et al) ranked poorly in the Shanghai University Rankings. Dr Padraig Walsh, of the Irish Universities Quality Board (IUQB), said in the article that such rankings tended to rate institutions on their research output, citations in journals and the number of Nobel prize-winners on their staff, rather than on the quality of teaching. So I had a look at the ranking site: Firstly, the top ten are very predicable: 1 - Harvard Univ; 2 - Stanford Univ; 3 - Univ California Berkeley; 4 - Univ Cambridge; 5 - Massachusetts Inst Tech (MIT); 6 - California Inst Tech; 7 - Columbia Univ; 8 - Princeton Univ; 9 - Univ Chicago; 10 - Univ Oxford.
http://www.arwu.org/rank/2007/ARWU2007Methodology.htm Thirdly, I think the IUQB's is trying to reframe the debate (in the wrong way) in defence of the old universities poor performance by focusing on the quality of teaching. According to the Irish Independant, Dr. Walsh, who was speaking ahead of the board's annual conference in Galway, said none of the league tables such as the Shanghai rankings, evaluated the quality of teaching and they "don't measure how happy students are". Seriously? Does anyone think that students don't get a good education from Harvard? Or MIT? Or Berkeley? Or Cambridge? I think not. I think a better approach to these rankings is to evaluate how they can suggest improvements in what we do, learn from them, and work to improve our rankings! Also, what's wrong with evaluating universities on: Nothing in my opinion. They are all academic achievements of the highest level. We should all be working towards these goals. I do have an obvious and serious criticism of the rankings methodology though and this is a point the IUQB seems to have missed. The current rankings methodology primarily assesses knowledge creation. However there are no criteria that assess the universities' performance at exploiting the new knowledge they create. No assessment of patent's filed or technology transfer (license agreements for the exploitation of, for example, a patent). This I see as the major weakness of the ranking methodology. Increasingly it is a key objective of most universities to exploit the new knowledge they create by filing a patent and then licensing it; or even developing a prototype to validate the patent (and dare I say it - the market opportunity) and transfer it to an existing company or to help create a new company (the so called Campus Company). It is a major oversight in my opinion that patents filed and technology transfers executed are excluded from the methodology of the Shanghai University Rankings. Perhaps our universities would rise in the rankings if such criteria were included? I know WITs ranking would! Posted by bdownes at October 15, 2007 3:46 PM CommentsPost a comment |
