The monitor tracks developments in almost 50 countries all over the world. It provides up-to-date country information and explores core themes in international higher education. It provides you with a selection of the news on international higher education, categorised thematically in seven dossiers and categorised by country. It also gives a daily selection of the most interesting international news and Dutch news. Furthermore, it presents monthly overviews of Dutch, European and international policy initiatives and a list of future conferences.

The monitor also features a blog on international higher education issues. Being one of the blog contributors, I will also cross post my own contributions here. Some forthcoming issues in the Nuffic Blog are: foreign backed universities, regulation of recruiting agents, Russia-Dutch scientific cooperation, mobility statistics and many others…

Let them know what you think of it!

More recently, also several podcasts have emerged that discuss the topic of higher education. The chronicle has its podcast with weekly interviews with prominent researchers, college leaders, and Chronicle reporters about big ideas in higher education. The Center for International Higher Education at Boston College has a podcast series with a more global scope. It brings key thinkers and leaders in higher education worldwide to a global audience. The series is coordinated by Laura Rumbley and it is definitely worth to have a look.

The past week there have also been some blogs that entered the world of podcasting. The Center for College Affordability and Productivity presented it’s first podcast on it’s blog. It features the center’s director Richard Vedder discussing the role of incentives and power in higher education.

For several years, the students of the Erasmus Mundus Programme on Higher Education have brought you the Hedda blog to you. I have taught a module on internationalisation, globalisation and the knowledge society for this module for several years (and loved it every year!). Of course I was pleased to see that they have started their own podcast series as well. Their first podcast features an interview with Peter Maassen, an ex colleague of mine at Cheps and now professor of Higher Education at the University of Oslo. He discusses his new book Borderless Knowledge?  Understanding the “New” Internationalisation of Research and Higher Education in Norway.

Update: I was pointed to the podcast series of the Lumina foundation. This is the foundation that is also keeping a close American watch on the Bologna process. The have two podcast sessions on the Bologna process featuring Lumina’s Dewayne Matthews and Tim Birtwistle, professor of law and policy of higher education, and the Jean Monnet chair at Leeds Law School (Leeds Metropolitan University, U.K.).

The 20th century saw a surge in higher education; in the early 21st century, the idea of going abroad to study has become thinkable for ordinary students. In 2006, the most recent year for which figures are available, nearly 3m were enrolled in higher education institutions outside their own countries, a rise of more than 50% since 2000.

The article emphasises the risks of international education, illustrated by the examples of Australia and the UK as receiving countries (the risks of over-commercialisation) and China as one of the main sending countries (the risks of brain drain). But fortunately, the benefits of international education education are not neglected. Read the rest of the article here.

Conclusion? It pays of to work hard in order to get to the top, especially in South Africa, New Zealand and above all, Saudi Arabia. Not so in France and Germany (surprise?). Furthermore, an advice for academics who aspire to have an international career and want to maximise their salaries: look for extreme weather conditions. They would be best of to start their career in Canada and end up in the global classrooms in the Saudi Arabian desserts.

In addition to offering high salaries for top academics, Saudi Arabia is also actively recruiting scholars from Europe and North America. Global Higher-Ed has a post on a faculty recruitment video of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Conveying a ‘unique semi-territorialized live-work-play message’ they target a mobile “world class” faculty base to come and live, work and play in Saudi Arabia. I’m sure that an average monthly top-level salary of US$8,490 helps. But then again, there are other things that count as well…

“International mobility of human resources in science and technology is of growing importance and can have important impacts on knowledge creation and diffusion in both receiving and sending countries indicating that it is not necessarily a zero-sum game.

Receiving countries benefit from a variety of positive effects related to knowledge flows and R&D. But sending countries can also experience positive effects. Much of the literature on highly skilled emigration focuses on remittances and brain drain but emigration of skilled workers can also spur human capital accumulation in the sending country. Brain circulation stimulates knowledge flows and builds links between locations. Diaspora networks can function as a conduit in these migration flows so that all countries can benefit.

Most OECD countries are net beneficiaries of highly skilled migration but there are significant variations. Students are increasingly mobile as well and often leads to skilled migration, both short and long term migration. Some evidence suggests that immigrant HRST (Human Resources in Science and Technology) contribute strongly to innovation.”

Skilled migration is an increasingly important rationale for the higher education internationalisation policies of national governments (and of the European Union as well). In this global competition for talent, Australia and Canada have  actively linked the recruitment of foreign students to their skilled migration policies. This approach is also increasingly chosen by European countries. Particularly in the science and technology related fields, skill shortages are becoming apparent and the benefits of (cultural) diversity for innovation are recognised.

And if you need a highly skilled and diverse body of professionals, why not start with foreign students? At Nuffic we recently published an appeal for an increased attention for internationalisation. In this appeal, the skilled migration approach is clearly apparent (see here for the Dutch booklet, or here for the English translation). Obviously, we are of the opinion that such policies should not come at the expense of developing countries…

The new OECD report shows again that such policies can create benefits for both the sending and receiving countries. This goes in  particular for emerging economies where the opportunities for brain circulation are present. Other studies – like this world bank report – show that it are the least developed countries that suffer most from the brain drain because brain circulation does not occur in these countries. Here, skilled migration policies should be accompanied by compensating and mitigating policies for the sending countries (see this CGD publication for some ideas on this issue).

The graph below shows that the United States and the United Kingdom are again superior in the Times rankings, followed by Australia and Canada. The Netherlands is the first non English speaking country, followed by Japan and Germany. The main difference however compared to last years results is that the number of countries represented in the top 200 has increased. The group is now joined by countries like Greece, Argentina, Thailand, Russia and India.

But of course…size matters and it’s easier to have many well performing universities in a large country than in a small country. So here is the result if we take population into account.

This of course works well for the small states like Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore. The Netherlands again comes fifth in line. If we control for GDP instead of population we get a similar picture. Here however, Hong Kong clearly outperforms the rest.

For what it’s worth….

Yes, it’s time for the fifth edition of the Times Higher Education World University Ranking of 2008. Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd, the company responsible for the ranking, claims (again) that the methodology is improved. They are even so blunt to say that ‘the rankings have established themselves as an accepted benchmark of quality’. I beg to differ…

One issue at least seems to be resolved, that is the volatility of the THE ranking (compared for instance with the relatively stable Shanghai Ranking):

The final results will see more countries represented among the top 200 institutions, with Continental Europe beginning to make more of a mark than in previous editions. But there will be less volatility this year, thanks to the change in statistical methodology introduced in 2007. Single outliers no longer have a disproportionate effect on the overall ranking.

The world university ranking will be published here and here tomorrow morning…

Meeting a rapidly rising demand for more and better education is creating intense pressures to raise spending on education and improve its efficiency. Recent years have already seen considerable increases in spending levels, both in absolute terms and as a share of public budgets: The total amount of public spending on educational institutions rose in all OECD countries over the last decade, on average by 19% between 2000 and 2005 alone, and in Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland and Korea by more than twice that amount.

Another visible indication of the efforts governments are making can be seen in the fact that, over the last decade, the share of public budgets devoted to education grew by more than one percentage point – from 11.9% in 1995 to 13.2% in 2005.

The full report and links to the statistics can be found at the EAG 2008 website.

Policymakers seem determined to assess the quality of HEIs using standardised tests of student learning outcomes. Yet, Dr. Banta claims that such tests do not provide data for valid comparisons and on top of that, they measure other things than institutional performance:

Comparing test scores sounds easy, but are today’s standardised tests of generic skills capable of yielding data for valid comparisons? Twenty years of research conducted in the US using these tests indicates they are not.

It is however not the use of standardised tests as such that was criticized by Banta, but the use of such tests to compare institutions. Research in the US showed that the scores of such tests were highly correlated with the SAT scores (with correlations up to 0.9). It appeared that 81% of the variance between institutions could be explained by previous schooling. This means that the residual 19 percent is explained by a whole range of other factors (e.g. motivation, family situation, etc.), only one of them being institutional performance!

Bante therefore concludes that:

standardized tests of generic intellectual skills do not provide valid evidence of institutional differences in the quality of education provided to students.

Moreover, we see no virtue in attempting to compare institutions, since by design they are pursuing diverse missions and thus attracting students with different interests, abilities, levels of motivation, and career aspirations.

This provides food for thought for many national policy makers, but also for some international actors. I’ve written a few times about the OECD AHELO project. In this project, the OECD tries to differentiate between institutions on the basis of an assessment of the learning outcomes.

AHELO focuses on an assessment of students’ knowledge and skills towards the end of a three or four-year degree programme. The assessment will be based on a written test of the competencies of students, and will be computer delivered.

The feasibility study is expected to demonstrate the feasibility – or otherwise – of comparing HEIs’ performance from the perspective of student learning rather than relying upon research-based measures which are currently being used across the globe as overall proxies of institutional quality.

AHELO can thus partly be seen as a response to the research-biased rankings and league tables. They are presently working on a feasibility study. Whatever will be the result of this, it’s a sure thing that such a (near-)global assessment is going to be an enormously complex exercise. And therefore a very expensive one…

It’s reasonable to expect that results here also correlate strongly with prior learning, just as was the case in the US. Therefore PISA results might better explain AHELO results than institutional performance does. If the AHELO-assessment results only explains a few percentages of the variance between institutions, comparing higher education institutions will be impossible. And then all that money might better be spent otherwise. I would hope the OECD takes these American research findings into account in the feasibility study.

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.

The Graduate Junction was established by Daniel Colegate and Esther Dingley, graduate  students in respectively Chemistry and Education at the University of Durham, in the United Kingdom. They set up The Graduate Junction because they were – in their own words – frustrated by a feeling of isolation in their own research projects and wanted to know who, if anyone, was doing similar research. I have had a quick look at it and it looks good and has the potential to be a valuable tool for graduate students. Much of its success obviously depends on the number of participants it will attract. If I still were a student I would definitely sign up and become member of groups like this.

Researchgate targets a larger community. It is meant as a networking tool for all academics and researchers. It is set up by three students from Germany (one of them now being at Harvard). Two of them in Medicine, one in Computer Science. The concept is backed by a world wide network of experts and advisers. Researchgate has big aspirations. Next to a networking tool, it sees itself as the start of a more profound change where researchers take more and more control over their publications and research findings.

So where will all this lead? Well…my experiences with these new tools for – often conservative – academics have not always been positive. Nevertheless I’m positive about these new tools. Graduate Junction has the advantage that it targets a younger group of people and probably more open to these kind of innovations. In addition, I think that the need of these tools might be more substantial with graduate students than with researchers in general. This is simply because the ‘normal’ channels such as journals and conferences are not so readily available to them and don’t provide that many opportunities for direct interaction.

Researchgate on the other hand has a more professional look and already is backed by a large network of academics. It also seems to provide more advanced technological opportunities like importing endnote libraries and linking with databases such as PubMed. I would love to see a further expansion to enable more interaction and maybe new opportunities for open peer reviewing.

I hope both initiatives will succeed. It’s about time for the academic community to start using the technological opportunities available. Both might turn out to be great new opportunities for inter-organisational, interdisciplinary and international cooperation.

It looks like it, however I must admit it’s slightly different. It won’t be a meta-ranker, but more an accreditor of rankings. I’m talking about the establishment of the IREG–International Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence:

On April 18, 2008 an important decision was reached by the International Ranking Expert Group (IREG) to consolidate its partnership arrangement with the   creation of the IREG-International Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence.

Bob Morse, director of data research of one of the first and one of the most influential rankings – US NEWS & World Report – is one of the Executive Committee members and he writes on his blog Morse Code:

The International Observatory, headquartered in Warsaw, will conduct reviews of various ‘academic rankings’ and measures of ‘academic excellence’ to assess how well they serve higher education stakeholders and the general public. The observatory will use the recommendations formulated in the Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions. Members of the body also will meet at the request of various ranking agencies to review their particular methodology criteria and standards. Ranking entities that receive observatory approval will be able to declare themselves ‘IREG Recognized’.

Especially that last item seems to point to an accreditor of rankings. But then, what gives IREG the authority to declare a ranking recognized or not? Well… at least they have some ‘recognized’ persons in their Executive Committee. Next to Bob Morse there are Gero Federkeil (CHE, Germany), Liu Nian Cai (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) and Alex Usher (Education Policy Institute, Toronto, Canada). The Committee is chaired by Jan Sadlak, the Director of UNESCO-CEPES in Romania. I wonder how this all will develop. And I wonder who will first get the ‘IREG-disapproved stamp’. Plenty of candidates…

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:

We at CCAP have long complained that most rankings of colleges are largely based on inputs used in providing services, things like the faculty-student ratio or the average SAT score of entering students. Better would to evaluate schools on either consumer satisfaction (like we evaluate most other things) or on the post-graduate achievements of the products of the education –the alumni.

The data for measuring consumer satisfaction come from the popular website ratemyprofessors.com. Today in their blog, CCAP research associates show what the ranking would look like if it would be solely based on the data from this site:

rankings are calculated by taking a weighted average of all faculty members at a university in the categories of: overall quality, average easiness (with ease treated as a negative quality), and average “hotness.”

And what is the result for the US national universities?

1. Boston College
2. Northwestern
3. Harvard
4. California Tech
5. Princeton
6. Samford
7. U. of Chicago
8. MIT
9. Wake Forest
10. Brigham Young University (BYU)
11. Brown
12. Yale
13. U. of Pennsylvania
14. Emory
15. Stanford

What surprised me in the list is that it is composed only of private universities. None of the prestigious public universities such as Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina, etc., appear in the list. In addition to a ranking for national universities, they also present the top 15 of Liberal Arts Colleges. Interestingly, these show a higher consumer satisfaction than the research universities.

Of course…ratemyprofessors.com has received a lot of criticism and using it for a ranking brings along many problems. Nevertheless, the idea of including student satisfaction as a measure of quality, is not that strange. Student surveys have been used by the Dutch magazine Elsevier in their rankings and also is the basis for part of the data behind the CHE/Die Zeit rankings in Germany. And after all, it has been applied – albeit indirectly – as a measure since the very beginnings of the university:

One of the oldest universities in the world, the University of Bologna chartered in 1158 by Frederick I Barbarossa, was designed to cater to student desires. Students collectively hired professors, set tuition rates, evaluated and even dismissed low-quality instructors. While we have moved away from that model (perhaps somewhat for the better) student instruction remains the primary function of a university. Faculty research and other things distract from this goal. Our findings that students at liberal arts colleges are more satisfied with their professors than those at national research institutions is not surprising. Perhaps it is time that our national research universities shifted priorities more toward satisfying high paying customers. Since students are the main consumers of the university product, any ranking of schools should include a student satisfaction variable.

It will be interesting to see how the inclusion of teaching and learning in international rankings will develop. And in the longer term, it will even be more interesting to see how this will change universities. Will it indeed cause a shift in priorities toward satisfying (high paying) customers?

The Guardian reports on a study that looks at what motivates international students to study abroad and what influences their choice of study. I haven’t seen the study and I can’t link to it because it is not available on their website, but looking at the article of the Guardian, it seems to be a case of over-simplification and over-generalisation. According to i-Graduate, the international student population can be divided into five tribes:

First, there are the “seekers”. These students are often at home on engineering, science and business degree courses. They are driven by their parents’ wishes that they secure a good job. They are not fussed about earning megabucks or changing the world. The seeker is happy if its parents are. I-graduate says students from Hong Kong are often seekers. About 24% of the 25,000 international students it polled were in this tribe.

Then there’s the “gekko”, after the hair-gelled and power-hungry corporate finance boss Gordon Gekko of the 1987 film Wall Street. The gekko can be found craving peers’ respect. But even more important to the species is the potential to command huge sums of money. They care about one thing: cash. I-graduate says Polish students tend towards this tribe, as do those studying creative subjects, business and engineering. About 23% of those polled were part of this tribe.

What of the “bono”? This international student is more idealistic than the rest. He or she can be found worrying in a corner about the difference they can make to the environment and is at home on language, science and creative degree courses. They are more influenced by tutors than parents. I-graduate says postgraduates are most likely to be part of this tribe, as are students from the Netherlands and the US. About 22% of those quizzed were members of this tribe.

Then there’s the “kid”, who can be seen wandering aimlessly across campus. The kid lacks focus and is searching for something easy to guide it. It might be for this reason that the kid is the most influenced by university league tables of any of the five tribes. Many of this tribe’s members are undergraduates, but not all. I-graduate says students from Pakistan are often members of this tribe, as are engineering students. A fifth of those polled belonged to this tribe.

And, finally, there’s the “surfer”. The surfer is just looking for fun and is less ambitious than members of the other tribes. He or she cares less about the future and job security than his or her peers. Despite the name, the surfer can be spotted at all universities, not just those on the coast, and is often at home on language degree courses. I-graduate says Spanish and Japanese students tend towards this tribe. About 11% of those polled were members.

The Guardian also asked some experts about their opinion on these ‘tribes’. A few think that the study might be helpful. I tend to agree with the others, who see it as stereotyping and see the nationality tagging of the study as unhelpful or even demeaning.