The Educationalist: Considers league tables
The publication of The Guardian’s 2008 University League Tables raises familiar questions: are British universities achieving as they should? Is York achieving as it should? Are tables at all useful within the education sector?
I am assuming most prospective students won’t look at the rankings in conjunction with the methodology, probably due to it being rather confusing and very boring. However, it yields some interesting insights. Most important are the different weightings given to various factors, perhaps the most important of which are those based upon the responses of graduates to the National Student Survey. These give the most recent information on universities and their courses, and are formulated from the views of students, not just nitty gritty facts and figures. The Guardian rankings refer to these in their ‘feedback’ and ‘teaching quality’ sections and they are weighted at five and ten percent respectively; not much compared to the 17% allowed to ‘student-staff ratio’ and ‘funding per student’.
Secondly, the highly publicised tables give a broad-brush picture, but there are also rankings for individual subject areas. On these figures, York varies greatly from the overall 15th place: for Art and Design we’re 2nd, Computer Science 3rd and Psychology 4th, while at the other extreme English has dropped to 21st, Physics 32nd and Education 42nd. But even these rankings aren’t as clear-cut as they might seem. These are broad subject areas; for example, ‘Education’ combines both teaching and educational studies. Is it fair to combine these two considering that one is a vocational course, the other focused on theory and research? Similarly, ‘Art and design’ lumps together fine arts, computer graphics and video games.
Tables also differ wildly from year to year. In 2007 The Times ranked York 15th, The Sunday Times had York as 7th in 2006 and 6th in 2004. The drop is there to see, but there is wide variation in methodology between the three. The most recent Guardian Table includes a value-added score and another for graduates’ job prospects which were determined using a different calculation than in previous years. It also has to be borne in mind that the National Student Survey was introduced only in 2005 and the rankings are still adapting to its inclusion even as universities themselves try to implement its recommendations.
I know that the tone of what I’ve written might suggest I’m defending the University: I’m not. Over the last three years, I’ve seen standards and faith in the academic reputation of this University drop amongst present and past students. There are many reasons for this and I’m not going to go into them here. I do, however, implore you to be skeptical of these tables and rankings, and their utility as a source of comparative data.
