Impact of University Ranking on Students

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Impact of University Ranking on Students

• Syed Ali Khayam

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What is this talk about?

• This talk is based on the following report
  published recently on the NUST website
• Marguerite Clarke, University rankings and
  their impact on students,
• In this report, the author explains her
  perspective on how university rankings affect
• students choice of school
• employment options after graduation, and
• admission policies

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What is this talk about?

• Many different university rankings exist in the
  world today
• Most prominent US rankings are
• US News World Report College and University
  Ranking
• Top American Research Universities by University
  of Florida
• Washington Monthly College rankings
• Global rankings include
• Times Higher Education Ranking
• Academic Ranking of World Universities
• Newsweek Top 100 Global Universities
• Webometrics Ranking of World Universities
• Most of these rankings use some well-known
  evaluation metrics to quantify the performance of
  postgraduate programs

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Do students care about university rankings?

• This study concludes that most students do not
  consider rankings to be important when choosing
  undergraduate and graduate schools
• Out of the 221,897 undergraduate students who
  responded to one survey, 11 saw university
  rankings as a very important factor in their
  choice of school while 60 found them not at all
  important
• I believe that this observation is largely
  dependent on the demographics of the survey
  participants
• For instance, good students in Pakistan are very
  rank-conscious when picking graduate schools

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Does university ranking affect employability?

• The study concludes that university rank might
  have an impact on salary, especially for business
  schools
• But this affect is only temporary
• I believe that salary alone is not sufficient to
  gauge employability
• We need to take into consideration whether the
  graduates are getting the jobs of their choice or
  not

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Impact of university ranking on student access

• To improve university ranking, schools offer
  early-decision programs and large amounts of
  scholarships, and invest heavily in
  infrastructure such as sports facilities and
  upmarket dorms
• This has a negative impact on access for
  low-income students and other underrepresented
  groups as these students are less likely to apply
  through early-decision programs or to earn top
  scores on standardized tests
• I am not really sure what this point means

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Impact of global university rankings

• Global rankings are providing students low-cost
  alternatives for quality education
• There are reservations that some countries see
  rankings and stratification as the means to
  create world class universities and thus meet
  the challenges of increasing global competition
• I am again not really sure why this is a bad idea

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Conclusion

• Due to limited time, I could not read and analyze
  alternative perspectives on this subject
• However, I found another, very useful article
  from the same author
• Clarke, M. (2002). Quantifying quality What can
  the U.S. News and World Report rankings tell us
  about the quality of higher education? Education
  Policy Analysis Archives, 10(16).
  http//epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n16/
• This article critically analyzes the university
  ranking system of US News and highlights many
  important issues and pitfalls

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Thank you!