Mastodawn

Universities should boycott the sleazy organizations that make money by ranking universities according to questionable criteria using non-transparent methods.

And they're starting to do it! The Sorbonne has just announced that it won't give data to the Times Higher Education rankings anymore. Columbia University and Utrecht University have also quit, as have the medical and law schools of Harvard and Yale.

700 research organizations, funders and professional societies have signed the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment in favor of making scientific research, data, methods, and educational resources transparent, accessible and reusable by everyone without barriers.

But we're a long way from getting there!

https://scroll.in/article/1087997/why-the-worlds-top-universities-are-abandoning-the-ranking-system

Why the world’s top universities are abandoning the ranking system

Institutes are questioning the value and methods used by ranking companies, which can focus more on research output than other parameters.

Scroll.in

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mausmalone Nov 2

@johncarlosbaez I sure hope this succeeds. The university where I work consistently gets dinged in the ratings for low "exclusivity." But we're a public institution - our /mission/ is to give as many people access to an education as possible.

Exclusivity is essentially a measure of supply and demand - but using it in a ranking of quality is nuts. It's like saying that a designer handbag is higher quality BECAUSE it's harder to get. It's totally backward.

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John Carlos Baez Nov 2

@mausmalone - yes, valuing "exclusivity" is like saying a restaurant is good because it's small and it's hard to get reservations! That might even make sense for a snobbish fancy restaurant, but education should be a public good, not a status symbol!

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doboprobodyne Jan 15

@johncarlosbaez @mausmalone
Interesting you should mention restaurants. I've read of public review sites for universities catching on. To be sure I'm not suggesting they're a perfect solution; going solely by users' reviews of any specialist service usually has the catch that the user purchased the service because they themselves are not subject matter experts. They may struggle to fully understand what they see. The classic medical example is a surgeon with a higher mortality rate might look bad to the public, but a specialist might realise that surgeon is willing to offer the chance of surgery to frail or sick patients that other surgeons would turn down.

Anyway, interesting times!

https://www.terminalfour.com/blog/posts/tripadvisor-for-universities-a-new-trend-in-showcasing-external-student-reviews.html

#measuring #metrics #universities #education #capitalism #funding #politics #higherEducation

Blog - TripAdvisor for Universities? A new trend in showcasing external student reviews

Don’t be afraid of what your students have to say and they may just turn out to be your biggest advocates! A first for Loughborough University!

Terminalfour Higher Education Digital Marketing Blog