Looking at the numbers
The new QS university rankings are out, and there’s a story in the Herald. It starts
Staff cuts despite growing student numbers have dragged most New Zealand universities down in the latest world rankings.
The biggest six of the country’s eight universities have all tumbled in the London-based QS rankings, which are regarded as the most important for attracting international students.
“Tumbled” is an exaggeration — for example, the University of Auckland has ‘tumbled’ from 82nd to 85th in the rankings. But the message that it’s staff numbers does seem to be backed up with a quote from QS
“The increase in enrolments – and the decrease in faculty numbers – reported by the country’s universities sees all eight receive a lower score for faculty/student ratio,”
QS don’t make it easy to find older numbers, but an archive of their webpage in March last year said there were 29,930 students and 2025 academic staff, and a ranking of 81. The current figures are 29,641 students (ie, fewer) and 2,047 academic staff (ie, more), for an improvement in staff:student ratio from 14.8 to 14.5.
That’s over a two year period, but last year, the story at Stuff said
New Zealand universities performed well in research outputs – Waikato ranked 133rd, Otago 174th and Canterbury 178th – but showed “uniformly deteriorating” faculty to student ratios. The exception was Lincoln University, which featured among the top 200 universities globally in that measure.
So, cumulatively over this two year period the staff:student ratio at UoA (as measured by QS) improved, but the reporting said it worsened in both years.
My guess as to what’s going on is that these rankings are rankings. What they mean by “lower score for faculty/student ratio” isn’t that the ratio got worse here, but that it got better here by less than it did at some competing universities.
The other strange thing in the Herald story is this:
The worsening staff/student ratio in NZ universities was entirely due to cuts of 203 academics at Massey and 74 at Lincoln.
It could be true that these are the only NZ universities with a worsening staff/student ratio — the other universities could be seeing the same sort of change that UoA did — but if it is, the apparent contradiction with the lead should have been noticed.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Such slapdash reporting, and on a front-page lead! I think it fits the Herald narrative of bad news at UoA with staff shrinkage in the Arts.
6 years ago
Another number thats of interest is 3%
“In a wide ranging interview with Massey University’s student magazine, Massive, [VC]Thomas would not rule out job cuts a Massey looks to meet a Tertiary Education Commission requirement that universities maintain a 3 per cent surplus.”
6 years ago