U of T’s prestige endured a withering assault last week from the international ranking of the Times Higher Education Supplement, which knocked the university to 45th overall in the world, down from 27th in 2006. The THES, based in the U.K. issues an annual report of the top 200 universities worldwide. One of the most watched publications on higher education, the annual survey is heavily reported on throughout the world.
It uses the following weight distributions to assign scores: peer review score (40 per cent), number of citations earned in research papers (20 per cent), review of graduates by employers (10 per cent), proportion of international faculty members and students (5 per cent each), and faculty/ student ratio (20 per cent),.
As are many school ranking schemes, this system has been critized heavily for aggregating dissimilar data (combining research citations with international complements, for instance), and boiling down each university’s performance to a single number. For this very reason, U of T’s administration has refused for the past two years to participate in Maclean’s magazine’s Canadian university survey (which nonetheless recently rated U of T fourth overall in its category).
Professor George Luste of the University of Toronto Faculty Association commented on the large fluctuations in rank seen by some of the schools on the list, and how it is difficult to derive any significant meaning from the report. U of T’s 18-spot drop was not the only precipitous decline: UC Berkeley also fell drastically from last year. It went from eighth place in 2006 down to 22nd. Luste, like many university members, views the survey with a critical eye.
“To me it says there’s something screwy about their measurement process, university reputations and quality do not just change on that time scale from year to year that much,” Luste said.
