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African varsities score poorly in world rankings
A past graduation ceremony at Africa University, Nairobi. Kenyan universities again fared dismally in the seventh world universities ranking released on Thursday by the British Times Higher Education.
By BENJAMIN MUINDI,
Posted Thursday, September 16 2010 at 21:09
Kenyan universities again fared dismally in the seventh world universities ranking released on Thursday by the British Times Higher Education.
Africa only produced the University of Cape Town in South Africa and Alexandria in Egypt in the top 200 slots globally.
Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and Princeton all American scooped the top five slots.
Others in the top 10 were Cambridge, Oxford, University of California Berkeley, Imperial College of London and Yale.
Five elements of higher education were considered, including the volume of research undertaken and how the institutions were relevant to the job market.
Others were the number of students admitted against that of academic staff, diversity on campus a sign of how global an institution is in its outlook, and the impact of the research conducted.
The ability of a university to attract the very best staff from across the world is key to global success, said lead researcher Ann Mroz.
Essentially a form of staff-to-student ratio is employed as a proxy for teaching quality, she added.
The teaching category also examined the ratio of PhDs to bachelors degrees awarded by each institution.
Institutions with a high density of research students are more knowledge-intensive, and the presence of an active post-graduate community is a marker of a research-led teaching environment.
On research, the survey said the number of papers published in academic journals were considered as it gave an idea of an institutions ability to get papers published in quality peer-reviewed journals.
Institutions that published fewer than 50 papers a year have been excluded from the ranking, the survey said, signifying the reason why Kenyan universities, and the region in general, may have scored so badly. African universities face enormous challenges, argued Prof Goolam Mohamedbhai, former secretary general of the Association of African Universities.
Africa inherited an education system that was a carbon copy of its colonisers. It is now expected to compete on a completely non-level playing field. Not only is this unfair, it is also inappropriate.
South Africa is the exception, the continents only higher education bright spot.
The University of Cape Town was ranked 107th among the global top 200 institutions.
But it is not all gloom in Kenya as another ranking webometrics that judges according to the information available on the Internet for each university placed four local universities among the top 100 in the continent.
The universities are Nairobi (24), Strathmore (32), Moi (74) and Kenyatta (80). The objective of the ranking is to promote web publication by universities.
But Prof Mohamedbhai argues that African universities do not need to be ranked in the global setting.
Their mission should be to produce the appropriate manpower required for Africas development, to undertake research that is of direct relevance to Africa.
He adds: This may not be acceptable for publication in the best scientific journals and to reach out to assist the communities in the many challenges they are facing, especially poverty reduction.
Daily Nation:*- News*|African varsities score poorly in world rankings