I just arrived from a grueling field survey only to get an “important”   email to the faculty from the Chancellor of the University of the Philippines in Diliman.

And what was this “important” email all about? It was about the recent THES university rankings!

The blurbs and their op eds have reported their reactions on the latest THES top 500 global university rankings where the University of the Philippines (UP) rating has gone from 398 in 2007 to 276 this year. Ateneo de Manila’s rating has gone from last year’s 401 to 254 in 2008. The views from both sides of Katipunan Road are given here and here. De La Salle is at 415th and our only ancient university, the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas is at 470th.

The blurbs have made fodder on the seeming fact that Ateneo has trounced UP this year. Fortunately we on either sides of Katipunan largelt don’t give a damn about this contrived rivalry. Those on UP’s side say that we are not even affected when the Blue Eagles make mincemeat of the Maroons, so why should these ratings make any difference?

Since many of us in UP have good and lifelong friends down on Katipunan Road, we are almost on the level on this. But we do have to give the cake to some Ateneans who think these ratings are somewhat mystically related to their raptorial treatment of that basketball team that lives on Taft Avenue.

Many in Ateneo think that while the ratings are really good news, it doesn’t mean that their university has achieved excellence. I doff my hat to our good friends in Loyola Heights. They do look at this levelheadedly in their own way. They point out the THES survey’s methods inadequacies as well as the Ateneo’s vision and mission and how it has initiated or catalyzed social action like the Pathways program. The THES of course has nothing to say about the latter.

On our side of the road, the UP has publicly said it never participated in the surveys, has questioned the method of the ratings and provided a link to a peer reviewed article published in BioMed central. This article questions the transparency of these university rankings.

Having read the BioMed article, the methodological pitfalls of these rankings are quite obvious. First of all they all have to average ratings. Any beginning student in information metrics knows that in taking the mean, it is possible to lose information. Also problems in normalizing university performance (given that universities worldwide have different indices in assessing themselves) are great pitfalls in the ratings.

While the THES and other ranking systems give priority to easily quantitated measures like ISI listed publications, it doesn’t give much weight on the diversity of university activities. Also the publication rate index suffers from bias towards certain disciplines. For instance as the authors of the BioMed article report, clinical medicine gets 50 times more citations than that of economics. Forget comparing that with scholarly works in the arts and humanities.

However in a university, even the most arcane discipline (like Philosophy? :-) ) needs to be fostered and taught. We can’t have a university where medicine is only the subject being taught!

Both the UP and Ateneo seem to get this point in their argument that the ratings have to be taken with other things in mind.

But as the UP chancellor’s email suggests, the ratings are really a marketing ploy. Universities that get the highest ratings will attract the most students that can cough up the fees. This is the unpalatable reality that Ateneo and UP will have to swallow.

Ateneo and UP seem to diverge on one point. Ateneo wants to “communicate” to the public what indices it needs to have in order it can be assessed properly. I reckon that the university will participate in future surveys. The UP on the other hand is unlikely to participate in future surveys unless the methods are made clear.

So Ateneo can serve us Pinoys well if it continues to teach seemingly “useless” subjects like Philosophy and doing constructive social action like Pathways. UP can serve Pinoys well by teaching seemingly “useless” subjects in Art studies, linguistics, geography and Filipino and having a critical eye on things like these surveys.

In doing so they are true top universities!

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