I’m on my way back to The Hague, returning from the EAIR conference in Copenhagen. Although lots of interesting new studies and findings have been presented there (some of them I’ll discuss in later posts), I actually want to talk about a conference I visited last July in Berlin.

This conference (Transparency in Diversity – Towards a European Classification of Higher Education Institutions) presented the results from the second stage of the project Classifying European Institutions for Higher Education, a project that might turn out to have a major impact on European higher education policy. This project was initiated in 2005 (see this previous post) and is now supported by for instance the European Commission (DG Education) and the German Hochschule Rektorenkonferenz. It’s run by an international team led by Frans van Vught.

The project can be seen as a response to two trends (at least, that’s my interpretation). First of all, there is the emergence of the European higher education area, the objective of the Bologna process. If there’s one space, we need to know what types of institutions are occupying that space and hence, we need a classification or typology.

Secondly, there is the proliferation of ranking and league tables. As I’ve discussed many times before, these rankings present a very uni-dimensional view of the contemporary higher education institution. Basically they only look at the - science heavy - traditional research university. Through this they neglect the quality of a very wide range of other institutions which might be very good at the things they are supposed to do. Here one can think of mono-disciplinary institutions (e.g. colleges of fine arts; schools of economics and business), teaching oriented institutions (like the American liberal arts colleges) ore more professionally and vocationally oriented institutions (like the German and Austrian Fachhochschulen, the Dutch Hogescholen, etc.).

A multidimensional classification of European higher education institutions can on the one hand create more transparency in European higher education, while at the same time clarify which institutions can be compared with each other (so we can compare apples with apples and pears with pears). If you are interested in how they intend to do this, I suggest you have a look at the presentations of the conference. See Frans van Vughts presentation (PDF) to get a better idea about the background of the project and have a look at Frans Kaiser’s presentation (PDF) for the technical aspects of such a multidimensional classification.

What the classification will look like exactly is not yet clear. If it will remain limited to the web tool and the resulting radar graphs, I expect the effects to be rather limited. The question is whether the various stakeholders related to the project will ultimately define real categories of institutions (like the old Carnegie classification did). This however might give the project a more political character. Even though the project-team stresses that they will not create a hierarchical classification, it is interesting to see whether some categories will be perceived as more prestigious than others.

Nevertheless, the classification project seems to be widely supported by institutions throughout Europe and their representative organisations. The feeling that Europe needs to create more transparency is widely shared and at the same time, many institutions are looking for benchmarking opportunities with like-minded institutions. After all, comparisons with Harvard, Oxford and Yale are not very useful for most higher education institutions in Europe…

Filed in: Europe, Higher Education, Politics, Ranking | Comment »

Both the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEST) of the Australian Commonwealth Government and the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) of the British Government are looking for news to organise and coordinate their higher education sector. For this, they have started a similar initiative. Both are relying heavily on input from the field and the broader society to get new ideas, and probably to receive more support for their future polices. Yet, there are some differences as well.

In its Review of Higher Education, the Australian government has asked a small expert panel to write a Higher Education Discussion Paper. This Discussion Paper (PDF, 4 MB) was released in June and addresses a wide range of questions structured around nine key challenges and issues for higher education in Australia over the coming decades.

· Meeting labour market and industry needs
· Opportunities to participate in higher education
· The student experience of higher education
· Connecting with other education and training sectors
· Higher education’s role in the national innovation system
· Australia’s higher education sector in the international arena
· HE’s contribution to Australia’s economic, social and cultural capital
· Resourcing the system
· Governance and regulation

After this release, the Expert Panel invited the community to react to this paper and send in their submissions before 31 July. This has led to 300 submissions responding to the discussion paper. Responses have been submitted by interested individuals, Vice Chancellors, Leaders of intermediary organisations, student unions, etc. There’s also a range of HE experts and researchers that submitted their reactions, and even some HE bloggers (who of course are also experts; for instance Andrew Norton - submission 91 and Steven Schwartz - Submission 66). The Review Panel will provide its report on priority action by the end of October 2008, and final report by the end of the year. I’ll keep an eye on it…

In the UK,  the Secretary of State for DIUS, John Denham, claimed that the UK needs to decide what a world-class HE system of the future should look like and what it should seek to achieve. And he also is asking the public to participate in this Higher Education Debate. Denham first asked eight experts to present their advise and opinions on eight different themes:

· Part-time studies in Higher Education
· Demographic challenge facing Higher Education
· Teaching and student experience
· International issues in Higher Education
· Intellectual property and research benefits
· Academia and public policy making
· Research careers
· Understanding institutional performance

These contributions will lead to a formal public consultation on a policy framework for HE in the autumn. They however also form the input for discussions on these eight topics with the wider public. And the discussions are conducted…yes on a blog. On the Future of Higher Education Blog readers have the opportunity to comment on the opinions of the experts.

The Australian example has shown that there are plenty of HE stakeholders and experts willing to spend some time in drafting future HE plans (I feel sorry for all the staff at DEST that has to go through them all). In some ways their process resembles the consultation process of the European Commission (for instance here, for the EIT).

What the input of the English public will be remains to be seen. Until now, comments on the blog are only few - and not always very constructive contributions. However, the  discussion opportunity has only been online since July. 

Even though the outcomes of these processes are not yet clear, I welcome these new ways of policy making. Even though these new initiatives would fit well in the (consensus oriented) Dutch political culture, - to my knowledge - the use of the Internet in the process of policy making and formulation is still rare. Maybe an idea for Dutch higher education…?

Filed in: Australia, Higher Education, Internet, UK | Comment »

Correlation between Genetic and Geographic Structure in Europe

by Lao, Oscar et al. (2008)

Full Text Available in Current Biology; See also this article in the IHT

Maybe not that weird, but definitely interesting. Biologists from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and others have constructed a genetic map of Europe. They investigated genotype data from 2,514 individuals belonging to 23 different subpopulations, widely spread over Europe. Although they found only a low level of genetic differentiation between subpopulations, the existing differences were characterized by a strong continent-wide correlation between geographic and genetic distance. This resulted in the following genetic map of Europe (click to enlarge).

The IHT explains: the genetic map of Europe bears a clear structural similarity to the geographic map. The major genetic differences are between populations of the north and south (the vertical axis of the map shows north-south differences, the horizontal axis those of east-west). The area assigned to each population reflects the amount of genetic variation in it.

The map also identifies the existence of two genetic barriers within Europe. One is between the Finns (light blue, upper right) and other Europeans. It arose because the Finnish population was at one time very small and then expanded, bearing the atypical genetics of its few founders. The other is between Italians (yellow, bottom center) and the rest. This may reflect the role of the Alps in impeding free flow of people between Italy and the rest of Europe.

But the study provides more than just an interesting picture. The authors explain that understanding the genetic structure of the European population is important, not only from a historical perspective, but also for the appropriate design and interpretation of genetic epidemiological studies.

Filed in: Europe, Science, Weird Science | Comment »

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 »

Last week, at Global HigherEd, Peter Jones reported on a forthcoming European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling in the case of Jacqueline Förster v IB-Groep. This is one of a range of recent cases handled by the ECJ that might have substantial effects for higher education policies throughout Europe.

In a forthcoming paper for the European Journal of Education I identified the ECJ as one of the main actors in the institutionalisation of the European Higher Education Area. In earlier posts in this blog I discussed recent cases on the German medicine students in Austria and French students in Belgium. In both cases, the principle of non-discrimination plays an important role. The same was the case for the Grzelczyk Case and the Bidar Case, which can be seen as a predecessor of the Förster case.

The Grzelczyk judgment suggests that EU students are entitled to claim maintenance grants when they find themselves in the same situation as nationals of the host Member State. Before the Maastricht Treaty, the Court refused the right to obtain loans and grants while studying in another member state. The Bidar Case changed this. Here, the Court argues that it is legitimate for a host Member State to grant such assistance to students who have demonstrated a certain degree of integration into the society of that State (although the Court made clear that Member States have a right to protect themselves against ‘grant-tourism’).

This ‘certain degree of integration’ is now being tested in the Förster Case. German student Jaqueline Förster went to the Netherlands to study in 2000. She did the minimum number of hours of work in order to be eligible for the Dutch student support. This amount of work apparently provided a substantial enough degree of integration. The Dutch scholarship board initially granted the student aid to her but asked for a partial refund in 2005 because Förster had not worked in the second half of 2003. She took the case to court saying the move was discriminatory as Dutch students do not have to work (see also this article in EU Observer).

An additional issue came up in the Netherlands after Nuffic presented its annual mobility monitor. This showed that the outgoing number of students was lower for the Netherlands than the incoming students and that the largest source of incoming students was Germany. While at least 16,750 German students were enrolled in the Netherlands, only 2,100 Dutch students were enrolled in Germany. A few days later, the ‘Dutch equivalent of the Financial Times’ carried a headline saying that German students cost the Dutch government at least one hundred million Euros. Reason for this is of course the fact that - because of the non-discrimination principle - EU universities can not charge higher tuition fees for foreign EU students than they charge for their own students. Considering Dutch higher education is still heavily subsidised by the government, German students are indeed partially funded by Dutch tax payers money.

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Filed in: Europe, Higher Education, Internationalisation, Politics | 2 Comments »

Social networking has gone academic. The Web 2.0 principles were already introduced in the field of science and innovation by the iBridge Network. Facebook brought social networking to the university, but it’s main goal was not exactly academic in nature. LinkedIn brought social networking to the professional sphere. Recently there have been some initiatives that bring social networking to academic life: Researchgate and Graduate Junction.

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.

Filed in: Higher Education, Internet, Science, Technology, World | 2 Comments »

Just before going to a meeting on rankings I saw this. It is from the proposed new immigration policy: Blueprint for a modern migration policy (pdf; in Dutch). As in so many other immigration countries, it contains a chapter on skilled migration. Here is a translation of the passage that surprised me:

Anticipating the implementation of the new migration system, the government will at the latest in the first half of 2009 introduce a regulation for highly skilled immigrants. On the basis of the regulation, foreigners can stay in the country for a maximum of one year to find a job as a ‘knowledge migrant’ or to start an innovative company.

The objective of the regulation connects well to the ambition of the innovation platform to attract 1000 extra knowledge migrants. It is also in line with the advice on knowledge migrants of the Commission on Labour Participation in its report ‘towards a future that works‘.

The target group consists of foreigners that are relatively young and received their Bachelor, Master or PhD degree not longer than three years ago. Migrants are eligible if they received their degree from a university that is in the top 150 of two international league tables of universities. Because of the overlap, the lists consists of 189 universities…

And guess what the two league tables are. Yes, the Shanghai ranking and the Times Higher Education Ranking. Now…this will mean that firms like this have influence on who is eligible to come and work in the Netherlands. Something is not right here…

Filed in: Globalisation, Higher Education, Netherlands, Ranking | 2 Comments »

During my years in Sydney, the issue of language skills and foreign students has come up repeatedly. The claim was that the financial reliance on foreign students had forced Australian higher education to accept students that lack even the basic English language and communication skills.

Most critical on this issue is probably Bob Birrell, Director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University in Melbourne. Last year he published a study finding that one in three overseas students which were granted permanent residency after graduating from an Australian university does not have good enough English to handle a professional job.

An analysis of government visa testing, the first of its kind, found 34 per cent of 12,116 graduating international students who received permanent residency in 2005-06 did not have the English standard needed to be admitted to university, let alone to be awarded a degree. For students from China, the fastest growing international student market for Australian universities, the proportion with poor English leapt to 43 per cent.

The question is of course: how did they get into an Australian university anyway? And even more: how did they ever get a degree? With respect to the second question, Birrell claims that universities dealt with the poor English language skills of their students by lowering teaching and assessment standards. On the question of how they get in, Birrell has another explanation.

Applicants for a higher-education student visa must score at band-six level, rated as “competent”, under the International English Language Testing System, if based overseas when they apply. But international applicants can avoid the testing by basing themselves in Australia earlier to complete either year 12 or an intensive language course. Dr Birrell found that about 40 per cent of overseas students followed this path.

Professor Peter Abelson – a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney at that time – summarised the issue correctly:

“These figures are a very stunning result, but not entirely surprising to people who are in tertiary education.”

Former Minister of Education, Julie Bishop, and former president of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee Gerard Sutton basically denied the problems. Sutton didn’t accept that there is a problem in universities in terms of soft marking of international students. Julie Bishop rejected claims that a large number of foreign students graduating from Australian universities have poor English skills:

“Australian universities only enroll foreign students once they have achieved international standards of language proficiency. This has been an extraordinary attack by Professor Birrell on our universities. International students must meet international benchmarks in English language in order to get a place at a university in Australia.”

The denial of the problem is astonishing. Yes of course, there is a lot of money involved and the stakes in international education are high. If the international student market would plummet, so would much of the Australian higher education sector. But denying the problem while more and more foreign graduates fail in their job search because of their language skills, does obviously not help in the long run.

And now the debate has moved up north…

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Filed in: Australia, Higher Education, Internationalisation, UK | 2 Comments »

After the proliferation of accreditation bodies in the 1990s and 2000s, the sector witnessed the appearance of meta-accreditation. Do we - after the proliferation of rankings in the past 10 years or so - witness the first meta-ranking?

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…

Filed in: Higher Education, Ranking, World | Comment »

Even though I left academia recently, I try to keep in touch with the academic community and keep up with academic publications in the field. Because of this, I still accept most requests from journal editors to review their contributions. What annoys me however, is the fact that I do not have access to such journals anymore. My current employer has subscriptions on some journals, but definitely not on all the ones I am interested in. Considering the subscription fees of most journals I can’t blame them.

Today I read an interesting article in the Times Higher Education on the costs of publishing and… the actual costs of peer reviewing. It does make you wonder about the current system of peer reviewing, especially if you don’t have access to the articles you review. I used to agree with the observation of the THE that the advancement of the academy’s collective body of knowledge was reward enough for the time and effort put into peer review and therefore academics needn’t get paid for doing this. But now I see what we are missing out on, I am not so sure anymore:

But a new report has attempted to quantify in cash terms exactly what peer reviewers are missing out on. It puts the worldwide unpaid cost of peer review at £1.9 billion a year, and estimates that the UK is among the most altruistic of nations, racking up the equivalent in unpaid time of £165 million a year.

The report says there would be a “significant transfer” of funds to academics if peer reviewers were paid. But such a move would drive up journal prices, with the estimated “breakeven price” of a major discipline journal jumping 43 per cent, leaving libraries with a bigger bill.

My first reaction to this was that there must be other possibilities with all the new technologies available. And there are. The report also shows that a move to electronic-only publishing would bring a fall of about £1 billion (12 per cent) in global costs. A system of author-pays open access publishing could add another saving of £556 million. I don’t have to get paid to review articles. But some changes to the system would be appreciated.

Filed in: Higher Education, UK | 1 Comment »

In the Dutch weekly journal ESB (Economic and Statistical Reports), economists from the universities of Groningen and Rotterdam presented an interesting article. Their starting assumption is that high student evaluations will have a positive effect on the market share of universities. After all, if a programme in a particular university is highly ranked by students, more students will chose this particular university to attend that programme.

The authors collected six year of student evaluations where students rate their programmes on a scale of 1-10  (as published annually in the Dutch weekly magazine Elsevier). Market share for each programme/university combination was calculated by dividing the number of students in programme X in university Y by all students in the Netherlands in programme X. When the evaluation of the programme is compared with the market share, we get the following graph:

On the basis of this finding (and the results of a simulation that they run), they present some interesting conclusions. I won’t go in details, but one of them is that there is no clear relation between evaluation and market share. Hence, students have other criteria than quality in the choice of where they will attend university (especially location, and in particular the distance to their place of residence).

In their discussion, the authors indicate that this shows that competition on the basis of quality is not really taking place in the Netherlands. One reaction could be that the government should enable universities to compete on the basis of price. In other words, universities should be able to set their own tuition fees. This is currently not allowed for Dutch and EU students and the government decided last week that this will not be possible in the near future.

I could pose an alternative hypothesis on the interpretation of the results. The results show that students don’t take quality of education into account in their decision-making process. This could indicate that students don’t purchase a service (a high quality education), but a product (a degree). Universities should therefore emphasise the quality of their degrees, not the quality of their education. If the value of the degree differs per university (reflected in the opportunities to enter the labour market in higher positions or on a higher remuneration), the students will take this into account. This then would mean that universities are better of improving their position in rankings, attracting more prestigious scholars (like Nobel laureates) and increase their budget for marketing. This will bring them a in a better competitive position. On the other hand… maybe economics doesn’t provide answers for everything…

Erjen van Nierop, Peter Verhoef, Philip Hans Franses. Studie Evaluaties en marktaandelen van universiteiten (subscription required). Economisch Statistische Berichten, 4 April 2008.

Filed in: Competition, Higher Education, Netherlands | Comment »

It’s been exactly ten years today since the Trisakti tragedy took place in Indonesia and the last  remaining foundations of Suharto’s 30 year rule started crumbling down. During the month of May in 1998, student demonstrations against Suharto were organised everywhere and several incidents occurred on campuses all over the Indonesian archipelago. But the events on May 12 at Trisakti university shocked many and directly led to the fall of Suharto nine days later.

On Tuesday May 12, at around 10.30, thousands of students gathered for a peaceful demonstration on the campus of Trisakti University, located between the airport and downtown Jakarta. On campus, a free speech forum was organised where students, academics and other speakers voiced their opinions. Students were allowed to demonstrate on campus but Suharto had explicitly prohibited all public demonstrations. Nevertheless, the students left campus and marched into the direction of the parliament at 1.30 in the afternoon.

Although most students demonstrated peacefully, the rally turned violent later in the afternoon. The students were blocking the traffic at one of the main arteries of Jakarta. The security forces stopped the thousands of students while they were on their way to the Parliament building. For hours there was a stand off between the students on the one hand and the police and security forces on the other. Somewhere around 5 PM, the students negotiated a solution. They agreed that one row of students would back off for every row of police that did the same. But then suddenly the security forces started shooting with rubber and live bullets to the students who were running back to the campus grounds. At the end of the day, four students lost their lives. Elang Mulya, Hafidin Royan, Hendriawan Sie and Hery Hartanto later became ‘the heroes of the reformation’.

The tragedy remains surrounded by mysteries. There has been talk about infiltrators of the security forces, disguised as Trisakti alumni, who provoked the peaceful demonstrators. Rubber bullets were used by the security forces, but it remains unclear where the live ammunition came from. The fact that the air was filled with teargas only added to the confusion. The Trisakti Tragedy was followed by one of the cruelest events in Indonesian history. In the two days after the events at Trisakti University, thousands were killed in the May 1998 riots. The mysteries surrounding these events and the involvement of government forces also remain unsolved.

Many investigations have been conducted into the Trisakti tragedy and the events afterwards, but many questions remain. Calls upon the Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and on the Indonesian judiciary to reopen the investigations have until now remained unanswered. Maybe the tenth anniversary of these events would be a good occasion to review this decision…

Filed in: Indonesia, Politics | 3 Comments »

The Higher Education Funding Council published a report on the impact of rankings in the United Kingdom. It is probably one of the most extensive studies on ranking today. The study was conducted by the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI) and Hobsons Research and is based on a survey of 91 higher education institutions in the UK and six institutional case studies.

The researchers looked at five rankings in particular, three national ones (Sunday Times Good University Guide, The Times Good University Guide, The Guardian University Guide) and two international rankings (Shanghai Rankings and the Times QS Ranking). The report itself and the background data are all available on HEFCE’s website.

Roughly, the study is divided into three parts. The first looks at rankings and their shortcomings in general. The second at the impact of rankings on universities in the UK. And the final part discusses alternative ranking methods such as the CHE ranking.

One of the most interesting questions posed in the first part is actually the same as the title of the report: counting what is measured or measuring what counts? In other words, are the criteria used in these league tables used because they are the most important determinants of quality or because those indicators are simply the ones that are (most easily) measurable? Not surprisingly, they find that:

The measures used by the compilers are largely determined by the data available rather than by clear and coherent concepts of, for example, ‘excellence’ or ‘a world class university’. Also the weightings applied do not always seem to have the desired effect on the overall scores for institutions. This brings into question the validity of the overall tables.

Several other points of critique - many of which have been discussed before, also in this blog - are confirmed in this part of the study. But the real value of the study is that it doesn’t stop here. It continues with an analyses of the survey and case studies to identify the ways in which these rankings actually shape policies. They find that institutions are indeed strongly influenced by league tables. One finding that I confirmed my expectations (see here and here) was about the link - and often contradiction - between league table criteria and other missions of the university:

League tables may conflict with other priorities. There is perceived tension between league table performance and institutional and governmental policies and concerns (e.g. on academic standards, widening participation, community engagement and the provision of socially-valued subjects). Institutions are having to manage such tensions with great care.

These are just a few quick observations. Read the full report! I will and probably post more about it at a later stage.

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