Why no Indian Institution is in the top 200 in the QS global rankings?

Why no Indian Institution is in the top 200 in the QS global rankings?

Gautam Barua, IIT Guwahati

QS has recently released its 2012 global University rankings. Since QS markets its product in India, there has been quite a bit of press on the rankings. The fact that no Indian University has come in

the first 200 ranks have made “news”.  There have been many reasons given by various people, ranging from a lack of research, inadequate funding, excelling in undergraduate education only, and indifferent academic administrators. Rankings are done on the basis of a number of parameters which the ranking organisation decides upon. Let us look at the ranks in QS 2012 of the IITs and examine the basis of their rankings. The details of the ranks of the IITs are as follows (the scores of MIT are given for comparison’s sake):

Rank	Institution	Academic Reputation (AR)	Employer Reputation (ER)	Faculty: Student Ratio (FS)	Citations / faculty (CF)	Intl faculty (IF)	Intl students (IS)	Total Score
		40%	10%	20%	20%	5%	5%	100%
	max marks	100	100	100	100	100	100	100.0
1	MIT	100.0	100.0	99.9	99.3	86.4	96.5	100.0
212	IITD	53.4	79.4	35.4	54.1	1.3	1.6	47.8
227	IITB	59.5	82.7	28.9	38.2	3.2	1.2	46.2
278	IITK	44.1	50.6	28.2	57.2	1.5	1.1	40.3
312	IITM	40.0	73.0	30.9	40.3	2.1	1.2	38.1
349	IITKGP	34.6	42.3	32.7	47.1	0.0	1.1	34.4
401-450	IITR			37.7	40.7
551-600	IITG	16.7	24.7	35.5	26.6	3.0	1.2	22.0

All scores are relative, with the number 1 ranked institute in that category getting a score of 100.  As can be seen, there are five parameters with different weights assigned to each parameter. The category CF refers to the average number of  times a published paper is cited by other papers in which the original authors are not authors. The number of citations of all papers over five years (2007-2011) were totalled and divided by the number of faculty in the Institute in 2011. If a paper is cited often, it is assumed that its quality is good. Unfortunately, the “citation index” depends on the size of the research population and so it is difficult to compare across disciplines.  We note the following:

1.      All IITs are at a disadvantage on the international faculty and students issues. We are not allowed to take international students at the B.Tech level (other than through JEE). With so much demand within the country, there is pressure not to have too many foreign students. There is scope for increasing the number of foreign PhD students. But even here there is a restriction, as Govt. Assistantships can be given only to Indian citizens. We are trying to get this restriction lifted. Without aid, it is difficult to attract good international PhD students. Hiring international faculty on a regular basis is  not allowed. They can be hired on contract upto five years, but only if the salary is  at least $25000 annually (only Profs  are allowed effectively). The moot question remains: is the internationalization of campuses an important parameter for excellence? The Western countries are clearly at an advantage here.

2.      50% of the weightage is based on “reputation” (AR: 40% and ER: 10%). This helps QS a lot. They are now aggressively marketing their products through which institutions can enhance their “reputation”. Thus we have been invited to advertise in their “QS Top University Guide 2013” (with discounts if we opt to advertise in more than one language) and in other publications, to attend seminars and conferences (with registration fees of course), and so on. Can we rely on reputations primarily to decide ranks?

3.       AR and ER have a weightage of 85% for international responses and 15% for domestic responses (the country the institute is).  Academics all over the world are asked their opinion of the top institutions globally and in their country. The chances of getting an IIT’s name included by a US professor are quite slim.  Alumni in academics may help the IITs as they know about them, but the number of alumni in academics in the US is a small fraction of the number of alumni in the US. This is a legacy of the past. Young institutions like IIT Guwahati without sufficient alumni, are at a particular disadvantage. The number of respondents is proportional to the number of institutes available for selection in that country. So the responses are heavily weighted in favour of responses from the developed countries. Respondents are not asked to give their inputs for each of the listed universities (it may be impractical to do so, as there are a large number of them). Instead, each respondent is asked to give a list of 5-10 Universities he or she thinks are globally well known, and well known in their country. This method perpetuates the existing ranks.

4.      Let us now look at the category FS. IITs have not done well  in the faculty to student ratio, and it is well known that there are many vacant faculty positions. But even here, the methodology is not clear. MIT states in its web site that it has a faculty to student ratio of 1:8. It also states that the total number of students is 10,894 students. The number of faculty is given as 1018, whereas 1362 are required to meet the above ratio. Then the number of “senior lecturers, lecturers, and Professors emeriti” are given as 540 (most of whom are on contract for temporary periods. Possibly 1362 is reached after deleting the “Professors Emeriti”.  But how are scores calculated?  Consider this: MIT with a 1:8 ratio gets a score of 99.9, while IIT Guwahati with a ratio of 1:13.3 (as per QS) gets only 35.5. I am not able to figure out how this score was arrived at. In any case, is this a fair marking system? Shouldn’t an ideal ratio get full marks and other ratios be given lesser marks in slabs?

5.      Finally we have the category CF. This  gives the average number of citations for the papers published in the last 5 years. The assumption is that the number of faculty has remained more or less constant (generally true for “old” institutions). But IIT Guwahati had 291 faculty in 2011 but only 191 in 2007. So its numbers clearly cannot be compared with institutions like Cambridge and Oxford. Further, since a five year average is taken, one or two “star” papers can make a huge difference to the numbers. For example, a review paper “The Hallmarks of Cancer” authored by two professors from UC San Francisco and MIT has about 10,000 citations. This paper alone will have boosted the CF figure of both these institutions significantly. Is this the right way to judge whether an Institution is doing well in research? Isn’t the median number of citations of faculty a better measure than this (although even this has its pitfalls)?

So, what can we conclude from all of the above? Surely it should be clear, ranking of universities is not a simple task. We have only scratched the surface as has QS. There are so many other aspects of an educational institution that QS has not even touched upon. The same can be said of the other global ranking systems like THE and  ARWU.  Many of these aspects are qualitative in nature, and it is very difficult to quantify them. This is not to say that Indian Universities do not need to improve in many ways. They do, and we may have to come out with our own ranking system to get a proper comparison among universities in India. But if Society wants Indian Institutions to get higher QS rankings, then Institutions must do the following: a) aggressively market the Institute among academia and Corporations in the US and Europe (and QS is there to help you! For a price of course, and we need to set aside a part of our budget for them!), b) Substantially increase the number of foreign students ( why not scrap JEE and admit only foreign students? Our income will rise, and our ranks will soar!), c) hire a large number of temporary “teachers” to boost the FS number (which counts the number of “academic staff”), d) create a network among Indian Institutions to encourage citations of papers of other Indian Institutions (scratch each others’ backs, as some other countries seem to be doing), and e) and of course try and improve the quality of research, teaching, education, etc.!

17/9/2012