University rankings are prime examples of "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
The amount of worthless papers, international exchanges etc. I've seen at my university is astounding.
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
utrecht uni w! munir would be so proud.