1. School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST), Pakistan Impact of University Ranking on Students Syed Ali Khayam

2. What is this talk about?  This talk is based on the following report published recently on the NUST website: Marguerite Clarke, “University rankings and their impact on students,”  In this report, the author explains her perspective on how university rankings affect: –students’ choice of school –employment options after graduation, and –admission policies

3. What is this talk about?  Many different university rankings exist in the world today  Most prominent US rankings are: –US News & World Report College and University Ranking –Top American Research Universities by University of Florida –Washington Monthly College rankings …  Global rankings include: –Times Higher Education Ranking –Academic Ranking of World Universities –Newsweek Top 100 Global Universities –Webometrics Ranking of World Universities…  Most of these rankings use some well-known evaluation metrics to quantify the performance of postgraduate programs

4. Do students care about university rankings?  This study concludes that most students do not consider rankings to be important when choosing undergraduate and graduate schools –Out of the 221,897 undergraduate students who responded to one survey, 11% saw university rankings as a very important factor in their choice of school while 60% found them not at all important  I believe that this observation is largely dependent on the demographics of the survey participants  For instance, good students in Pakistan are very rank- conscious when picking graduate schools

5. Does university ranking affect employability?  The study concludes that university rank might have an impact on salary, especially for business schools  But this affect is only temporary  I believe that salary alone is not sufficient to gauge employability  We need to take into consideration whether the graduates are getting the jobs of their choice or not

6. Impact of university ranking on student access  To improve university ranking, schools offer early- decision programs and large amounts of scholarships, and invest heavily in infrastructure such as sports facilities and upmarket dorms  This has a negative impact on access for low-income students and other underrepresented groups as these students are less likely to apply through early-decision programs or to earn top scores on standardized tests  I am not really sure what this point means

7. Impact of global university rankings  Global rankings are providing students low-cost alternatives for quality education  There are reservations that some countries “see rankings and stratification as the means to create ‘world class’ universities and thus meet the challenges of increasing global competition”  I am again not really sure why this is a bad idea

8. Conclusion  Due to limited time, I could not read and analyze alternative perspectives on this subject  However, I found another, very useful article from the same author: Clarke, M. (2002). Quantifying quality: What can the U.S. News and World Report rankings tell us about the quality of higher education? Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10(16). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n16/ http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n16/  This article critically analyzes the university ranking system of US News and highlights many important issues and pitfalls

9. Thank you!