Consultant for USM?

It was recently reported that USM has engaged a consultant to report the reasons why USM dropped out of the THES rankings of the top 200 universities in the world. Tony has already blogged about it here and I want to add my two cents.

Is the hiring of this consultant really needed? For the sake of argument, let's give USM the benefit of the doubt. It might be a useful exercise for USM to confirm that the reason why they dropped out of the top 200 was because its international faculty and student scores were miscoded in the 2004 rankings. While Tony and I strongly believe that QuacquarelliSymonds Limited made the mistake of coding Indian and Chinese students and lecturers as foreign, we have not confirmed this. If USM gets this news from the horses' mouth, hopefully the VC would be more careful in the future in 'using' these rankings for self-promotion. And he might want to pass on the information to his fellow VC in KL. (We're assuming that the consultant hired by USM is indeed QS Limited)

But the report should go beyond this. If its worth the money that USM is paying them (and it cannot be peanuts), then QS should give USM a lengthy description and explanation of their methodology and hopefully the VC and his staff would come out of it a little bit wiser. For example, I would be interested to find out how the employer survey was conducted. Did QS send questionaires to local companies, regional companies or global MNCs? Did QS asked these companies to rank the quality of graduates coming out from universities only in their country or was the net spread wider? It wouldn't surprise me that surveys of this sort, which always has a cost constraint element, fail to have a sound enough or comprehensive enough methodology for some sections especially on a new score like employer rating.

The more important question is this - what is USM going to do with the consultant's report? It is very unlikely that it will make its content publicly available. More likely, USM will select and pick parts of the report that it can 'use' to its advantage. And if the USM VC is really smart, he'll be able to 'use' the report to try to 'boost' the ranking of USM for the following year. He can try to provide internal 'data' to QS Limited to be used in next year's ranking or he can try to find out who QS sends the peer review forms to so that he can try to 'influence' some of them.

Therein lies the danger. The report will be used not to introduce real and substantive change in university policies but to cover up the real and substantial shortcomings in the teaching and research standards in our local universities. I was hoping that perhaps, this report can be used by the VC to highlight the shortcomings within the system and in response, introduce real reform on the pretext of needing to be internationally competitive. But this is likely to be false hope.