Article published by José Alberto León Alonso in El Día on 03/22/15.
This week the ISSUE Rankings (Synthetic Indicators of the Spanish University System) were published. These rankings aim to generate classifications of Spanish universities based on extensive sets of information, which cover the three main dimensions of their activities: teaching, research and innovation, and technological development. The ISSUE methodology is rigorous and is aligned with the recommendations of recent international reports on this subject. The rankings have been built from a set of variables that take into account the different missions of the universities: teaching, research, technological development and innovation.
The first is measured by the rate of doctoral professors per hundred students, the budget per student, the proportion of doctors over the total number of professors; student success, evaluation and dropout rates; the ability to attract students measured by the percentage of graduate students and cut-off marks; and internationalization, measured by the percentage of foreign students out of the total, the percentage of students in exchange programs and the percentage of students enrolled in programs in non-official languages. In my opinion, it is the least reliable indicator of all, since in some cases it uses indirect indicators of the quality of teaching with debatable impact on it. Does a high number of doctoral professors imply better teaching or better research? Because to be a doctor it is the research carried out that counts, not the teaching. Does a high dropout rate imply poor teaching, a low level of student entry or a high level of demand? What has been said, debatable. In my opinion, other indicators such as the percentage of employed and underemployed graduates one year after graduating, their salary five years after graduating, or the number of alumni with national or international academic awards would offer a better perspective of the teaching quality of an institution. Of course, they are more difficult indicators to obtain and measure.
Research is more reliable because it measures the resources allocated for this purpose, the production carried out both in quantity (citable documents, six-year terms and theses read) and quality (impact, relevant publications and citations per document), as well as internationalization in research.
Finally, technological development and innovation measures the return to society in the form of R&D&I. To do this, it uses data on income from licenses, consulting contracts and continuing training; number of patents, commercialized patents, triadic (international) patents and income from international contracts. It also seems like a pretty solid indicator.
A general conclusion from the results of the project developed is that a notable diversity is confirmed between Spanish public and private universities in terms of their capacity to generate results and their productivity. In this diversity, their differences in teaching and research specialization and their ability to excel in specific areas or degrees are also very noticeable. In many cases there are examples of excellence in specific degrees in institutions that are not outstanding in general terms; and vice versa, the results in certain degrees are below the average quality level of a university.
The result of the research and the incorporation of private universities into it allows us to verify their high specialization in their teaching dimension and their notable performance in that activity: their average teaching productivity exceeds the Spanish average by 10%. However, to properly evaluate this result, it is important to keep in mind that not all private universities have participated in the study, and that the incorporated private universities have better indicators than the majority of those not included. The teaching specialization of private universities has its counterpart in their worse relative position with respect to the public system in research productivity: on average it is 40% lower than that of the university system. Public universities also present higher levels of productivity in innovation and technological development activities than private universities, with these being 20% below those.
The differences in productivity of universities are also seen at the regional level. Catalonia, Navarra, Cantabria, Valencian Community, Madrid and the Balearic Islands are the communities that have the most productive university systems, with average levels higher than those of Spain as a whole.
Regarding the Canarian universities, in the general ranking by productivity both La Laguna and Las Palmas are 20% below the average. If Spanish universities are not exactly the best at a European or global level, that means an unmitigated failure. Our universities are among the worst in Spain (they rate a “3” if their “grade” is translated into school results), which, in turn, are mediocre in any ranking that is consulted. Disaggregating the indicators, in teaching the Canarian universities are 10% below the average, although in my opinion this indicator is the least solid of all. In research, La Laguna passes and qualifies at the national average, while Las Palmas fails again and its results are 20% below the average. But where both perform the worst is in the measure of productivity due to innovation and technological development. In this section the result is very poor. Both rate 60% below the average, and there are only two worse universities in Spain. If we take into account that Canarian R&D&I rests fundamentally and almost exclusively on our universities, we already know why our archipelago tops all Spanish statistics on innovation and technological development. This way we will never progress in the society of innovation and knowledge.
