Helsinki University dropped from top 100

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The largest Scandinavian daily, Helsingin Sanomat, reported the last week that the University of Helsinki had dropped from the top 100 universities in the Shanghai ranking . Now several Finnish academicians have responded . The take-home message of the response could be summarized as *Don’t take these rankings seriously!*Are these rankings really a meaningless indicator of university quality, just a part of the “attention economy”? This is certainly true for those rankings that are not completely transparent about how the ranking procedure works. And for those that are opening up their methodology completely, Goodhart’s Law still applies: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Everything is good then, despite Helsinki University’s downfall from the upper echelons of academic research, right? Perhaps not. The many university rankings ( Shanghai , THE , and QS being perhaps the most influential) are just one of many targets that Finnish universities aim at. Another - and perhaps a practically much more important one - is the scheme according to which the Finnish Ministry of Education distributes money among Finnish universities. This scheme might be the secret driver behind the decline of Helsinki University. Under the Sipilä government (2015-2019), the distribution criteria were changed so that the number of produced degrees increased in importance while scientific research (as measured by publication output) became less important. Helsinki University is very research-focused. As a matter of fact, after the changes to the money distribution scheme, Helsinki University’s research output reaches the maximum yearly points that can be given typically at the end of the summer. All publications after that until the end of the year do not improve Helsinki University’s standing compared to the other domestic universities. In Finland, the money from the ministry is very important since they do not operate on multi-billion-dollar endowments as most large US universities do. The HS article specifically mentions that these rankings are not a good way to measure the quality of teaching and, thus, should not influence students’ decisions about where to study. However, some rankings do have meaningful metrics. For instance, the THE ranking compares the ratio between students and teachers. Obviously, if a university does not have enough teachers, it will not be able to deliver good teaching. Bad teaching is neither good for students nor the NYT ranking. I agree that some rankings include questionable practices, such as asking more-or-less randomly selected scientists about what universities they think are the best in their fields. I myself have been contributing to such a ranking in 2021. I tried to skew the needle in favour of Finland and Germany as much as I ethically could justify to myself. Although flawed, I would not completely dismiss rankings. The HS article concludes with a similar sentiment: that the displacement of Helsinki University from the top 100 should be a warning sign to the present government to finally put Finnish Universities on equal grounds with the other Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) universities which have not suffered from nearly two decades of declining funding. However, this warning sign comes very late, although the decline has been obvious for quite some time for those following university news. The funding situation has already resulted in irreversible losses of human capital. When the purchase-power-adjusted funding for the University of Helsinki went down for the first time, everybody knew that it would take many years before the effects of the funding cuts would become blatantly evident. It finally happened, with a delay of more than ten years. Thanks to all the politicians that have contributed since 2005 by not doing anything, doing not enough or even actively supporting the dismantlement of Finnish academic research. 2005 was the year when I realized that university funding had declined for the first time in real terms.

University rankings (and how to manipulate them)

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Whow. Helsinki University was again able to improve its position in the Shanghai Ranking and is now number 56. However, even the University’s own press release had kind of a gloomy tune as if this was the last blossom before the final decay. It is true that the basis of the current success has patiently been built by the researchers over the last decades. Nevertheless, when politicians now draw the conclusion that the cuts of the educational budget are responsible for this success, they are probably right.Perhaps the cuts actually did contribute to the surge in productivity: All the scientists that unexpectedly were suddenly unemployed obviously continued to work furiously on their current projects to get their current manuscripts ready for publication. Papers are the overwhelmingly dominant currency in the academic job market. And these unemployed scientists might publish faster than before since unemployed scientists have no teaching duties…However, more importantly, the Helsinki numbers of the individual Shanghai Ranking indicators for 2015 and 2016 differ significantly only the per capita academic performance (publications/number of academic staff) and the number of highly cited scientists. Since the job cuts at Helsinki Universities have been going on already for a while even before the massive cuts of this spring, it appears reasonable to claim, that the 56th position is partly due to the job cuts, which did influence directly and rapidly the number of academic staff.The Shanghai Ranking emphasizes research, whereas in other rankings, Helsinki has even been dropping. E.g. in the QS World University Rankings , Helsinki dropped from position 67 (2014/15) to 96 (2015/16). Between these two rankings, the QS team made “improvements” to their ranking system and these were almost exclusively responsible for the drop if you look at the data closely. They “normalized” the citation ratio per faculty according to the subject, and life science got badly punished by being a “high citation field”. Very simply put, a citation to a paper in Arts and Humanities now counts about 40 times as much as a citation to a paper in Life Science/Medicine. Each of the 5 big fields (Arts & Humanities, Engineering & Technology, Life Sciences & Medicine, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences & Management) contributes now equally with 20% to the final rating in the citation per faculty category (detailed explanation of the normalization from here: http://content.qs.com/qsiu/Faculty_Area_Normalization_-_Technical_Explanation.pdf).Why on earth do they punish a field for having a bigger impact? Papers in the humanities are not cited as much as papers in life science. Maybe this could be due to the fact that their average publication is not as relevant for their own field as is a life science publication for the life science field? I agree that there are cultural differences between fields, but who is to say how much is due to such cultural differences versus low quality or irrelevant research? Exactly that’s what QS World University Ranking’s did by making up “normalization” factors essentially claiming equal relevance.However, all such rankings are easily manipulated. E.g. the citation to faculty (member) ratio can easily improved by outsourcing services that were previously performed by faculty scientists (and that’s what Helsinki University is just doing at the moment). Similar to the impact factor for journals, university rankings are losing their relevance if the goal is to score high and not to excel at research and teaching ( Goodhart’s law : When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure).The Shanghai Ranking has been criticized much. It undervalues teaching since teaching performance doesn’t enter directly the calculation at all, and it favours big universities since 50% of the rating are based on sheer numbers which are not normalized to account for the size of the university. Nevertheless it it the only reproducible (and therefore scientific) dataset from the three big rankings ( https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-012-0801-y ) since both the QS and the Times Ranking rely heavily on opinion and reputation surveys, which are notoriously difficult to reproduce.What is the take-home message? Helsinki University is probably as good as it used to be during the last decade and the big fluctuations are just artifacts resulting from changed ranking methodologies or resulting from administrative adjustments to the financial realities brought upon us by the Finnish voters in the 2015 parliamentary elections.

QS on Michael’s Domain

Helsinki University dropped from top 100

University rankings (and how to manipulate them)