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Cambridge Retains Top Spot in World University Rankings

September 5, 2011, 7:37 am

The University of Cambridge has retained the top spot in this year’s QS World University Rankings, one of the most closely watched in the increasingly competitive field of global ratings of higher-education institutions.

As it was last year, Harvard University is the top-ranked American institution in the list, at No. 2, and American institutions dominate the table over all, with more than 50 of the top 200 spots.

British institutions place well over all, with four in the top 10, but QS’s head of research told the BBC that it was “inevitable” that their future performance would suffer in the face of “financial pressures,” including “cuts to teaching and research budgets.” The rankings include for the first time this year comparative data on tuition rates at universities.

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  • richardtaborgreene

    The most important thing in life is figuring out, before we die, just WHO exactly is the top top top-most monkey.   That is what really counts.  

  • hoytmirbeau

    Wow! What an absolutely groundbreaking critique, man! You must know all of the nuances and motivations behind university ranking systems intimately. And the synthesis of those nuances and motivations here … amazing! Totally speechless.

  • bscmath78

    The answer to a) is many students think that going to college will let them become financially
    well-off, combined with students thinking college is a great place for sex, drugs, rock’n'roll, drink, sports, partying, gambling, networking and/or computer gaming. And even better, there actually isn’t much of a need to study, as has been reported in various studies. 

    For at least a hundred years about 10% or less of college students have been interested in studying and they were regarded with contempt by both college administrators and their fellow students.  For Harvard, Yale and Princeton see Jerome Karabel’s “The Chosen.”   See also Gerald Graff’s “Professing Literature.”  In the olden days, of rich, elite prep school dominated classes, only the faculty was interested in students who were interested in studying or learning for other than instrumentalist reasons.

    The answer to b)  is that just like K-12 the state systems find the equivalent to “social promotion” politically wise.  Note how various governors and other politicians are focused on retention and graduation rates.  Learning is irrelevant, what counts are generating more credentials.  Another very important factor is that colleges keep lots of people employed and keep all those students off the job market.  This is an extension of the Depression Era child labor laws and other measures that forced children out of the labor market and into high school, as well as the various post-war measures to force women out of the labor market.

    The lack of interest in actual learning is illustrated by the title of this article which is focused on retention while largely ignoring survey results showing a less than 1% improvement in “critical thinking” for freshman and a less than 4% improvement in “critical thinking” after 4 years, combined with DECLINES in student views on literacy, science, arts and academics. Though towards the end it does mention, “Among students in the small colleges he studied, 33 percent failed to show significant gains in learning.” See my comments starting here:  
    http://chronicle.com/article/What-Spurs-Students-to-Stay-in/129670/#comment-357899570

    The good news is that K-12 has been pretty poor for several decades and it hasn’t mattered! Back during the Cold War it was repeatedly claimed to be terrible compared to the Soviets. Sputnik caused enormous expenditures and produced some very nice academic programs like PSSC Physics and CHEM Study Chemistry, but basically failed because of the basic problem that most people don’t like academics. But the Soviets and the Eastern Bloc with their “wonderful” educational systems failed. The lesson of history is that K-12′s main purpose is to be a babysitter for maybe 75% of the population. What happens in K-12 is really only important for maybe 25%, because it is from that pool that the 10% who are actually interested in studying will be drawn.

    Two premises of the “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader” TV show are:
    a) Most aren’t, which is why the adults get so much help from the show rules.
    b) It doesn’t matter in real life, because what you learn in school is worthless!

    Face it, with computers and the internet, many jobs operate at a 5th grade level combined with on the job training. Reading, Writing and Arithmetic are really all that is needed and with spell check and calculators the necessary skills are less than they were 40 years ago.

    A recent Georgetown report (overly optimistic in my opinion) says 4.4% of jobs are STEM jobs. And given the various studies showing little to no intellectual improvement in college (but those same improvements, if not better ones, might have been obtained doing something else), the rampant credentialism for non-STEM jobs is unwarranted.
    http://chronicle.com/article/High-Demand-for-Science/129472/#comment-340057829

    For some ideas on what students could be reading on their own, if they actually care about “education”:
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-university-of-stonehenge-part-2-of-3/30451#comment-323063660

    Look at the army of poorly paid adjuncts to see what little need and what little respect there is for those interested in “the life of the mind.”

  • bscmath78

    For how STEM students have been ill-treated over the decades consider:

    “Piore had phrased things differently to an advisory group to the Pentagon: ‘Graduate students working part time are slave labor.’”

    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/just-dont-go-the-sequel/30693#comment-354893184

  • bscmath78

    Further evidence of the lack of interest in learning is provided by an news item entitled,
    “Professor in George Washington U. Medical Program Quits Amid Complaints That She Didn’t Teach”
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/professor-in-george-washington-u-medical-program-quits-amid-complaints-that-she-didnt-teach/37891

    “. . . did not teach two out of three semesters of a required course, yet gave A’s to all her students, . . . at least three students complained . . .”

    Which gives the impression that most of the students were OK with no learning in a MEDICAL program.  It also is interesting that it appears that the problem continued through two semesters!

    One should also keep in mind the various kinds of cheating that goes on in school, by various parties.

  • bscmath78

    As has been noted by others, much of college has become the following deal:

    “We pretend to teach, you pretend to study”

    or
     
    “We pretend to teach, you pretend to learn”

  • gmanacheril

    I teach in a four year college which until recently was a community college. The open door admission policy means that any one who can get through the CPT tests are our potential students. Several years ago I had a calculus student who was struggling with her basic algebra and trigonometry skills. When I asked her about her problems she said, “I got an A in trigonometry because I baked a pie.” Our high schools have neglected for years teaching basic skills of language and mathematics and a good percentage of our high school graduates cannot read, write or do simple calculations. Although I am not the first to put blame on teachers, I have to point out that if teachers with in-depth knowledge in the subject are employed to teach, they will do a good job of inspiring students to learn. A good percentage of our high school teachers have education degrees in the discipline they teach, and this does not equip them with the in-depth knowledge required to be effective in teaching that discipline. Science and math teachers should have at least a degree in the subject area they teach if not a masters degree. I have taught at different levels in four different continents and in all the places I taught except in the US a degree in the subject you teach is required to teach that subject. Our K-12 education will continue to suffer as long as we run our school system loaded with the bureaucracy of school boards (top high officials who have heavy pay checks and make bad decisions), emphasize self esteem and football at the expense of reading writing and arithmetic and de-emphasize the need for competent subject teachers as long as they can put a warm body in the class to “teach”.

  • raymond_j_ritchie

    Everyone has an opinion on this one. When I was a post-doc in the US I quickly drew the conclusion that Australian students had about 2 years on american students entering college.  That carries through.  An american PhD student needs about 2 years of coursework to catch up to what I had when I started my PhD.  A PhD program should have no need for remedial coursework but in America they do.  Why?  British, Australian and New Zealand PhD programs do not have coursework for the simple reason they are not thought to be needed.
    Before readers think I am being smug all the problems with Primary and Highschool education are apparent in Australia just as they are in the US and fundamentally for the same reason. 
    The key problem is the status of the teacher.  That is the mystery behind why places like S Korea, Singapore, Taiwan & Scandinavia do so well.  The status of the teacher (not just in terms of salary) is high and therefore the profession attracts good people.  Good teachers also help create social coherence which is a common problem in all western countries with rapidly changing demographics.  School is where you get your first impressions of how your country is governed.
    Everyone jokes about Education students being the worst students with the worst attitudes you will ever encounter in a biology class and are the least rewarding to teach.  When you pause to think it is not very funny.

  • mister_anthony

    It kind of seems like the beneficiaries of medicine (survivors of traumatic accidents) are not being considered.  If it were not for advances in medicine due to the evolution of traumatic care, I would not be raising the question.  How many high level thinkers have been thrown on the rubbish heap by denial-of-service?  What am I talking about?  Read what is at this link -> http://members.cruzio.com/~awwalton/disability/access1.html

  • jeff_winger

    I like the Finnish model for K-12.
    Our teachers are too often the under achievers who pick a practical degree.
    Also, more and more masters level education is becoming useless. This solves both those issues.

  • nordicexpat

    Finns are understandably proud of their accomplishments, but I’m not sure they really know what the basis of their success has been. (I would actually look to countries that have recently increased their scores, rather than the perpetual high scorers to see what works and what does not). 

    Here’s some reasons for my skepticism. It is highly misleading to say that “it tougher to get into (education) master’s programs than it is to get into higher education for medicine.” It’s actually pretty easy to get into a master’s program in Finland. If you get accepted into a particular program for a BA, you automatically have the right to continue for a MA. There’s not even a need to maintain a minimum GPA, and it is next to impossible to fail out of the university. Second, the difficulty of getting into a particular program is inflated, because acceptance into a Finnish university comes through a department, not through the university. In other words, prospective students apply to a particular department, or number of departments, within a university. It is those departments that set the exam determining whether students are accepted. In one sense, yes, the acceptance rate might be higher for medicine or law than for education, but that might simply be because more unqualified people apply to the latter than to the former. Since some of those people who don’t get accepted into education programs never get accepted for any subject, you can’t really compare Finnish with American universities, unless you include all the acceptance rate for the university as a whole in the statistics for American universities. Third, you can certainly teach in Finland without a MA. What you can’t have is a permanent job. There is a substantial number of people working in schools who are not on permanent contracts. In fact, students often have a hard time finishing an MA, because they are too busy teaching. As far as I know, there haven’t been any studies comparing the performance of students taught by those with a MA with those without a MA in Finland, so it is difficult to know if the MA does make difference. Indeed, even a first-year university student might be asked to do substitute teaching in their former high school. Finally, it is very difficult comparing BAs and MAs across countries. Unlike the poster above, I’m not convinced that American Ph.D. students are behind their peers in other countries. I’ve heard plenty of international students (including Finns from the top Finnish universities) say they have never worked so hard as in American MA program. Again, it would be interesting to actually compare programs — what exactly gets taught when — or even the knowledge of students both before and after coursework, across countries to see whether the higher education system is itself responsible. In other words, you need to know specifics of the program, because there is no guarantee that MAs are equivalent across countries. Finally, I’ve heard the exact same comments about (Finnish) education students being the worst students from Finns than I’ve heard from Americans. This is not to say that the comment is true, but it does cast doubt on the view that teachers are “revered” in Finland. 

    The other general comment concerns students’ performance. I’m never really sure how much of low US test scores are due to the “paper airplane effect,” that is, a low performance is due not to students lack of knowledge, but to the fact they are throwing paper airplanes during the exam because they don’t care. This is not to say that there aren’t problems with US education system, but there are a number of variables that I think are being overlooked, the most important of which might be cultural.

  • mbelvadi

    It sounds as if both South Korea and Finland have national education systems. I wonder to what extent the American system of leaving each state to manage K-12 curriculum and teacher certification standards is the problem? (think Texas and evolution, for example)

  • educationfrontlines

    Finland moved from a national curriculum to its current system with NO external testing. Today, all of their tests are teacher-written, as was the case in the U.S. before “Nation at Risk.”

    What is not discussed is the fact that the U.S. has led in creativity with science Nobels, under pre-reform teaching where the American K-12 teacher decided what,when and how to teach.
    That academic freedom or responsibility is now gone atthe K-12 level. Now the movement to standardize general education at the university level and require uniform syllabi and even exams threatens to destroy your curricular academic freedom/responsibility at the university level as well.

    John Richard Schrock   

  • savetheacademe

    So true……it saddens me when professors tell their very good students that you are “too good of a student” to become a teacher!  Why would we not want our “very good” students to be K-12 teachers?

  • bscmath78

    nordicexpat, you wrote, “because they don’t care.” That seems a perfectly good reason not to hire them or allow them into college.  They don’t care about the subjects.  They don’t care about their performance. They don’t care about their school or their country’s reputation. It is quite revealing and useful information.
     
    This supports my earlier “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader” premise, showing at an early age that not only do they think that what they do is worthless, even an exercise in reputation is worthless.  It seems to be fundamentally damning evidence against: students, parents, teachers and administrators. But the thing to remember is that the focus should be on the top 25%. Most jobs aren’t very academic, so for maybe 75%, they shouldn’t care, it is just baby-sitting.

    “The Situation” and Snooki idol (idle? ;-)) generation (see “Jersey Shore” in Wikipedia). What a triumph! ;-)  How many billions are wasted in producing this result? But it is cheaper than paying for the increase in unemployment.

    BTW, thanks for the Finnish educational information. raymond_j_ritchie was discussing the UK and its Dominions, which historically tended to have very focused undergrad programs like the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, with tough exams. So no need for them to have prelims/quals or the grad school training for them, because that was all done in the undergraduate program.

    In the UK, it was a system with little dawdling, for example, you started immediately in med or law school, without a preliminary undergrad degree. The undergrad degree was 3 years at which time you were ready to start research with your Ph.D. in 4 years. This structure was based in turn on a rigorous educational system (public and private) geared to producing a subset of students prepared for Oxford or Cambridge. In recent decades much has been politicized.

    And as raymond_j_ritchie has pointed out elsewhere, your Science Ph.D. future is still dismal. Plus, in 2010 a Royal Society study showed that the odds against a UK Sciences Ph.D. becoming a professor were worse than 200 to 1.

    Plus undergrad Physics at MIT, Berkeley or Caltech is likely far better prep for a Ph.D. than at about 4000 other schools.

  • bscmath78

    educationfrontlines, Science Nobel Prizes came from massive military, Federal and contractor spending during WW II, the Cold War and beyond, and the large scale importation of top scientists from around the world who could teach/inspire the output of a few schools like the Bronx High School of Science.  It was also helped by Hitler and Stalin largely eliminating the competition.  A few top undergrad and grad programs funded with lots of Federal money and aided by US industrial/high-tech might are the basis for US success. 

    The post-Sputnik PSSC Physics, CHEM Study Chemistry and New Math programs were attempts to move forward, foiled by the average American K-12 teacher who decided they didn’t want to teach these programs or would teach them in a warped fashion.  I think PSSC Physics only made it to about 10-15% of schools. 

    Things like NCLB have made things worse. But again the average American K-12 teacher has made things worse by teaching to the test and warping everything to the state mandated Lowest Common Denominator standardized test.  Please note that I wrote “average”.  There used to be 10-15% of teachers who were for “education” and were an inspiration (or at least would let the top students explore things on their own), but they seem to have been threatened for the last few decades and many have retired (probably in disgust).

    There are good students, good teachers and good parents who all are ill-served by the larger system and unappreciated by the larger society.

  • 5768

    The US, upon wanting to improve an impoverished classroom or school, invariably ends up with a scenario which involves inordinately expensive solutions: dump lots of money onto the stage in the form of additional teachers, technological revamping, monitoring of student performance, continuous attention to the extent of spoiling the students, etc. Zakaria’s program gave prototypically superb examples: Bill Gates to the rescue, Khan Academy with personalized video monitoring to the rescue. Create a labor- and resource-intensive  “showcase” classroom or school here and there, then stand back and admire the result. Try to apply this approach nationwide in every classroom, however, and the resources would simply be prohibitive. Additionally, students and teachers not part of such expensive experiments are off the hook: how could they possibly be expected to learn and teach without such luxurious facilities?

    Similarly, what is seen in Finland–teachers paid on a par with physicians–may also mislead us into thinking more resources in the form of higher teacher salaries alone is the sure “fix” for the problem.

    What Finland as well as any expensive rescue attempt might instead have to teach us is that cultures that signify the importance of serious education to their young people will have young people serious about their education. If a “cohesive educational philosophy” in the US will involve anything it must first of all be expectation-driven at the broader level of culture. The US currently sends too many mixed messages to its young people for any one of them to be taken seriously. When anything goes, everything goes–down the drain, that is.

  • ssriniva

    I missed this show, any idea where this can be seen? 

  • bscmath78

    For more posts disputing STEM shortage myths, please see a variety of my posts starting at these points:
     
    http://chronicle.com/article/High-Demand-for-Science/129472/#comment-340057829
    http://chronicle.com/article/Lack-of-Confidence-as/129528/#comment-346054219
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/just-dont-go-the-sequel/30693#comment-353933351
    http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/11/08/is-math-too-hard-or-just-not-interesting-enough/#comment-358706512
    http://chronicle.com/article/Bringing-Girls-Into-the/128099/#comment-252951129
    http://chronicle.com/article/Time-to-Craft-a-Plan-C/129587/#comment-352939884
    http://chronicle.com/article/No-More-Plan-B/129293/#comment-331941302
     
    For my critiques of “Academically Adrift” and CLA please see posts starting here:

    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/richard-vedder-on-the-ills-of-higher-education/28716#comment-156293507
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-revolution-of-rising-expectations/28804#comment-164271291
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/rigor-in-the-business-school-guest-post-jason-fertig/32657#comment-157246585
    http://chronicle.com/article/The-Self-Exam-That-Higher/128543/#comment-282472182
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/too-much-for-too-little/30220#comment-297275019
    http://chronicle.com/article/Academically-Adrift-a/126371/#comment-156687418
     

    For related material please see posts starting here:

    http://chronicle.com/article/What-Spurs-Students-to-Stay-in/129670/#comment-357591638
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/campus-cfos-are-right/29787#comment-246226619
    http://chronicle.com/article/A-Perfect-Storm-in/126451/#comment-154352120
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/politics-is-killing-us/29663#comment-334191983
    http://chronicle.com/article/44-Billion-Ought-to-Buy-Some/126812/#comment-168648719
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/pell-mell/28873#comment-167608793
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/against-relevance/38096#comment-284724578
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-university-of-stonehenge-part-2-of-3/30451#comment-323063660

    Please note that the above threads include other posts by me on other aspects.

  • bscmath78

    A prof skips 2 out of 3 semesters and only 3 students complain, yet ALL STILL get an A and a REFUND!  And strangely enough, nothing seems to have happened until after all 3 semesters were completed!  This really demonstrates how to spur “Students to Stay in College and Learn”!  especially when it is MEDICAL training. ;-)  

    This type of event is more revealing and useful than “critical thinking” studies, though there is the consistent set of clear messages: students aren’t interested, profs don’t care, administrators don’t want to be caught, and nothing much of intellectual value occurs for most students in college.  Please read the story, about George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences. at:
     
    “Students of Professor Who Didn’t Show Up Keep Their A’s and Get Refunds, Too”
    http://chronicle.com/article/Students-of-Professor-Who/129709/ 

  • bscmath78

    Here is a table showing the relatively low penetration of post-Sputnik STEM materials like PSSC Physics and CHEM Study Chemistry, which I liked as a student:
     
    http://books.google.ca/books?id=CEArAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA24&dq=%22use+of+selected%22+%22chem+study%22+%22pssc+physics%22&hl=en&ei=_ujCTvO-Mcbk0QGM49jlDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22use%20of%20selected%22%20%22chem%20study%22%20%22pssc%20physics%22&f=false 

    It appears to show slightly better PSSC Physics penetration than I guessed at in an earlier post. It shows 18% of school districts using prior to 76-77 then declining to 11% for 76-77. It appears that percentages do not tend to match comparing school districts to schools to teachers to students.

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