Tomorrow, the new 2008 Academic Ranking of World Universities will be officially published. Not surprisingly, it’s an almost all American affair. It’s rather interesting that the publication of the Shanhai Jiao Tong rankings almost goes by unnoticed, especially if you compare it to the publication of the Times Higher Education Supplement/QS World University Rankings (the THES-QS rankings 2008 will be published on 9 October).

This exactly is the strength of the SJT ranking. After all, universities are robust organisations and don’t change a lot in a years time. I guess it therefore corresponds with reality that the top 10 of 2008 is exactly the same as the one of 2007. Actually, not much has changed at all (although I of course did notice that the University of Sydney - my former employer - entered the top 100; the top 500 list is here).

2008(2007)		University
1 (1)		Harvard University
2 (2)		Stanford University
3 (3)		University California – Berkeley
4 (4)		University Cambridge
5 (5)		Massachusetts Inst Tech (MIT)
6 (6)		California Inst Tech
7 (7)		Columbia University
8 (8)		Princeton University
9 (9)		University of Chicago
10 (10)		University of Oxford

The main critique on the SJT rankings is that they only give an indication of a university’s research quality. They have only one proxy for teaching quality and that one isn’t exactly saying much about teaching quality at all. I have already pointed to some alternatives for these research biased rankings and league tables, for instance the new ranking being develop by CCAP (Center for College Affordability and Productivity).

This last one has now been published by Forbes Magazine. And yes…the criteria are very different than the ones we are used to:

1. Listing of Alumni in the 2008 Who’s Who in America (25%)
2. Student Evaluations of Professors from Ratemyprofessors.com (25%)
3. Four- Year Graduation Rates (16 2/3%)
4. Enrollment-adjusted numbers of students and faculty receiving nationally competitive awards (16 2/3%)
5. Average four year accumulated student debt of those borrowing money (16 2/3%)

And what’s the result?

2008	University
1	Princeton University
2	California Institute of Technology
3	Harvard University
4	Swarthmore College
5	Williams College
6	United States Military Academy
7	Amherst College
8	Wellesley College
9	Yale University
10	Columbia University

Compared with the SJT rankings, it are especially the liberal art colleges and the military colleges that are evident in the Forbes ranking. The high quality liberal arts colleges in the US (and elsewhere) are unfortunately lacking in nearly all international rankings. The reasons for this is of course again that these rankings are so research biased.

Another thing that I noticed after looking through the rest of the list is the relatively low standing of the public research universities. University of Virginia is the first one on 43, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at 66 and UC Berkeley at 73.This is probably due to another flaw in most rankings, that is that they measure the quality of the graduates without looking at the quality of the inputs. For more criticism on this ranking, see the comments on Vedder’s article in Inside HigherEd and the critical contribution of Patricia McGuire.

This challenge of actually measuring the added value provided by the university is taken up by the OECD’s AHELO project: assessing learning outcomes in higher education (sometimes referred to as the PISA for higher education). This exercise is still in it’s early stages and currently they are at the stage of studying the feasibility of such an exercise. And although the OECD explicitly does not want to promote it as a ranking, it might provide an alternative for the league tables.

Filed in: China, Ranking, USA, World | 3 Comments »

The Financial Times featured an interesting article from business guru Charles Baden Fuller. Professor at the Cass Business School of the City University, London. He observes a decrease in the gap between management research between the US and other regions like Europe and Asia. Although he acknowledges the supremacy of the US in the field, he says that the US share of management research will fall below 50 percent the next few years:

Research output in management is still concentrated: less than 3 per cent of the world’s universities produce more than 70 per cent of global output. Of these 214 universities, 126 are in the US, 13 in Canada, 57 in Europe and 18 in Asia and elsewhere. But comparative world positions have been changing quickly. My research** reveals how the world’s academic business research output has become more dispersed.

While Wharton and Harvard are still the best by a margin, Europe now accounts for 25 per cent of international research output. Its best schools - London Business School, Rotterdam School of Management (Erasmus), Insead and Tilburg are in the global top 30. Asian schools - in China and Singapore especially - are further behind but their stock is rising even faster.

While some of the best US schools admit privately to being worried, publicly they stress their continued dominance - at least, according to their data. But their measurements overemphasise past successes, ignore current trends and importantly use narrowly based research measures, looking only at material published in US journals and ignoring the fact that important new ideas are increasingly being published in highly regarded, peer-reviewed non-US publications.

The interesting part is his explanation for the rise of European and Asian management research. He claims they are more innovative in their approaches and engage more in cross border comparative work than their Colleagues in the US. Another factor is that European and Asian researchers seem to focus more on micro issues where US academics emphasise macrostatistical trends.

I have always admired the US management research and think they have produced some of the most interesting and sophisticated social science studies in the past decades. Not just in the field of economics but especially in sociology where many of the recent breakthroughs have come out of business schools. At the same I indeed found them to be very US centric. I think this is related to their emphasis on macrostatistical trends. If the priority is on the cleanliness of data sets and the complexity of the modeling, than comparative studies are just a nuisance. But of course, social sciences can not be just about data and models, it’s also about reality. And the reality is after all becoming less tidy, more global and less US centred…

Filed in: Asia, Competition, Europe, Higher Education, Social Science, USA | Comment »

Now here is an interesting fact. I knew that the United States was becoming ever more dependent on foreign PhD students, especially in the so-called STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). I also knew that an increasing proportion of them come from Asia, and China in particular. But this article in Science surprised me nonetheless:

A new study has found that the most likely undergraduate alma mater for those who earned a Ph.D. in 2006 from a U.S. university was … Tsinghua University. Peking University, its neighbor in the Chinese capital, ranks second. Between 2004 and 2006, those two schools overtook the University of California, Berkeley, as the most fertile training ground for U.S. Ph.D.s (see graph). South Korea’s Seoul National University occupies fourth place behind Berkeley, followed by Cornell University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOURCE: CPST ANALYSIS OF SED, 2006

HT: Nanopolitan

Filed in: Asia, Mobility, Science, USA | 1 Comment »

One of the main criticisms of international rankings is that they measure research quality rather than teaching quality. This is especially the case in for the Shanghai Jiao Tong Ranking. The THES Ranking uses proxies like employer surveys, student staff ratios and the number of international students in order to indicate education quality. The best known national university ranking is probably the one of the US News and World Report.  However, their proxies for educational quality (such as selectivity) can not be applied in a standardised global setting.

The most ambitious project to date to rank universities on education quality is the plan of the OECD to rank according to learning outcomes. Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s head of education research explained this in the Economist in November last year:

“Rather than assuming that because a university spends more it must be better, or using other proxy measures for quality, we will look at learning outcomes”

Just as the OECD assesses primary and secondary education in their PISA assessment, it will sample university students to see what they have learned. Once enough universities are taking part, it may publish league tables showing where each country stands, just as it now does for compulsory education. This of course is a very ambitious project, if not over-ambitious. But at the same time, the OECD is probably one of the few international organisations that have the capacity and experience to assess educational outcomesat a (near) global level. Or not?

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) at the University of Ohio recently proposed an alternative ranking of US colleges and universities:

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Filed in: Ranking, USA, World | 3 Comments »

Convergence in the physical appearance of spouses

by Zajonc, R.B., Adelmann, P.K., Murphy, S.T., & Niedenthal, P.M. (1987) 

Full Text Available in Motivation and Emotion

This study attempted to determine whether people who live with each other for a long period of time grow physically similar in their facial features. Photographs of couples when they were first married and 25 years later were judged for physical similarity and for the likelihood that they were married. The results showed that there is indeed an increase in apparent similarity after 25 years of cohabitation. Moreover, increase in resemblance was associated with greater reported marital happiness. Among the explanations of this phenomenon that were examined, one based on a theory of emotional efference emerged as promising. This theory proposes that emotional processes produce vascular changes that are, in part, regulated by facial musculature. The facial muscles are said to act as ligatures on veins and arteries, and they thereby are able to divert blood from, or direct blood to, the brain. An implication of the vascular theory of emotional efference is that habitual use of facial musculature may permanently affect the physical features of the face. The implication holds further that two people who live with each other for a longer period of time, by virtue of repeated empathic mimicry, would grow physically similar in their facial features. Kin resemblance, therefore, may not be simply a matter of common genes but also a matter of prolonged social contact.

Weird Science is a new item on Beerkens’ Blog. It presents a peculiar, remarkable, eccentric, extraordinary, unconventional, atypical, strange, funny, odd or bizarre study. In other words: a case of Weird Science.

Filed in: USA, Weird Science | 1 Comment »

Once again, there has been a shooting at a university campus in the US. On February 14, a gunman killed five students at Northern Illinois University. The killer died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He had been a graduate student in sociology at the university but was no longer enrolled. Sadly, the Northern Illinois shooting is part of a long list of random or semi-random shootings on university and college campuses:

USA / 2008 - February 14: Five people are killed when a man opens fire in a classroom at Northern Illinois University near Chicago, including the gunman who killed himself.

USA / 2007 – September 21: eighteen-year old student Loyer D. Braden shot two seventeen year old Delaware State University students from Washington, D.C.

USA / 2007 - April 16: A gunmen kills 32 people and himself and wounds 15 others at Virginia Tech University in the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history.

Canada / 2006 - September 13: Kimveer Gill opens fire on the street and inside the college in Montreal’s Dawson College, killing one student and injuring 19 others. Gill kills himself after a battle with police.

USA / 2002 - October 28: Robert Flores, a forty year old failing student of the University of Arizona Nursing College, walks into an instructor’s office and fatally shoots her. A few minutes later, he enters one of his nursing classrooms and kills two more of his instructors before fatally shooting himself.

Australia / 2002 - October 21: Huan Xiang, 37, an honors student at Monash University in Melbourne, shoots and kills two students and wounds five other people.

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Filed in: Higher Education, USA, World | 2 Comments »

Both the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times bring an article by Tamar Lewin on universities rushing to set up outposts abroad. It presents an illustrative overview of the risks, benefits and the viability of institutional globalisation in higher education. If, after reading the article, you are left with any pressing questions, the NYT gives you the opportunity to pose them dirteclty to Charles E. Thorpe, the dean of Carnegie Mellon in Qatar (ht: globalhighered). To get you started, here are some interesting quotes that provide food for thought:

Howard Rollins, the former director of international programs at Georgia Tech, which has degree programs in France, Singapore, Italy, South Africa and China, and plans for India:

“Where universities are heading now is toward becoming global universities. We’ll have more and more universities competing internationally for resources, faculty and the best students.”

Susan Jeffords, vice provost for global affairs of the University of Washington, about the increase in demand for higher education from overseas students:

“It’s almost like spam”

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Filed in: Globalisation, Higher Education, USA | 1 Comment »

The remaining Republican and Democratic candidates for the 2008 presidential elections in the United States have followed rather different educational careers. While the Republicans have been trained in some ‘typical republican’ fields, the Democrats spend their formative years in the elitist private liberal art colleges and Ivy League universities.

Although John McCain is very likely to become the Republican candidate, there is still a theoretical chance that Mike Huckabee will be elected. It’s no surprise that Huckabee, the most conservative of the candidates, graduated from a college with a strong religious affiliation. He earned a BA from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. The liberal arts university is affiliated with the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. It “seeks to combine the love of God with the love of learning” and “affirms that life is lived most abundantly when it is lived in response to the love of God through Jesus Christ”. After graduating from OBU, Huckabee became a pastor and he was the youngest president ever of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. The conservative and religious views are very apparent in Huckabee’s positions.

McCain’s educational career is dominated by military education and training. John McCain earned a BS degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1958. After graduating he started a career as a naval aviator. After serving in Vietnam (being a POW from 1967 until 1973), he attended the National War College in Washington DC from 1974-1975. The NWC was a a training ground for higher officers and has delivered well known graduates such as Collin Powell. Although McCain is often seen as surprisingly liberal (for a republican) he is considered a War-Hawk Republican. His support for the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq war has been consistent.

In the democratic camp, the educational careers of the two remaining candidates show much more similarity. Both have a BA in political science, both attended Law School and both taught in Law School. Barack Obama started his academic career at Occidental College in Los Angeles. After sophomore year however, he transferred to Columbia University where he majored in political science and specialised in international relations. After his graduation in 1983 he worked for some years, but decided to enter Harvard Law School in 1988. In 1990 he was elected as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in its 104-year history. Obama graduated magna cum laude in 1991 but re-entered academia in 1993, this time as a senior lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago. And he seems to have been very good at it. “He was good enough that students showed up at 8:30 in the morning in the dead of winter for him“. Obama has been ‘on leave of absence’ from the U of Chicago Law School since his election as senator in 2004.

Hillary Rodham attended the prestigious Wellesley College near Boston. Wellesley is a women’s liberal art college “for the student who has high personal, intellectual, and professional expectations“. This is also where her first political activities started, first for the Republicans, later for the Democrats. Her senior thesis was on community organiser Saul Alinsky and has led to quite some controversy during her husband’s presidency of the US. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1969, Hillary Rodham entered Yale Law School. Here she specialised mainly in issues related to civil rights and children’s rights. In 1971 she met her future husband who was also in Yale Law School. After graduating in 1973, she stayed involved in children’s right issues. In 1974, Hillary became a faculty member at the Fayetteville School of Law of the University of Arkansas. Here Hillary served as an assistant professor and director of the legal aid clinic from 1974 until 1977 after which she joined a law firm in Little Rock Arkansas.

So what will the arena look like on November 4? On the right side it is likely to be a candidate with a strong military affiliation and experience. On the left side, it will definitely be a candidate with a background in political science and law from some of the most elite institutions of the US. Whether it will be a Mac or a PC will be decided later this year…

Filed in: Higher Education, Politics, USA | 3 Comments »

Here’s a case to watch. The University of Wisconsin in Madison is accusing processor giant Intel of stealing their intellectual property. A lawsuit has been filed by UW’s technology transfer office (WARF, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) in which it charges Intel with infringement of one of its patents. The patented invention improves the efficiency and speed of computer processing and this technology is used by Intel in its Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

WARF filed this complaint to ensure that the interests of the UW-Madison and its inventors are protected and that WARF receives the compensation to which it is entitled for Intel’s unlicensed use of the invention. This compensation will be used to advance continued research at the university. The foundation’s complaint identifies the Intel CoreTM 2 Duo microarchitecture as infringing WARF’s United States Patent No. 5,781,752, entitled “Table Based Data Speculation Circuit for Parallel Processing Computer.”

The technology, patented in 1998, was developed by four researchers at the UW-Madison, including Professor Gurindar Sohi, currently the chair of the university’s Computer Science Department. Intel has aggressively marketed the benefits of this invention as a feature of its Core 2 technology. “The technology significantly enhances opportunities for instruction level parallelism in modern processors, thereby increasing their execution speed,” states Michael Falk, WARF general counsel.

The researchers had several discussions with Intel representatives on the possibility of licensing the technology. Intel repeatedly refused but nevertheless incorporated it into its products. Intel never informed the researchers that it was using the patented technology. WARF is now asking the court to declare that Intel is infringing on its patent and to stop Intel from selling the product. Also they asked for Intel to cover WARF’s legal fees and pay damages to WARF. Considering Intel’s dominant position in this market and the huge success of the Core 2 Duo, this last thing might prove very lucrative for the University of Wisconsin.

If it can be conclusively proven that Intel is using this specific technology, I guess that Intel will soon get together with WARF to come to a settlement…

Filed in: Innovation, Technology, USA | Comment »

Now, isn’t this frustrating. After a hard day’s work, putting all effort in converting my thoughts to text, I read this: Philip M Parker is the world’s fastest book author, and given that he has been at it only for about five years and already has more than 85,000 books to his name, he is also probably the most prolific. Parker himself says the total is well over 200,000.

So how does Philip M Parker (professor of innovation, business and society at Insead in France) do all that? When he turns to a new subject, he seizes and shakes it till several books, or several hundred, emerge. Parker invented a machine that writes books. He says it takes about 20 minutes to write one. I don’t know what kind of device this is, but I am sure I want one! Beats an iPod, Kindle or a Mac Air anytime. Next week, the Education Guardian Weekly will have a closer look at the machine…

Update: here is how it works and here’s a video

Filed in: France, Humor, Innovation, Technology, USA | Comment »

What did the internets bring me today? A lot of presidential hopefuls.

• The World & the US elections - Alan S. Blinder analyses whether Americans are ready to stop the world and shut out reality: among Democrats, this may manifest itself in attitudes toward international trade that range from lukewarm support to outright hostility. Among Republicans, it shows up in attitudes toward immigration - and most things foreign - that border on xenophobia.
• Education & the US elections - Barack Obama, the winner of last week’s Democratic caucuses in Iowa was a favorite of academe. He received about one-third of the total donations that college administrators, faculty members, and other educators have made to presidential candidates. From the Chronicle’s election blog.
• Blogs & the US elections - Over at Crooked Timber they are ahead of the rest. Anticipating an Obama victory, John Holbo polls the likeliness of an Obama/Clinton ticket. The commentators clearly have other combinations in mind.

Filed in: Politics, USA, W - E - B Links | Comment »

Earlier this year Daniel Drezner discussed why there will never be a reality show about academia. Well… this is not reality, but pretty funny nevertheless. The Office Department: a merger between the Kennedy School of Government and the Government Department at Harvard.

The difference?

They (Kennedy School of Government) want to go and save the world. What we (Government Department) want to do is save the political science profession. I don’t know which job is tougher. Probably the latter.

[ht: CoreEcon / Dani Rodrik]

Filed in: Higher Education, Humor, USA | Comment »

Isn’t economics wonderful? It gives answers to all important questions in life. It even provides the tools for ‘understanding the preferences underlying the search for a mate’. Or in other words, an economist goes to a bar and solves the mysteries of dating.

At a local bar just off the Columbia campus, Raymond Fisman ran a speed-dating experiment with two psychologists, Sheena Iyengar and Itamar Simonson, and fellow economist Emir Kamenica. Some of their findings confirm the well known clichés, stereotypes and prejudices, other findings are more surprising:

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Filed in: Economics, Social Science, USA | Comment »

One of the major current issues in (higher) education policy - in my opinion - is the issue of excellence versus equity. Is it most important to focus on the masses and see to it that everyone gets the same high quality education? Or should the country’s prime talents be nurtured and given the opportunity to fully exploit their opportunities. Or, better yet, can you do both?

The BBC Radio Documentary series ‘The Changing World’ investigates the dilemma, and what better places to visit than Finland on the one hand and the UK and US on the other. Finland is generally seen as the success story in creating a high quality egalitarian knowledge society. Finland shows very good results on the global tests like PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), TIMSS (Third International Mathematics and Science Study) and IALS (International Adult Literacy Survey).

In addition, they manage to do so without having schools that really fail. The range between the outcomes in the best and the worst schools is very small. An interesting observation in the interviews is that the consistent high performance of Finish schools is not only a consequence of their egalitarian education system, but also of the stability and equality in Finnish society as a whole. Major differences between suburbs or districts don’t exist and therefore major quality differences between schools don’t exist either. This of course sets limits to the transferability of the Finnish system.

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Filed in: Competition, Finland, Higher Education, UK, USA | Comment »

As a European, my view on the relation between the university and sports is very straightforward. There’s a health related function and a social function: the university provides facilities for students and staff to stay in shape and stay in touch. Simple as that!

As a European in Australia, the prominence of athletics on campus surprised me in the early days when I got here (I’m pretty much surrounded by ovals and tennis courts). But then again, sports are pretty much part of everyday life here (especially the past few weeks) and obviously, that’s reflected in campus life.

In the United States, this relation is taken a step further. And not without controversy. Escalating coaches’ salaries and the long-term bonded debt required to finance new arenas, stadiums, and other capital projects have a growing number of university leaders worried that college sports might not be as financially sound as it appears. Many academics are getting increasingly frustrated as well by the fact that universities overspend on sports at a time when its academic programs are deteriorating from financial starvation.

I was well aware of the importance of athletics at US campuses and the controversy surrounding it. But still, I was amazed by the excessive spending reported in this article about the University of Texas in the Statesman (thanks to the CCAP Blog).

Here are some figures:

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Filed in: Culture, Higher Education, USA | 1 Comment »