It is “virtually impossible to capture the quality of an entire university with all the different courses and disciplines in one figure," the university said.

Utrecht University said it did not provide any data to the makers of the British trade magazine Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings, so they couldn’t determine a score. According to Utrecht University, the rankings place “too much emphasis on scoring and competition,” while the university says it considers collaboration and openness of scientific research to be more important.

    • Endorkend@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      MedUni near me used to be like that, which ended up deteriorating the quality of doctors they put out so considerably, the hospitals in the country that historically would employ the graduates coming out of there instantly, were starting to hire primarily elsewhere.

      They since switched to being far less “churning out papers” focused and putting a lot of time and effort in applicable research and experience training and that turned everything around again.

      Their ranking on that shitlist Times puts out dropped (considerably) as a result, yet the request from foreign students to study there surged.

      Your reputation in your region and sector is still more important than some fictitious score some media outlet gives you.

    • Bernie Ecclestoned
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Nothing is perfect, but it seems reasonable to rank universities based on their performance in education attainment and research?

      • oroboros
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 year ago

        How do you rank research output consistently. Every university is expected to create their own exam content, how do you effectively measure education attainment across universities?

        • sab@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Push for research outputs can also create perverse incentives for rapid publishing in whatever is considered quality journals - which are usually themselves associated with universities - rather than the pursuit of quality research and academic integrity.

          It leads to increased strain on researvhers and a unfruitful obsession with any kind of academic output that can be easily counted. Of course research outputs are inherently important, but the whole academic publishing industry has just gotten weird the last decade or so.

          • oroboros
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            A university I know of brought in a policy of only two terms for postdocs, so regardless of where they were in their research, they either had to become a lecturer or move on.

            The reason behind this was to bring new postdocs in. Not to increase the quality of the research, but because it was a very effective way of opening up access to new funding streams.

            These funding streams are of course very time limited and commercially driven, so what normally happens is some half assed piece of work is produced, with possibly an attempt to monetised and then more often than not discarded. Actually producing work that furthers an academic field seems to be very much down the list of priorities…

    • 0x815@feddit.deOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Yes, in the business world this often comes with the Icarus paradox, a phenomenon that eventually leads to a business’s failure by the very elements that brought its temporary success before.

  • fristislurper@feddit.nl
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    1 year ago

    I think this is quite a common criticism to have, but a top-100 uni like this probably profits from keeping the status quo. Takes a bit of courage to step up.

    • Anekdoteles@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 year ago

      Not courage, but integrity. It’s easy to criticize anything, if you don’t have to pay any price. You can either cuddle yourself comfortly in your nice words or act on them, but only the latter is what counts.

  • Riddick3001@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Good someone , i.e. Utrecht, started to bail out of the current ranking system. Continental Universities are hard to compare with British & American ones, afaik. The teacher- student contact is more on the foreground compared to the latter.

    Ergo, if teachers need to write papers all the time to maintain ranking, they’ll have actually less time to bother with teaching and maintaining contact with students progress & question. Imo, this is a very important element in (higher) education. *Edit

  • ratskrad@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    The “integrity” part is a very valid criticism. A big part of these rankings is how many papers the faculty publish per year. So you see a lot of higher ranked universities’ professors adding their names to a lot of reasearches where they didn’t really do anything except review/advise.

      • dth@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        it sure is! my (unofficial) national hero on human rights (who got murdered by dictatorship regime back then) went there to study.