University rankings are destined to be accompanied by bloody storms.
In the past, it was all colleges and universities that worked hard to earn a good ranking in the university qualifying competition. Now, more and more universities are dropping out of the university rankings, saying they are no longer "competing".
A few days ago, the University of Zurich (QS ranking 91) announced on its official website on March 13 that the University of Zurich decided to withdraw from THE Ranking. This is because the ranking does not reflect the wide range of teaching and research activities carried out by universities.
A number of top universities have dropped out of the university rankings
universityrankings.ch, a website run by the Swiss State Secretary for Education and Research, warns that university rankings run by media companies tend to be more competitive in the gladiatorial arena:
"They like to list clear results in the form of ranking tables, with winners and losers competing against each other in dramatic 'ranking games', even at the expense of oversimplification or sacrificing precision, which can be added to by large fluctuations in rankings." Such rankings do not affect the economic interests of operators, but are likely to have a significant impact on the universities involved. ”
Founded in 1833, the University of Zurich, which announced its withdrawal from the Times World University Rankings, is one of the largest and most powerful comprehensive universities in Switzerland after more than 180 years of baptism.
There are as many as 12 Nobel Prize-winning alumni who have come out of here. Röntgen, the first Nobel laureate in physics and discoverer of X-rays, and Albert Einstein, the "great man of the century", both received their doctorates at the University of Zurich, and Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, was also the head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Zurich.
The University of Zurich has long held a leading position in the rankings. Ranked 75th in the world in the 2022 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, 70th in the world in the 2022QS World University Rankings, and 64th in the world in the 2022 U.S. News World University Rankings.
The University of Zurich is not the only top university that has announced its withdrawal from the university rankings.
A number of top universities, including Stanford Law School ranked No. 2, Columbia Law School ranked No. 4, University of California, Berkeley at No. 9, University of Michigan at No. 10, Duke University at No. 11, Northwestern University at No. 13, Georgetown Law School at No. 14, and UCLA at No. 15 have announced that they will not participate in the U.S. News Law School Rankings.
Harvard Medical School officially announced its withdrawal from the university rankings: no longer providing data to the U.S News World University Rankings. Within a week, Stanford, Pennsylvania, Columbia University School of Medicine, and Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine followed.
Four of the top 10 medical schools in the U.S. News list of the best research schools dropped out of the ranking.
A ranking that will not please everyone
"Flawed methodology" is the most cited reason why universities opt out of university rankings.
Each major ranking list has its own set of ranking indicators and their weights. Sometimes, adjusting a few key indicators can make a significant difference in determining a university's position. To evaluate a university, it may take thousands of dimensions, but when making rankings, it is often only about a limited number of dimensions, which is not scientific.
Previously, QS announced a new evaluation index on its official website, with the weights of "academic reputation" and "student-to-faculty ratio" each lowered by 10%, while adding three new indicators: "sustainable education", "employability" and "international research network".
These three new indicators are exactly what Korean universities consider extremely unreasonable. In the case of the "international research network", this indicator is calculated as the number of research partner countries / the number of joint research partner institutions or universities, i.e. the fewer research partners for the same number of countries, the higher the score.
The evaluation of "employability" is based on whether alumni are often mentioned in the English-language media, which is obviously good for universities in English-speaking countries and not good for Asian universities. Judging by the latest QS rankings, this is indeed the case.
Last year, Peking University, Tsinghua University and many other domestic universities fell in the QS rankings by varying degrees, and the decline in South Korean universities was even more severe, with Seoul National University falling 12 places and another 19 universities falling by more than 100 places.
Figure | Korean media statistics: 31 universities have fallen in rankings
In stark contrast, Australian universities won by a wide margin, with the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales finishing in the top 20 for the first time in history.
The evaluation index only flapped the butterfly's wings slightly, and a mountain and tsunami occurred.
Figure | The University of Sydney printed the good news that it entered the TOP20 overnight
The gray area of the cracks
Arrow's Law in the field of social choice tells the world that there is no one reasonable, non-contradictory way to rank more than three candidates. However, the university rankings obtained by using crude weighting and synthesis of various index scores are mixed with too many subjective factors, leaving a gray area for the already unreasonable ranking.
In February 2022, Columbia University professor Sardis publicly questioned the alleged falsification of six data submitted by Columbia University to U.S News, including class size, financial resources, and graduation rate, through a detailed comparison of materials, thus rising to No. 2 in the ranking.
Subsequently, Columbia University admitted to submitting erroneous data, and in the latest U.S News rankings in September 2022, Columbia University plummeted to 18th place. In June of this year, Columbia University officially announced that it would terminate all cooperation with U.S News, and would not provide any data to U.S News and participate in any subsequent rankings.
图 | 哥伦比亚大学宣布永退出U.S News排名
Colin Dever, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, once said, "Because rankings rely heavily on unaudited, self-reported data, there is no way to ensure the accuracy of the information or the reliability of the rankings." ”
According to the official data released by U.S News, there are 48 American universities that have been temporarily removed from the ranking due to misstatement of data since 2018 alone, and these schools are all self-reported.
In this perverse ranking system, the university's development is distorted into cold numbers, driving the university to make crazy moves.
In 2020, a local university in China required cross-citation of papers due to the high weight of the citation rate in the ranking, and finally in the U.S News subject ranking, there was an absurd scene that the Department of Mathematics beat Peking University and ranked first in China.
Some universities in Saudi Arabia have also been exposed to scandals that have raised their global rankings by recruiting top researchers who only use their "names".
And under the booming system, there is a more obscure space - buying rankings, which of course will not be on the table, but universities and institutions have their own tacit.
QS operates both university and individual student counseling services outside of the rankings, and the University of California, Berkeley, has stated that "universities that receive QS consulting services are likely to rise in the rankings." After 52 universities announced their withdrawal, people in the Korean education circle also revealed that many universities paid a lot of advertising fees to QS or were forced to accept QS consulting in order to improve their rankings in QS.
Blind worship of disenchantment
"College rankings are a slightly silly obsession that can do harm when universities, parents, or students take it too seriously. ”
"There's simply no linear ranking to measure the greatness of a university. ”
More and more doubts from higher education professionals have removed the aura of rankings little by little. Domestic universities are also trying to correct their obsession with rankings.
During the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, many domestic universities took university rankings as one of their goals. Since 2020, the Ministry of Education has repeatedly made it clear that it is not allowed to blindly adopt, quote and publicize the rankings released by various institutions, and resolutely do not run schools around various popular rankings.
In April last year, Nanjing University mentioned in the "14th Five-Year Plan of Nanjing University" and the "Overall Construction Plan of Nanjing University" Double First-Class "University" that the development of the university and the construction of disciplines will no longer use international rankings as an important construction goal.
At the same time, it has been confirmed by many parties that Chinese University has decided not to participate in the international rankings, while Lanzhou University has said that it has never participated in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. It is foreseeable that under the leadership of the three 985 universities, the number of universities that have written university rankings into the "14th Five-Year Plan" of colleges and universities has decreased a lot.
Figure | Chinese Renmin University withdrew from the international university rankings
Still, as long as the simple but strong needs of students, parents, businesses, and society remain, university rankings will not die.
Judging from the latest QS 2024 university rankings, these 3 985 are still among them, which shows that the university just no longer provides data, but it cannot stop the ranking of institutions.