Competitive Education System in The Philippines
Filipinos believe that Education is the key to success. We value much education because we want to be progressive to help ourselves, our family and our country. Many students are packing up their lives and preparing to move out to attend university. Depending where you want to go with your life, students are currently counting the pennies before their student loans come into make sure they can afford higher education. Going to college can strip you off your money so better get dedicated in studying. Finishing a college degree is expensive so we should choose the best university that suits us and our abilities. Because of the practice of Education-Based Meritocracy and Credentialism in the Philippines, Filipino students aim to finish studies on prestigious schools so that it will be easier for them to get hired by employers. Here‘s a glimpse of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018 that shows the top ranking of universities in the year 2018 from around the world.
2. University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
3. California Institute of Technology, United States
4.Stanford University, United States
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
If we would observe what universities and countries are included in the top ranks, we can say that high ranking schools are from rich countries. Because of wealth,these rich countries can provide universities more than enough of what they need. They are granted good facilities which ease the way of learning of the students. These gives them a comfortable environment when studying.
On the other hand, Philippines as a third-world country works hard for its national universities earn higher ranks in the world rankings. There are almost 2,300 higher education institutions in the Philippines, the majority of which are private. Many universities are affiliated with Roman Catholicism, which reflects the country’s colonial past. Here are the world rankings of some Philippine universities.
Ranked joint 367th in the World University Rankings 2018 and 75th in Asia, the University of the Philippines (UP) is actually a public university system made up of seven constituent universities and a total of 15 campuses across the country. Its flagship campus and administrational seat is the University of the Philippines Diliman, which is located in Quezon City and teaches around 22,765 students. UP was founded by the American colonial government in 1908 and has since gained a strong reputation, consistently referred to as the top university in the country. It currently ranks among the top 150 universities in the world for English language and literature and in the top 250 faculties around the world for social sciences and management.
2. Ateneo de Manila University
The Ateneo de Manila University is a private research university which ranks 551–600 in the world rankings and joint 95th in Asia. Its four campuses are located in the Metro Manila region, with the main campus in Quezon City. Founded in 1859 by the Society of Jesus, it’s one of the country’s oldest universities. Ateneo ranks as one of the top 200 universities in the world for English language and literature, and its arts and humanities faculty is ranked as one of the top 350 in the world.
Next among the top universities in the Philippines, De La Salle University (DLSU) is ranked 701–750 in the world and 134th in the latest edition of the QS Asia University Rankings. DLSU is a private, Roman Catholic research university which was founded in 1911 by the Brothers of the Christian Schools and was originally a boys’ school. It teaches around 18,500 students and has a main campus in the heart of Manila. Like the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of the Philippines, DLSU ranks within the top 200 universities in the world for English language and literature.
The University of Santo Tomas (UST, also known as Pontifical and Royal University of Santo Tomas, or the Catholic University of the Philippines) is ranked 701+ in the world rankings and 157th in Asia. UST is a private, Roman Catholic research university located in Manila, and has the distinction of being the oldest university in both the Philippines and Asia, having been established in 1611. It’s also one of the largest Catholic universities in the world, with over 42,000 students. UST has been rated four out of five stars in the QS Stars benchmarking system, and was recognized as having the most accredited programs in the country in 2013.
Philippine universities’ standing in the rankings start from 370+. This is not so bad but compared to the other high ranking universities, it is possible that we can lift our rank higher. To understand it better, here is the criteria for ranking universities worldwide.
World University Rankings 2018 Methodology
With more data from more institutions, our 2018 rankings give a bigger picture than ever before. Here we explain the methodology that underpins the tables.
Source: Koivo
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings are the only global performance tables that judge research-intensive universities across all their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. We use 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons, trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.
The performance indicators are grouped into five areas:
- Teaching (the learning environment)
- Research (volume, income and reputation)
- Citations (research influence);
- International outlook (staff, students and research)
- Industry income (knowledge transfer)
Independent audit
The calculation of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings has been subject to independent audit by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
Exclusions
Universities are excluded from the World University Rankings if they do not teach undergraduates or if their research output amounted to fewer than 1,000 articles between 2012 and 2016 (and a minimum of 150 a year). Universities can also be excluded if 80 per cent or more of their activity is exclusively in one of our 11 subject areas.
Data collection
Institutions provide and sign off their institutional data for use in the rankings. On the rare occasions when a particular data point is not provided, we enter a conservative estimate for the affected metric. By doing this, we avoid penalising an institution too harshly with a “zero” value for data that it overlooks or does not provide, but we do not reward it for withholding them.
Getting to the final result
Moving from a series of specific data points to indicators, and finally to a total score for an institution, requires us to match values that represent fundamentally different data. To do this we use a standardisation approach for each indicator, and then combine the indicators in the proportions indicated to the right.
The standardisation approach we use is based on the distribution of data within a particular indicator, where we calculate a cumulative probability function, and evaluate where a particular institution’s indicator sits within that function. A cumulative probability score of X in essence tells us that a university with random values for that indicator would fall below that score X per cent of the time.
For all indicators except for the Academic Reputation Survey we calculate the cumulative distribution function of a normal distribution using Z-scoring. For the data in the Academic Reputation Survey we use the cumulative distribution function of an exponential distribution in our calculations.
- Reputation survey: 15%
- Staff-to-student ratio: 4.5%
- Doctorate-to-bachelor’s ratio: 2.25%
- Doctorates-awarded- to-academic-staff ratio: 6%
- Institutional income: 2.25%
- Reputation survey: 18%
- Research income: 6%
- Research productivity: 6%
Our research influence indicator looks at universities’ role in spreading new knowledge and ideas.
The citations help to show us how much each university is contributing to the sum of human knowledge: they tell us whose research has stood out, has been picked up and built on by other scholars and, most importantly, has been shared around the global scholarly community to expand the boundaries of our understanding, irrespective of discipline.
- International-to-domestic-student ratio: 2.5%
- International-to-domestic-staff ratio: 2.5%
- International collaboration: 2.5%
In the third international indicator, we calculate the proportion of a university’s total research journal publications that have at least one international co-author and reward higher volumes. This indicator is normalised to account for a university’s subject mix and uses the same five-year window as the “Citations: research influence” category.
A university’s ability to help industry with innovations, inventions and consultancy has become a core mission of the contemporary global academy. This category seeks to capture such knowledge-transfer activity by looking at how much research income an institution earns from industry (adjusted for PPP), scaled against the number of academic staff it employs.
The category suggests the extent to which businesses are willing to pay for research and a university’s ability to attract funding in the commercial marketplace — useful indicators of institutional quality.
Now that we learned the criteria, what should we do to improve our rankings?
Here are suggestions written by Amanda Goodall in the 18 February 2010 issue of Times Higher Education and drawn from evidence, experience and anecdote.
The average academic or administrator in a university is completely unaware of your university’s strategy document. If they have seen it, they think it is waffle. So if your strategy is supposed to change behaviour, you have to provide new incentives for your staff, and monitor performance from the top.
If raising or maintaining research quality is part of the strategy, hire the best scholars you can and put them in positions of power — pro vice-chancellor for research, dean or head of department.
The best universities and business schools have been shown to hire the best scholars as their heads. The probable reason is that other great scholars will choose to be there because the culture and values of the place will likely be more amenable under a fellow researcher.
The vice-chancellor is the standard bearer, and, therefore, he or she should set the quality threshold in the institution. If you want good hires to be made, then control the process yourself.
Again, the vice-chancellor should create and drive this process, and be available to talk to potential hires personally, as should the pro vice-chancellor for research and the head of the recruiting department.
As mentioned earlier, the vice-chancellor should sit on major hiring panels or, at the very least, review the candidates. If the university head isn’t able or prepared to control the people who join and leave, then the game is lost.
It is inconceivable that a successful commercial organisation would not be fully aware of its most talented staff. Find out who they are in your university — researchers, teachers and administrators.
When you reward your teachers, make it generous. Try to let people know that their contribution has not gone unnoticed.
Attracting top staff is a gruelling and increasingly expensive process — be sure to hang on to those you have!
These are few ways we can do to raise our rank in the world ranking. But why do we have to rank high? We improve our university ranking to achieve university competitiveness. Being competitive means that the school is good and it can we can pace with other universities. High ranking universities also attracts more people to study in their prestigious school. The standards also gets higher, encouraging the students and employees to do better. If the rank of our universities here in the Philippines is high, then students might want to study here in our country instead of going abroad. Not only we produce brilliant individuals, we also gain knowledge from these people of our own race rather than other people outside our country.
