• University Metrics
  • Who cares?
  • Why care?
  • Current international university rankings
  • Fuzzy cluster analysis of SJTU and THES rankings
  • The G-Factor - a new ranking methodology
  • Links

University Metrics

University Metrics.com is dedicated to the discovery, development, analysis and constructive criticism of international benchmarks for measuring university performance.

Who cares?

Several audiences and user communities are (or should be!) interested in ways of measuring and comparing university performance on the international stage. These include:

• Prospective students and their parents
• Current students
• Alumni
• Faculty and research staff
• University administrators
• Business and industry
• Government officials
• Political leaders
• Everyone who recognizes that the intellectual and economic well being of their society depends on a thriving and competitive university sector (i.e. in an ideal world ... everyone!)

Why care?

As noted above - the health of every country's university system has a direct bearing on the economic and social prosperity of the nation and its future. But universities are paradoxes of archaism and modernity, encapsulating intellectual liberalism in organizational conservatism. They fiercly defend their right to govern their own affairs, while demanding public support through taxes and tuition fees. They have excelled at defining their own missions, identities and concepts of academic quality and value.

Universities, however, are not immune to the forces of globalization that are shaping the rest of the world. The countries whose university systems have dominated the last century(ies) cannot safely assume that this dominant position can be maintained. Nor should they assume that the form and function of universities in the next century will follow the norms and practices of the last one.

The development of metrics and benchmarks is a significant step on the road to analyzing and understanding the performance of any organization, and universities are no different.

Just because this is a tremendous challenge does not mean that we should not attempt it. And we shall!

Current international university rankings

There are currently two well known international university rankings for universities as a whole:

• Shanghai Jao Tong University international ranking
• Times Higher Education Supplement international ranking

There are numerous subject-specific international rankings, in particular for business schools and MBAs.

Fuzzy cluster analysis of SJTU and THES rankings

One of the primary criticisms of most university rankings (and many other rankings too) is that they weight and add scores under a range of headings to yield an overall score, which is then used as the basis of the ranking. An interesting analytic approach is to use fuzzy logic techniques to compare universities across the range of factors measured, without making any judgements about the relative importance of each factor. Read more about a fuzzy cluster analysis of the SJTU and THES rankings here.

The G-Factor - a new ranking methodology

• An entirely new university ranking methodology based on the number of links between university websites measured by Google Search.

Links

• Della Bradshaw of the FT discusses business school rankings.
• Institute for the Future*
• An analysis of the 2005 THES international university ranking.
• Gary Becker and Richard Posner on university governance and reputation.
• on the Washington Monthly ranking
• on discipline-based rankings
• Another Google-based university ranking, from Stanford
• Prawfsblogs discuss university rankings

Copyright Peter Hirst, 2006. All rights reserved.