Global Universities Ranking

The ranking is generated on the basis of estimation of education quality which is considered as the complex characteristic reflecting the majority of aspects of activity of higher educational institutions: educational, research and international, level of professional competence of the professorial and research personnel, used resources, level of communications development.

Methodological approaches of choosing and estimating the indicators of activity of universities are specified by the expert group formed by RatER and the Institute of Complex Researches of Education, with the assistance of the broad spectrum of experts in the higher education sphere. In the developed methodology of ranking the expert group has considered the international approaches, as well as the practice of certain countries which consider university ranking as one of the elements of educational system social accountability.

The ranking is first and foremost aimed at overcoming the barriers which have historically appeared between domestic educational system and the world educational space, first of all, of information barriers; definition of the place of the Russian higher education institutions and the universities of the CIS countries and Baltic in the global educational space; stimulation of the academic community for putting their efforts on development of universities and educational systems.

From 15000 universities more than 500 higher educational institutions from 70 various countries of the world, including almost 100 universities of Russia, the CIS countries and Baltic are chosen for estimation.

The Soviet system of higher professional education created a few score of universities being up to the real world standards, however due to a number of reasons of ideological and political nature it had been developing in separation from the world educational system. The most positive experience was not adopted, for instance the one of development of research universities, though it should be noted that by many criteria some of the best Soviet universities had an investigational and research direction.

At the present time the isolation of educational systems of new countries of the post-Soviet territory has remained, but now due to the economic reasons.

If in 1990th the processes of degradation of educational systems of the majority of the Post-Soviet countries were fixed, then in the beginning of a new century, due to the growing attention of the society and the authorities to the problems of higher education and the saved up resources, in Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Ukraine educational systems started to recover and develop, and what is noticeable - with the use of the most productive experience of educational systems of the developed countries.

Russia and most CIS countries have understood that the higher education in many respects determines the level of competitiveness of a country. In the same period we can observe the splash of interest for comparative estimations within the national educational systems and world universities, simply the splash of interest for the global rankings of the world universities. Insignificant level of representativeness of the Russian universities and universities of the CIS countries and Baltic in global rankings has initiated a new wave of activity of the academic community and the society as a whole, having generated thus the social order for carrying out of a comparative estimation of the best universities of Russia and the CIS countries with the best universities of the world.

RatER, being engaged during last two years in the public estimation of quality of education in the Russian universities, as well as being incorporated in the international community of universities appraisers, has clearly caught this social order and, following it, has initiated organization of comparative estimation of universities of Russia and the CIS countries with the best world universities.

The basic criteria of universities selection for their subsequent estimation:

· Mainly classical, technical, technological and, as minimum, economic universities were estimated. (Specialized medical, agro-industrial, pedagogical are excluded from the estimation)

· For foreign universities - presence in the current world ratings. (Restriction to the general number of considered foreign universities is valid only for the working period of the current year; it is supposed in future to expand the number of estimated universities at least to thousand)

· For the Russian universities - belonging to many winners and participants of competitions of innovative educational programs 2006-2007, excepting some specialized, and also not state high schools.

· For universities of the CIS countries and Baltic - popularity of a university at the present time and its reputation. Actually, the largest and the most important classical, technical and technological universities of the CIS countries and Baltic were selected for estimation.

Organization of work

For estimation of universities the following time intervals are chosen: "epoch" - new, the XXI-st century, i.e. the period since 2001 till 2008; calendar year - 2008; academic year - 2006/2007; fiscal year - 2007.

In the autumn of the year 2008 the letters with questionnaires were sent to the addresses of the universities chosen for estimation, however the answers are received only from 10 % of the addressees, so the compilers of the rating have carried out the scaled work on search and editing of public data, using following informational sources:

· Official sites of universities

· Annual reports of universities

· National agencies specializing in gathering and processing educational statistics

· Various ratings which may also include estimated universities (for example, Top-500 rating of the world supercomputers)

· Records of the scientometric data base Scopus

· Google search system data

Table 1 shows the classification of the general number of estimated universities by the countries.

The necessary information on 430 universities is received both from the questionnaires and from public sources of information, and data from the questionnaires filled in by universities was auxiliary, specifying and got after the public data.

79 selected universities did not manage to be estimated due to informational restrictions which, we hope, will be overcome in the future.

During the analysis of foreign approaches to formation of global ratings of universities such a peculiarity as primary estimation of research activity, scientific achievements of a university was revealed. Naturally, in this case the Russian and ex-Soviet universities throughout the time of life of several generations functioning in the conditions of rigid division of science and education lose in the dispute with universities of the developed countries. Accordingly, the experts of RatER in this case of formation of global rating tried to get focused on several aspects of activity of a university.

The estimation is made in the following six blocks of activity:

1. Educational activity (Block1). It includes indicators of number of bachelors, specialists, masters, post-graduate students/doctoral candidates of a university; estimations of number of educational programs realized by the university (bachelor’s program, specialist’s program, master’s degree program, postgraduate studies/doctoral studies); size of the resulted number of a contingent trained by one teacher.

2. Research activity (Block2). It includes general number of patents and certificates of discovery registered by authors of a university during the period from 2001 to 2007; an indicator of productivity of the computer centre (supercomputer) of a university; Hirschman index of a university.

3. Professional competence of the faculty (Block3). It includes number of publications of authors of a university (articles, monographs, scientific and methodical books), published during the period from 2001 to 2007; number of quotations of the authors of a university during the period from 2001 to 2007; estimation of number of awards of the world level received by employees of a university during the period from 2001 to 2007 (awards of the world level - the Nobel Prize, Fields medal, the Descartes prize, the Abel prize, Lomonosov medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences).

4. Financial maintenance (Block4). It includes the volume of consolidated budget of a university for 2007 (million US dollars) in ratio to the aggregate number of students.

5. International activity (Block5). It includes estimation of membership of a university in the international academic communities; number of foreign students from an aggregate number of student.

6. Internet audience (Block6). It includes the volume of web-products created by a university during the period from 2001 to 2007; popularity of the university in queries of the search system Google in 2008; PageRank value of the main page of the university’s site for the autumn of 2008.

University’s evaluation summary is determined as follows: 0,2*Block1 + 0,2* Block2 + 0,2* Block3 + 0,15* Block4 + 0,1* Block5 + 0,15* Block6.

Weights of block estimations are determined in the course of procedures of expert estimations.

Estimations are standardized according to the maximum value and are brought to 100 points.

Comments

Educational activity:

Windowed estimations of number of basic educational programs of levels 1, 2 and 3 of the training led to the number of students of various level taking into account the resulted number of students for one teacher of a university reflect not only the spectrum of the programs being realized, the degree diversification of the university’s activity, but also the priority attention of the university to development of the highest levels of preparation, i.e. researchers and qualified professionals (masters).

Furthermore rather big in comparison with the contingent of students teachers and research bulk of a university provides not simply mass production of qualified specialists, but to a large extent their single-piece training.

The lowered weight of an estimation of bachelor educational programs underlines such signs of a leading university of the world, as the priority orientation toward preparation of scientific manpower, as well as highly skilled experts for effective activity in national and global economic systems. Educational programs of specialist training in the Russian universities are similar with western master’s programs on the majority of signs, and the Russian universities are not overestimated, since most of them develop master directions of training extremely cautiously, opening just a few master’s programs per year.

Research activity:

Development of supercomputer technologies (it means not only building of supercomputers, but also development of the distributed calculations in networks) in the world’s leading universities has turned into the well-defined tendency. Practically no a direction in science and technologies can go without computers at all stages - from research planning, processing of experimental data to modeling of processes and samples. If at the end of the 20th century construction of supercomputers was the matter of national prestige then at the present time they are getting necessary means of support of the research process, available for the majority of research universities.

The number of patents for inventions and registered discoveries evidently characterizes the research potential of a university. The use of data from Scopus data base for this estimation allows technologize the estimation processes, and the Russian universities get an obviously low estimation as they are presented in this scientometric system minimally by the present time.

The use of an h-index (on the basis of Scopus data) for all authors of a university characterizes, on the one hand, the generalized scientific efficiency of research and teaching staff of the university, and, on the other hand, the level of demand of the world research community for the scientific product of the university.

Professional competence of the teaching staff:

Expansion of a spectrum of scientific awards of the world level is considered to be correct since in recent years there has appeared such a respectable European award as the Descartes prize; Lomonosov medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences has old history and the high status in the world scientific community; the Russian prize «Global Energy», despite insignificant time of existence, it also confirms its high level in the world scientific community. Besides, it is necessary to notice that most of those who have ever been awarded a Russian prize are foreign scientists and thinkers.

The procedure of estimation of the level of professional competence of the teaching staff also includes the estimations of scientific efficiency of authors of a university - number of articles published in reviewed magazines and number of references to the articles during the period from 2001 to 2008 (Scopus DB).

It is necessary to notice that low representativeness of Russian universities in Scopus DB also reduces their estimation.

Financial maintenance:

Owing to a considerable inconsistency of financial indicators of universities of different countries we have chosen an elementary indicator - led to an aggregate number of students the volume of consolidated budget of a university in 2007 expressed in US dollars.

International activity:

Assessment of universities activity in the international academic communities. Due to a considerable number of such communities of the world, regional, branch scale we had to resort to an expert appraisal of this activity.

Technological indicator - number of foreign students from an aggregate number of students allows to counterbalance the expert appraisal upon the above-stated indicator.

Internet audience:

Modern university is connected with enormous number of subjects of scientific, educational, industrial, administrative activity in the national and global scales; it keeps all significant audiences informed. A choice for estimation of level of development of global communications of university of Internet communications is natural proceeding from the level and the rates of development of network technologies.

The estimation is made on the basis of data on the university’s web-products (Scopus DB), the estimation of the requested popularity of the university in the search system Google, PageRank of the main page of the university.

The volume of web-products characterizes the level of development of Internet technologies in the universities in preparation and advancement of scientific and scientific and methodical publications.

Requested popularity of the university’s site characterizes popularity of the university in the widest network environment, first of all, among such audience as potential entrants and their parents.

PageRank of the main page of the university’s site characterizes the "importance" of this page defined on the basis of the analysis of reference activity of other pages (sites) taking into account recommendations of turning to this main page. PageRank of the main page is higher in those universities where, first of all, an effective interaction of Internet resources connected with the site of a university is organized - sites of faculties and institutes, sites of partner organizations, sites of academic communities and communities of graduates.

The developed procedure of estimation allows lying technological bases of formation of a global rating of a new third generation which is under construction on the basis of processing and the analysis of the public information of the university available for each researcher and interested person.