The London School of Economics has been placed 67th out of 200 in the ‘World University Rankings 2009’, a ranking conducted by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) magazine.
While the LSE has dropped one place from 66 overall in 2008, it was ranked 5th for social sciences in a separate league table of specialist universities. This was also a drop from 4th place last year. Harvard University topped both tables.
Unlike previous years, the top ten list was not just dominated by American universities. University of Cambridge followed behind Harvard, whilst University College London (UCL) and Imperial College London (Imperial) were respectively ranked 4th and 5th, pushing University of Oxford to equal 5th place.
The table is compiled based on data from six categories: academic peer review (40 per cent), employer review (10 per cent), faculty student ratio (20 per cent), citations per faculty (20 per cent), international faculty (5 per cent) and international students (5 per cent).
The LSE scored 29 out of 100 for citations per faculty and 53 out of 100 for faculty student ratio, which is explained to be a “commitment to teaching”. It was comparatively lower to those of UCL and Imperial who both scored 100 for faculty student ratio.
LSE Pro Director for Research and External Relations Professor Sarah Worthington believed the citations per faculty category to be “dramatically underepresentative of any peer assessment of our work”. Furthermore, she explained that the faculty student ratio employed publicly available data, which does not accurately reflect the teaching quality.
“The World University Rankings were set up to measure general universities, not specialist colleges and schools, and that is what they do The LSE has long complained that its social science specialism prevents it from featuring as highly in our rankings as it should. It is, in fact, the only H1 institution in our top 200, showing that it is the best medium-sized, research-intensive specialist university in the world,” Worthington continues.
LSE has produced a report detailing problems with the rankings, which states that, “The company producing the university rankings for the THE is QS. For a variety of reasons it has been difficult to precisely replicate the QS methodology as QS do not make it transparent.”
“The THES table has been largely discredited because of its in-built prejudice against social science institutions. League tables in general offer little utility, and this table in particular does little to reflect the reality of study at any of the institutions listed. The most important rankings to students will continue to be specific measures of quality of education and student satisfaction,” stated LSESU General Secretary Aled Dilwyn Fisher.
Third year Social Anthropology student Alice Pelton said, “It’s a huge shame, seeing as you start to think about what University you want to go to about 4 or 5 years before you graduate with its name on your degree. That’s clearly enough time for its reputation to fall into disrepair.”
[...] London School of Economics fell in the World Rankings that the Times of London does every year. Boo [...]