Tag: UAE

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University Rankings: the awful secret is now out!

My friend and colleague Dr. Senthil Nathan has been a long time educator in the United Arab Emirates. During his twenty plus years at Higher Education of Technology he has held posts ranging from an Engineering instructor to department chair to campus director to Deputy Vice Chancellor before he left in late 2014 to co-found our company Edu Alliance.

Senthil is first and foremost an educator who believes in very much in teaching and learning. I felt my readers would be interested in his thoughts on an article by The Telegraph concerning a recent report by Times Higher Education on university ranking on teaching excellence in UK. We would like to learn your thoughts.

University Rankings: the awful secret is now out!

Most of us who have worked for and/or studied at top ranked “research” universities have always known this secret: many research professors and research focused universities do not give high priority to teaching and student learning.

Recent Times Higher Education university ranking on teaching excellence in UK universities is a strong evidence of what many of us have known all along.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/06/23/top-universities-for-teaching-but-where-are-oxford-and-cambridge/

World’s top ranked Oxford University – is ranked 28 in teaching excellence in UK. Not a single Russell group university in the top 10 of this ranking.  Parents, students, funding agencies and employers – must all pay close attention to this ranking – rather than research focused world ranking – for undergraduate education.

I hope that this ranking system helps top research universities refocus on teaching and learning – and for the top teaching universities not to be distracted by trying to pursue a basic research agenda (rather poorly).

Finally, I do hope that the governments and the universities in the UAE / GCC region pay much more attention to Teaching Excellence rankings – as this should be the top priority at this stage of development of higher education in this region.

Dr. Senthil Nathan

Director & Co-Founder

Edu Alliance Ltd.

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Ranking of UAE Universities – US News & World Report vs QS World Rankings

For any of us involved in higher education, the world rankings for institutions have become a very big deal. There are many such services but I thought it would be interesting to compare two groups who have recently produced new reports;  QS World University Rankings and US News & World Report. Times Higher Ed at this date has yet to release a similar Arab ranking group and will not be presented below.

Lets look at the results

US News & World Report shows 120 Arab region schools which have been ranked based on 11 indicators that measure their academic research performance and reputation. To see exactly the methodology go to: How US News calculated the best Arab region university rankings.

The results for UAE institutions among the Arab universities are:

US News UAE

QS World University Rankings, is an annual publication of university rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). They developed their own internal ranking system. To better understand the method go to Methodology. 200 Arab universities are ranked in this regional presentation. Here are the results.

UAE Rankings

As you can see there is a significant difference between the two organizations. They are in agreement on UAEU (#6 vs #9) but after that we see very different results.  For example, why is Masdar and Petroleum Institute in US News & World Report ranking and not in QS, why Zayed University #86 vs #20 or American University of Dubai is #23 in QS and not ranked at all in US News. In addition both services do not rank international branch campuses like NYU Abu Dhabi, Murdoch and many others.

Why are Rankings Important

Rankings are considered a significant KPI for judging success by many university heads, board of trustees members, government leaders and funders. Using the rankings as a KPI gives me a great deal of concern after seeing the above results for two well established organizations who have conducted university rankings for years.

What does this say about rankings? I would be hard pressed to tell a university administrator, high school counselors or parent which ranking company is the most accurate or the best to follow. I would suggest that while rankings are an interesting piece of data, be very cautious in accepting them as significant KPI for quality.

What is your view? Is one ranking company more accurate than another, and if so which one and why?