Meta-ranking to position world universities Luque-Martínez, Teodoro; Faraoni, Nina
Studies in higher education (Dorchester-on-Thames),
04/2020, Letnik:
45, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
University rankings have proliferated in recent years and have been diverse, with a variety of profiles. This paper deals with the task of obtaining one single summarized ranking based on a selection ...of the most widely known rankings, in short, a meta-ranking. Five of the best-known rankings were selected and a database compiled with the major world universities that appear in at least four of the five rankings chosen. A meta-ranking was constructed, which differentiates between two dimensions, identifying the positions of universities in each and checking bias. The positioning of the universities is shown and seven clusters of world universities are identified, differences examined according to size, quality of scientific production, level of internationalization, features of the economic context and institutional attributes (staff-to-student ratio and percentage of female students). These results are useful for benchmarking by universities and national university systems, with a view to planning decisions.
Over the past 20 years, universities have been faced with sustained change, driven by external factors. This has led to the evolution of the teaching and research mission and the creation and rise of ...the third mission. Such mission extension has led to the emergence of entrepreneurial universities which has seen a move from traditional research and teaching business models, to business models which incorporate a much wider range of activities, to meet stakeholder demands as well as sustaining and growing universities in the era of intense national and international competition. This special issue extends knowledge by providing novel insights into the multidimensional antecedent contextual influences, consequences and implications of university mission expansion. We also provide a foundational research agenda which will help guide future research exploring the changing and expanding university missions and business models.
COVID-19 has created significant challenges for higher education institutions and major disruptions in teaching and learning. To explore the psychological wellbeing of domestic and international ...university students during the COVID-19 pandemic, an online cross-sectional survey recruited 787 university students (18+ years) currently studying at an Australian university. In total, 86.8% reported that COVID-19 had significantly impacted their studies. Overall, 34.7% of students reported a sufficient level of wellbeing, while 33.8% showed low wellbeing and 31.5% very low wellbeing. Wellbeing was significantly higher in postgraduate students compared with undergraduate students. Future anxiety was significantly greater among undergraduate than postgraduate students. Multivariable regression models showed female gender, low subjective social status, negative overall learning experience or reporting COVID-19 having a huge impact on study, were associated with lower wellbeing in the first few months (May-July) of the pandemic. Supporting the health, wellbeing, and learning experiences of all students should be of high priority now and post-pandemic. Strategies specifically targeting female students, and those with low self-reported social status are urgently needed to avoid exacerbating existing disparities.
After decades of turbulence and acute crises in recent years, how can we build a better future for Higher Education? Thoughtfully edited by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin, this rich and ...diverse collection by academics and professionals from across 17 countries and many disciplines offers a variety of answers to this question. It addresses the need to set new values for universities, trapped today in narratives dominated by financial incentives and performance indicators, and examines those “wicked” problems which need multiple solutions, resolutions, experiments, and imaginaries. This mix of new and well-established voices provides hopeful new ways of thinking about Higher Education across a range of contexts, and how to concretise initiatives to deal with local and global challenges. In an unusual and refreshing way, the contributors provide insights about resilience tactics and collective actions across different levels of higher education using an array of styles and formats including essays, poetry, and speculative fiction. With its interdisciplinary appeal, this book presents itself as a provocative and inspiring resource for universities, students, and scholars. Higher Education for Good courageously offers critique, hope, and purpose for the practice and the trajectory of Higher Education.
•The paper builds a comprehensive review of the current research on the Third Mission of universities and offers an innovative framework of measures to support the enactment of the Third Mission.•The ...Third Mission represents the economic and social mission of the university and its contribution to communities and territories.•Policy makers and university managers should avoid isomorphism, or rather, the tendency to emulate “world class” universities.•University-Industry labs can bridge the gap between university and society at large.•Social sciences and humanities facilitate both understanding of the complexity of the economic, social and environmental issues involved, and generate collaborative strategies between university-industry labs.•A continuous process of entrepreneurial discovery and exploration of market opportunities can foster collaboration between university-industry-government.
In recent years, there has been increasing pressure on Universities to shift from focusing primarily on teaching and performing research, and to add an equivocal Third Mission (TM), labelled “a contribution to society”. Unprecedented challenges have been redesigning the missions of Universities, which are often perceived as being at a crossroads. The TM is a multidisciplinary, complex, evolving phenomenon linked to the social and economic mission of Universities in a broad sense. Existing studies mainly focus on Universities in accomplishing their traditional missions, or they offer a narrow perspective of the TM. To the best of our knowledge, no systematic literature review has been performed on the TM to comprehensively explore its heterogeneous functions, constraints, clashes and incorporation within education and research. This paper presents a systematic review of the state of knowledge and develops a novel framework for the enactment of the TM. The paper reveals the potential and the constraints of the recurring themes of the TM, focusing especially on the engagement of non-academic stakeholders. It also suggests, to scholars and policymakers, a selection of measures through which some of the challenges might be faced. The paper offers both a descriptive and a thematic analysis, through examination of 134 peer-reviewed articles which were published between 2004 and May 2019.
Now that most UK universities have increased their tuition fees to £9,000 a year and are implementing new Access Agreements as required by the Office for Fair Access, it has never been more important ...to examine the extent of fair access to UK higher education and to more prestigious UK universities in particular. This paper uses Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) data for the period 1996 to 2006 to explore the extent of fair access to prestigious Russell Group universities, where ‘fair’ is taken to mean equal rates of making applications to and receiving offers of admission from these universities on the part of those who are equally qualified to enter them. The empirical findings show that access to Russell Group universities is far from fair in this sense and that little changed following the introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and their initial increase to £3,000 a year in 2006. Throughout this period, UCAS applicants from lower class backgrounds and from state schools remained much less likely to apply to Russell Group universities than their comparably qualified counterparts from higher class backgrounds and private schools, while Russell Group applicants from state schools and from Black and Asian ethnic backgrounds remained much less likely to receive offers of admission from Russell Group universities in comparison with their equivalently qualified peers from private schools and the White ethnic group.
The presence and experiences of Black people at elite universities have been largely underrepresented and erased from institutional histories. This book engages with a collection of these experiences ...that span half a century and reflect differences in class, gender, and national identifications among Black scholars. By mapping Black people's experiences of studying and teaching at McGill University, this book reveals how the "whiteness" of the university both includes and exceeds the racial identities of students and professors. It highlights the specific functions of Blackness and of anti-Blackness within society in general and within the institution of higher education in particular, demonstrating how structures and practices of the university reproduce interlocking systems of oppression that uphold racial capitalism, reproduce colonial relations, and promote settler nationalism. Critically engaging the work of Black learners, academics, organizers, and activists within this dynamic political context, this book underscores the importance of Black Studies across North America.
The modern university is sustained by academic freedom; it guarantees higher education's independence, its quality, and its success in educating students. The need to uphold those values would seem ...obvious. Yet the university is presently under siege from all corners; workers are being exploited with paltry salaries for full-time work, politics and profit rather than intellectual freedom govern decision-making, and professors are being monitored for the topics they teach.
No University Is an Islandoffers a comprehensive account of the social, political, and cultural forces undermining academic freedom. At once witty and devastating, it confronts these threats with exceptional frankness, then offers a prescription for higher education's renewal. In an insider's account of how the primary organization for faculty members nationwide has fought the culture wars, Cary Nelson, the current President of the American Association of University Professors, unveils struggles over governance and unionization and the increasing corporatization of higher education. Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best.
The book calls on higher education's advocates of both the Left and the Right to temper conviction with tolerance and focus on higher education's real injustices. Nelson demands we stop denying teachers, student workers, and other employees a living wage and basic rights. He urges unions to take up the larger cause of justice. And he challenges his own and other academic organizations to embrace greater democracy.
With broad and crucial implications for the future,No University Is an Islandwill be the benchmark against which we measure the current definitive struggle for academic freedom.
Universities play a well-established role in regional economic growth, one contribution to which is academic entrepreneurship, the establishment and support of faculty and graduate student spinoff ...companies based on university research. A vibrant literature examines the general contributions of universities within regional innovation ecosystems while another strain of literature examines individual intermediaries, such as technology licensing offices and incubators, in support of the university's economic development mission. Little research exists, however, that conceptualizes the structure and function of an entrepreneurial university ecosystem. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature by examining the composition, contributions, and evolution of social networks among faculty and graduate student entrepreneurs and the role of knowledge intermediaries therein. While our investigation supports an emerging literature that finds academic entrepreneurs are typically limited by their own homophilous social networks, we also find that spinoff success relies upon academic and non-academic contacts who connect faculty and students to other social networks important to spinoff success. We investigate how by creating a taxonomy of social network evolution among spinoffs; the results show that the contributions of universities depend on the existence and interrelationship of loosely coordinated, heterogeneous knowledge intermediaries guided by a strong collective ethos to encourage and support academic entrepreneurship.
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