[LINK] Aussie Higher Ed

[Glen Turner]

Folks,

Please don't use a league table to select a university.

These tables aren't compiled the hard way -- interviewing students and asking about the quality of their university experience, and then reinterviewing them five years later and asking about the relevance and quality of their education.

They're just counts of research citations. That might be marginally related to your experience as a graduate student, but even there it's a double edged number since it might merely reflect that graduate students will be pushed to publish. For example, I know that one of the top-ranked schools in the table requires graduate students to have an accepted paper after one year. If you think about the publication process, that means that they've done about a month of their graduate study before they wrote that paper. That paper is unlikely to advancing the state of the science.

One good thing about this particular ranking is that is lists disciplines. That's important, as there are many cases where the top-ranked school for a particular discipline doesn't appear at all in the top 500 universities. Often because that one discipline is all the school does (eg: Johns Hopkins). However, if you want to constrain yourself to a particular Australian capital city (as many of our students do for cost-of-living reasons) then the by-city results appear to me to be somewhat random.

Let's not forget that people's passion isn't usually as wide as even a discipline. So these tables can very much understate the value of particular world-leading courses. For example, aboriginal anthropology at Flinders.

Finally, these tables say nothing at all about your experience as an undergrad student. How bad is course enrolment and other encounters with university administration? If you have to punt a due date, how understanding are the instructors? Are the instructors engaging? Do you as a undergrad even get access to the researchers who put the university near the top of the league table (eg, are undergrads invited to research seminars)? What is the anticipated career path for their students (ie, does it match your plans)? What if you just can't grasp a concept, how much help do you get?

-glen