Academic rankings: an approach to a Portuguese ranking

The academic rankings are a controversial subject in higher education. However, despite all the criticism, academic rankings are here to stay and more and more different stakeholders use rankings to obtain information about the institutions’ performance. The two most well-known rankings, The Times and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings have different methodologies. The Times ranking is based on peer review, whereas the Shanghai ranking has only quantitative indicators and is mainly based on research outputs. In Germany, the CHE ranking uses a different methodology from the traditional rankings, allowing the users to choose criteria and weights. The Portuguese higher education institutions are performing below their European peers, and the Government believes that an academic ranking could improve both performance and competitiveness between institutions. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the advantages and problems of academic rankings and provide guidance to a new Portuguese ranking.Academic rankings; CHE; higher education; performance evaluation; Portugal; Shanghai; THES

Higher Education Rankings: Robustness Issues and Critical Assessment

It has been often stated that European growth has been disappointing during the past three decades, remaining persistently lower than in the United States and this is to be attributed to the state of innovation and higher education in Europe. Such a conclusion has been in part based on higher education rankings such as the SJTU or the THES. These rankings can potentially be used by prospective students when choosing which university to attend, and bring attention to important issues such as ¿the student experience¿, employability and retention. The rankings and league tables also have a much wider impact ¿ for example, on institutions¿ reputations and potentially on the behaviour of academics, businesses and potential benefactors. Governing bodies take an interest in them as a means of assessing institutional performance, sometimes seizing on them in default of other, more sensitive indicators of institutional performance. There clearly is a demand for rankings in the higher education field, but there are also questions about their quality, impact and eventual validity of the conclusions, which in turn depend heavily upon the choice of indicators, the suitability of the methodologies used, the transparency of the processes and the robustness of the rankings. This JRC report has three main goals: - To throw a considerable amount of light on the approaches and limitations of the SJTU and THES rankings; - To assess the robustness of the two ranking systems with a view to identify for which universities the THES and SJTU ranking systems can be reliably used for drawing conclusions; - To identify factors behind the differences in university performance across Europe compared to the United States. We hope the debate will lead to improvements to league tables methodologies; enable users to better understand the complexities of the league tables, and avoid misunderstanding them; and to help higher education institutions develop approaches that help them satisfy the legitimate information needs of their stakeholders.JRC.G.9-Econometrics and statistical support to antifrau

Academic rankings: an approach to a Portuguese ranking

The academic rankings are a controversial subject in higher education. However, despite all the criticism, academic rankings are here to stay and more and more different stakeholders use rankings to obtain information about the institutions’ performance. The two most well-known rankings, The Times and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings have different methodologies. The Times ranking is based on peer review, whereas the Shanghai ranking has only quantitative indicators and is mainly based on research outputs. In Germany, the CHE ranking uses a different methodology from the traditional rankings, allowing the users to choose criteria and weights. The Portuguese higher education institutions are performing below their European peers, and the Government believes that an academic ranking could improve both performance and competitiveness between institutions. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the advantages and problems of academic rankings and provide guidance to a new Portuguese ranking

The origins, operation and impacts of quality assurance in UK higher education, 1985-2004

The thesis explores the origins of government concerns about the quality of UK higher education during the 1980s and traces legislative processes leading to the reform acts of 1988 and 1992. It demonstrates close links between higher education reforms and Conservative policies in the rest of the public sector and shows how quality assurance was used as an instrument of regulation to increase government control over the universities during the next decade. These developments coincided with the rise of a higher education ‘market’ in which quality assessment scores were translated into league tables to attract students as ‘customers’. The narrative then shows how the issue of student fees increasingly came to dominate the Labour government’s thinking from 1997 onwards and became a major theme in debates leading to the higher education act of 2004. The chronological narrative based on historical accounts and contemporary documents identifies four successive phases of quality assurance between 1992 and 2004. This is combined with a qualitative study which uses a constructivist approach to build up a picture of the unsettled period that followed the introduction of quality assurance systems into universities. A wide range of views from contemporary literature were supplemented by a series of ten semi-structured interviews with individuals who played significant roles in these events and reported their experiences in their own words. The narrative traces the growth of a quality ‘industry’ in higher education and a longrunning ‘quality debate’ among those affected by its impacts. Difficulties of defining ‘quality’ and the political desire for quantitative measurement led to the adoption of unsuitable methodology, emphasising accountability at the expense of improvement. This turbulent period was characterised by a recurring pattern of rising protests from academics which culminated in political intervention and subsequently further change. The thesis analyses the effects of quality assurance on university staff and students and on the developing discourse between higher education and the state. Summarising its impacts in a balance sheet of pros and cons leads to the conclusion that though concerns about quality were justified and some form of regulation was necessary in the expanded and diverse sector, the results of audit and assessment revealed little cause for concern about the quality of UK higher education. Furthermore, though quality assurance produced some benefits in the organisation of courses, staff development and information for prospective students, there was little evidence of benefits to teaching itself. Thus, quality assurance failed to deliver the government’s own aim of value for money, and the effort and time 3 required by the universities could have been put to better use; less insistence on regulation could have given academics more freedom to pursue improvements in teaching. A brief epilogue reflects on the status of quality assurance in 2015 and warns that separate plans for reform announced by HEFCE and the current government risk repeating old mistakes

Business models and higher education

The researcher believes that the wide ranging use of the term business model in academic and practitioner arenas suggests that the clarification of its use rhetorically, strategically or managerially or lack of use would be of interest to both academics and management practitioners. Universities face increasingly challenging economic conditions and the identification of the use within higher education of business models using interview data, cross-referenced to institutional success, measured by a variety of metrics, may allow inferences to be drawn about the relationship of the relative success of institutions and the role, if any, of business models which may then inform future decision making. The researcher suggests that a business model approach, whilst not introducing new concepts is a useful descriptive and analytical tool for both practitioners and academics. In a discursive sense the term can act as a useful short hand whilst as a framework for value propositions it can aid the identification and development of the underlying economic reality of business activity. Furthermore, business models when viewed in the context of competing value propositions and business model innovation provide a link to and an aid in, the development of strategy. The researcher found that the term business model was frequently described in interview as inappropriate and no evidence of significant explicit usage of the term business model was found in university strategic plans. Further evidence from interview and the analysis of strategic plan documentation highlights the use of business-like language and practices suggesting that implicit, rather than explicit, business model approaches are being adopted in universities for decision making purposes

Liberalisation and the public sector: The case of international students' policy in Britain and France.

The spread of liberalisation across both developed and developing countries has become an increasingly important policy trend over the last thirty years. This thesis examines how liberalisation has occurred, at different speeds and in different ways, in the same sector across two different countries. It seeks to explain why, in the market for international students, liberalisation occurred to a greater extent in Britain than in France. This was despite the fact that both countries' governments had espoused very similar policies towards international students from 1979 onwards, promoting a reorientation of recruitment away from developing countries and towards developed and emerging economy countries, and encouraging higher education institutions (HEIs) to compete against each other for international students. The thesis attempts to explain this cross-national difference in the extent of liberalisation through examining which actors pushed for liberalisation, and which factors conditioned their ability to do so. In this case, governments played the most important role in propagating liberalisation, and higher education institutions generally attempted to resist liberalisation, rather than promoting it. Governments' ability to push forward liberalisation was constrained, however, by the extent of coordination of HEIs in sectoral associations, which enabled them to resist government proposals. Whilst in some cases, French governments were able to create new institutions which encouraged a commodification of international students, they proved unable to create new institutions which incentivised HEIs to compete against each other for the recruitment of international students. In contrast, British governments managed to create new institutions which led to both the commodification of international students, and competition for their recruitment. The thesis thus also counsels a more nuanced approach to liberalisation, which recognises that it can consist in different elements (in this case, in both commodification and competition). rather than representing a uniform, and unified, process across countries and sectors

What is the evidence of the impact of microfinance on the well-being of poor people?

The concept of microcredit was first introduced in Bangladesh by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. Professor Yunus started Grameen Bank (GB) more than 30 years ago with the aim of reducing poverty by providing small loans to the country’s rural poor (Yunus 1999). Microcredit has evolved over the years and does not only provide credit to the poor, but also now spans a myriad of other services including savings, insurance, remittances and non-financial services such as financial literacy training and skills development programmes; microcredit is now referred to as microfinance (Armendáriz de Aghion and Morduch 2005, 2010). A key feature of microfinance has been the targeting of women on the grounds that, compared to men, they perform better as clients of microfinance institutions and that their participation has more desirable development outcomes (Pitt and Khandker 1998). Despite the apparent success and popularity of microfinance, no clear evidence yet exists that microfinance programmes have positive impacts (Armendáriz de Aghion and Morduch 2005, 2010; and many others). There have been four major reviews examining impacts of microfinance (Sebstad and Chen, 1996; Gaile and Foster 1996, Goldberg 2005, Odell 2010, see also Orso 2011). These reviews concluded that, while anecdotes and other inspiring stories (such as Todd 1996) purported to show that microfinance can make a real difference in the lives of those served, rigorous quantitative evidence on the nature, magnitude and balance of microfinance impact is still scarce and inconclusive (Armendáriz de Aghion and Morduch 2005, 2010). Overall, it is widely acknowledged that no well-known study robustly shows any strong impacts of microfinance (Armendáriz de Aghion and Morduch 2005, p199-230). Because of the growth of the microfinance industry and the attention the sector has received from policy makers, donors and private investors in recent years, existing microfinance impact evaluations need to be re-investigated; the robustness of claims that microfinance successfully alleviates poverty and empowers women must be scrutinised more carefully. Hence, this review revisits the evidence of microfinance evaluations focusing on the technical challenges of conducting rigorous microfinance impact evaluations

Personality Types and Their Hypothesized Attributes: An Application of Holland\u27s Vocational Choice Theory

The purpose of this study was to assess the usefulness of Holland\u27s vocational choice theory for counseling with university students. More specifically, it attempted to determine whether or not Holland\u27s theory provides a suitable framework for integrating the results of two commonly used counseling instruments: the SVIB and the EPPS . A sample was drawn from those students tested by the University Counseling Center on both the SVIB and EPPS. This sample was, within reasonable limits, representative of the male student population dealt with by the Counseling Center. The sample contained 255 Ss. For analysis of the data the student test profiles were grouped according to Holland\u27s criteria - by SVIB profile. Hypo thes es regarding the personality attributes (manifest needs) of Holland\u27s six major personality types were then tested by means of EPPS profile scores. Analysis of variance revealed differences between the H-SVIB groups on seven of the 15 EPPS needs (p The results of this study clearly indicate that Holland\u27s theory of vocational choice does provide a suitable system or theoretical framework within which to organize the SVIB and EPPS results.

Development of an integrated performance appraisal system for truck drivers in the wine trade

Bibliography: pages 224-231.The purpose of this study was to develop a performance appraisal system for truck drivers in a wine manufacturing organization. One of the objectives of the system developed, was to improve the performance of the truck drivers. The sample involved in this study consisted of 80 truck drivers and six transport foremen. A preliminary study was done to determine the satisfaction of the drivers with the previous appraisal system. A need for a new performance appraisal system was established and it was therefore decided to develop a new performance appraisal system for the truck drivers in the Transport Department of the organization. A literature review indicated that the most suitable appraisal system for this specific situation was the behavioural observation scale (BOS). A job analysis of the truck driver's job was done, critical incidents were collected and behavioural dimensions were defined. This resulted in the final behavioural observation scale consisting of 37 behavioural items. The reliability of the appraisal instrument determined by Cronbach's coefficient alpha, was .98. An effort was made to achieve both content and face validity for the BOS. To determine whether the performance of the truck drivers did increase as a result of the new appraisal system, an experimental and control group were defined. Their performance was appraised three times at three-monthly intervals with the BOS. The experimental group received feedback on its performance, which included setting goals to be achieved by the next appraisal. The drivers in the control group were unaware of the fact that their performance was being appraised. To determine whether the performance of the drivers in the experimental group had improved, planned comparisons were done. There was a substantial improvement in performance amongst the experimental group, whilst the control group's performance remained unchanged. It was concluded that the intervention was successful. The use of a behavioural approach to performance linked with adequate feedback made a major contribution to the efficiency of these truck drivers as well as to their interaction with their supervisors, the transport foremen