Sixix: Analysis re ....What do you do for a living?

Sagamite:

Obviously .................... analysis.

http://www.jarushub.com/category/columnists/sagamite-columnists/

Sagamite:

Obviously .................... analysis.

http://www.jarushub.com/category/columnists/sagamite-columnists/

slzft:
To clarify my previous post, I'm not sure why London Met is listed as one of the better third division universities, given that it is generally one of the lowest universities in most league tables, has one of the lowest average entry tariffs, and has been involved in a large number of scandals.

[size=18pt]Proposed merger between IOE and UCL[/size]

The Councils of the Institute of Education and UCL have given approval for negotiations to continue on the proposed merger between the two universities.

Subject to these more detailed negotiations and a process of due diligence, it is planned that the two councils be asked to give final approval to the merger at their meetings in October. The formal merger could then be completed in December.

UCL President and Provost, Professor Michael Arthur said: "The driver behind this proposal is academic, prompted by the sense that the world-leading research undertaken by the IOE was highly complementary to many areas of work undertaken by UCL. All the evidence to date has confirmed this to be the case.

"There is genuine excitement within both institutions as we believe this planned merger will deliver significant advances in the field of social science and education, whilst further advancing the work both universities undertake to develop education across London."

Welcoming the decision, IOE Director Professor Chris Husbands said: "The proposed merger is potentially transformational in terms of the long-term security and growth of the Institute and I am pleased that this has been recognised by the members of the IOE Council.

"I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all those staff, students, alumni and other key stakeholders who contributed to the consultation process."

Tomjazzy2:
Please OP which uni would you guys recommentd for some one who wants to enroll for his masters program, with emphasis on a relatively easy entry requirment for international students, and the finance? I'm currrently pursuing a post graduate scholarship with a view to doing an MBA in any reputable uni in the UK. If i can secure the admission before mid next year, better. Btw I have a B.Sc. in Pol sci.

Jabski:
Sagamite, good job you are doing here. I would love to seek your opinion as I intend going for an MBA in the UK or Canada this sept 2015.
I need work experience of about a year in the UK while doing the course to sharpen my business language mentality. I chose to apply for Sheffield Hallam University and Portmouth University in acheving this goal as they offer 2yrs MBA programme with the 2nd year in a work placement. Are they good schools? whats your take on this and are there better options in accomplishing what im after?
Thanks.

Sagamite:
The Quality tables.

The usefulness of quality tables is that the size of the university does not matter at all. It just looks at what proportion of the staff work submitted is of high quality.

That said, it does not take into consideration the proportion of overall staff submitted. The thing there is that participation in the assessment is not compulsory. Universities can choose which staff they want to put forward, so to manage their reputation, some of them game it and only submit a lower proportion of their overall staff.

Quality - Percentage of work that is World leading (i.e. 4*)
1. LSE 49.9%
2. Oxford 48.1%
3. Cambridge 46.8%
4. Imperial 46.4%
5. UCL 42.6 %
6. Cardiff 40.5%
7. KCL 40.2%
8. Edinburgh 37.6%
9. Warwick 36.9%
10. Bristol 36.0%

The top 5 UK universities shine through on this table. World leading shows the universities that can compete at a global stage. Manchester was in 11th position with 35.3%


Quality - Percentage of work that is World leading and Internationally excellent (i.e. 4* and 3*)
1. Imperial 90.6%
2. Cardiff 87.4%
3. LSE 87.3%
4. Oxford 87.2% draw
4. Cambridge 87.2% draw
6. Bath 86.9%
7. Warwick 86.6%
8. QMW 86.0%
9. Sheffield 85.5%
10. KCL 85.2%

UCL was not even in the Top 20. It was in position number 21 with 82.1%. Edinburgh was 12th with 82.5%.


The Times Higher Education did a Quality table which takes into consideration the volume of staff submitted (not the proportion of staff) mixed with the percentage of 3* and 4* to get a GPA.

Quality - THE's Top 10 by GPA
1. Imperial
2. LSE
3. Oxford
4. Cambridge
5. Cardiff
6. KCL
7. UCL draw
7. Warwick draw
9. Edinburgh
10. Bristol

When looking at the quality tables (which is independent of size) we can see that Cardiff has been the surprise package with a wonderful performance. Manchester does not do as well when its size is not considered, as it does when it is considered (like in the Research Power tables). Nottingham too. Warwick comes into the Top 10 for quality.

When size is not considered, and only quality is, the smaller universities like LSE and Imperial then shine.

berildan:


Guess it is then logical to conclude that St. Andrews,Glasgow, Birmingham and Durham have no business in top 10 rankings this year?? Unbelievable .

[size=18pt]London overtaking Oxbridge domination[/size]

London universities are breaking up the traditional dominance of Oxford and Cambridge, according to official figures on research excellence.

The London School of Economics has the highest proportion of "world-leading" research among UK universities.

In rankings based on research grades, University College London has overtaken Cambridge for the first time.

The research ratings will determine the allocation of £2bn public funding for universities each year.

The findings are based on a massive funding-council project evaluating the quality of research at universities across the UK, with the last similar exercise having been published in 2008. The Research Excellence Framework measured the quality of research from more than 52,000 academics in 154 universities.

It revealed the rise of London institutions, catching up and overtaking Oxford and Cambridge and the decline of big universities in the north of England.

[size=14pt]'Taking a hammering'[/size]
William Cullerne Bown, of Research Fortnight, which analyses research and funding, said "London looks unstoppable" and universities in the capital "could now eclipse Oxbridge".

He said this process would be further accelerated by major plans for expansion at University College London (UCL) and Imperial College.

"The biggest losers are Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds. The North is taking a hammering," he added. "The government is indeed rebalancing the economy - but towards London instead of away from it. Outside the elite in the South East, almost all the other leading universities in England now face relentless decline."

The growing concentration of higher education resources and excellence in London follows a wider trend in education, which has seen schools in the capital outstripping the rest of England.

International rankings have also shown UCL and Imperial matching or overtaking the traditional Oxbridge duopoly.

The figures from the higher education funding councils for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland show that 30% of the research submitted was "world leading" and 46% was "internationally excellent".

[size=14pt]'Global city'[/size]
Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said that unless there was an increase in overall budgets, funding would increasingly be concentrated in fewer places, such as the so-called "golden triangle" of London, Oxford and Cambridge.

He warned that this "could have some dramatic regional effects" for other universities.

UCL's provost, Michael Arthur, said: "There is clearly a London factor at work in today's outcome. This is a global city, which makes attracting world class researchers that bit easier for our universities. Our popularity with students worldwide has also helped to drive funding and expansion."

There are no official rankings produced by the funding councils, but Research Fortnight has produced its own league table showing how the "market share" of research funding could be distributed - weighted to take into account that bigger research teams are likely to get more.

This puts the University of Oxford in top place, but University College London has now taken second place ahead of Cambridge.

The vice-chancellor of Oxford, Andrew Hamilton, welcomed the recognition for research across a "huge range of subjects and of the real impact they have on health, prosperity, policy formation and culture around the world".

Imperial College in London is also able to claim to have the best results from the evaluation, with the highest combined level of "world leading" and "internationally excellent" research - with 91% of its submitted work falling into one of these top categories.

There are also ratings by individual subject areas. These are based on the work submitted for evaluation - so some universities are assessed on hundreds of academics while others are measured on the work of a handful.

Madeleine Atkins, chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, said the exercise showed that "UK universities are in the top rank of an internationally-competitive research community".

Universities Minister Greg Clark said: "Britain's outstanding reputation in research is founded on excellence.

"A rigorous and unflinching review by fellow experts assures that excellence, this is why the REF is such a crucial driver of quality."

[size=18pt]14 UK Universities Think They're in the Research Excellence Framework Top 10[/size]

By 12pm on results day, 14 universities had tweeted that they were in the top 10 for the Research Excellence Framework. Now one would hope that the REF - a new system for assessing the quality of research in UK universities, and one that took six years and £60 million to complete - would not make such a basic numerical error; and so it proves just how far you can manipulate statistics.

The REF assessed research in 36 subject areas: looking at quality, the infrastructure that supported it, and its impact on the outside world. However, the breadth of its success criteria (quality of top-graded research, number of researchers doing top-graded research, impact of that top-graded research etc) meant that numbers could be easily squeezed and stretched until they gave the most favourable statistics.

Another problem, says Adam Crawford, pro-dean for research and innovation in the faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law at the University of Leeds, was that universities heard about their own results before realizing that the share of top-rated research had gone up across the board, from 14% in the last exercise to 22% in this one. Thus despite their willingness to self-congratulate, this success was definitely a shared one.

Yet perhaps there are other reasons why universities were keen to publicize their achievements. Many universities have worked hard to boost their research profile - for example, City University had recruited about 140 researchers between 2011 and 2013 - in order to help strengthen their international reputation. Indeed, the REF showed that City University had doubled their number of staff producing world-leading research in five years to 40%, and this has opened up the possibility to join with London University. City’s vice-chancellor, Paul Curran, said that they are having ‘informal discussions about the possibility of making an application’, as they are now in a ‘strong enough position from a research point of view’.

More than that though, a good REF performance could guarantee you a larger slice of the research funding pie of nearly £2 billion, which will be allocated by UK funding councils in March. However, as that pot gets smaller, universities begin to rely more on other sources of funding such as European grants and student fees, again emphasizing the importance of an international presence. Crawford says that previously ‘it was primarily about carving up the cake of public funding’, but now institutions must prioritize their ‘reputational benchmarks.’ Cardiff University recognized the potential benefits of changing strategy: it submitted a lower proportion of its research staff for this exercise, which helped it leap from 22nd to 5th place in terms of research quality.

However, humanities and social sciences are still particularly vulnerable to budget cuts after a better-than-expected performance by the medical and life sciences. Mike Kelly, head of Modern Languages at the University of Southampton, warns that universities will be ‘looking at their portfolio of subjects over the next few years’ for some ‘shakedowns’ - if subjects ‘are struggling for students’ or ‘their research isn’t well assessed’ some universities may ‘say time to call it a day.’

This will come as worrying news to institutions for modern languages, who have been recently waving au revoir to student demand. Managers are more likely to concentrate resources on strong areas, rather than on trying to bring up weaker ones, and so departments must try and keep up with one and another. Another area to focus on will be ‘impact stories’, as the impact of work could join teaching, research and administration as a fourth essential element of an academic post.

The consequences of the REF therefore seem to be as complicated as the criteria used to discover them in the first place. However, many argue that research funding must keep up with that of the other major industrialized economies - whatever investment, divestment and restructuring occurs over the next few months. In other words, we must continue to focus on value creation rather than value separation, both financially and intellectually.

moshoodn:
Hi Sagamite,

How are you doing?

Could you kindly assist with scholarship info into one of those schools for Msc. (Bioinformtics, Biophysics or ny related)

I'll apprecite a prompt response. I've googled and still googling but most infos are mumbo jumbo...

Regards,

Moshood. A. A

Sagamite:


Hey, hi.

Why do you say they are mumbo jumbo? What did you not understand in the information provided?

moshoodn:


Thank you.

Most do not give detailed info until midway into the process.
Besides, I'll need scholarships info that are specific to the field of biochemistry.

Thanks.

Sagamite:


What kind of detailed info are you seeking?