Nederland academische wereldtop
De jongste THE-ranking onderstreept dit nog eens. Het is geennieuw fenomeen, hoewel andere media dit lijken te denken. Ons landstijgt op de ‘lijstjes’ van kennisnaties door een uitstekendeperformance in het onderzoek en ook het hoger ondewijs van HBO enWO behoort -mede daardoor- tot de beste ter wereld.
Wijs beleid
Alle Nederlandse universiteiten slagen er in op de THE-lijst testijgen. Dat steekt af tegen bijvoorbeeld de daling die de Brittennu al bezorgd cnstateren voor hun midlevel WO, de instellingenonder de groep van Oxbridge, de LSE en dergelijke.
Dit is te danken aan de inzet en creativiteit van de mensen inHO en R&D en aan een wijs en vooruitziend beleid. Zo wijstFrans van Vught in zijn grote
Saluut en geduld
Dat is niet alleen een bijzonder saluut aan de toenmaligeminister in Lubbers-I en II, maar ook een compliment aan zijnopvolgers: Braks, Ritzen, Hermans, Van der Hoeven, Plasterk en VanBijsterveldt en hun staatssecretarissen HO-beleid: In’t Veld,Cohen, Nijs, Rutte en Zijlstra. Zij hebben de wijsheid in achtgenomen en ook het strategisch geduld opgebracht, om datvooruitziend beleid niet kortademig en al te ego-gedreven weer omte gooien of af te schaffen. Nederland en het talent dat wij in onsland academisch vormen mag hen daar wel erkentelijk voor zijn.
Van Vught analyseerde in zijn betoog de verschillende rankingsen het meta-beeld dat hier uit naar voren komt. Het nieuwsteTHE-lijstje bevestigt dit nog eens: een hoogvlakte van kennis enkwaliteit, zoals die in de wereld elders zijn pendant nog moetvinden.
U leest hier de betreffende passages uit Van Vughtsrede:
‘Tour de HE’
Nowadays league tables are all around us. In sports, forinstance, there are seasonal league tables for baseball andfootball and lists ranking the number of times cyclists have wonthe Tour de France. Since the early part of the 20th century wealso have league tables in higher education and research, globaluniversity rankings usually showing Harvard as the best universityin the world, followed by the names of a number of other globallyrenowned universities.
But while sporting league tables are wellaccepted, universityrankings remain hotly debated — and rightly so. Aside from thewellknown methodological criticism, there is an importantepistemological argument why university rankings should beapproached with extreme caution. Let me briefly outline thisargument.
Each and every observation of reality is theory-driven: everyobservation of a slice of reality is driven by the conceptualframework being used. In the scientific debate, this statement hasbeen accepted at least since Popper’s work (Popper, 1980): heshowed abundantly that theories are ‘searchlights’ that cannotencompass all of reality, but necessarily highlight only certainaspects of it. He also showed that scientific knowledge is ‘commonsense writ large’.
Alles hoog tussen de besten
Let us see what the most prominent global rankings have to sayabout the performance of Dutch universities in recentyears.According to the Academic Ranking of World Universities(ARWU), also known as the ‘Shanghai Ranking’, the best universityin the Netherlands is Utrecht, which according to the ShanghaiRanking scored a position of around 50th out of the 500 bestuniversities in the world. Leiden University comes second (around70th).
Another four Dutch universities are in the top 150 (Universityof Amsterdam, the Free University Amsterdam, University ofGroningen and Radboud University Nijmegen). Maastricht Universityclimbed to within the top 300 universities worldwide in 2011.
The second ranking is the Times Higher Education (THE) ranking.According to this, the University of Amsterdam was the best Dutchuniversity from 2007 to 2009 (ranking around 50th among the top 200worldwide), but after 2010 (when the THE ranking changed itsmethodology) first Eindhoven University of Technology and thenlater (in 2011) Utrecht University became the Dutch ‘number 1’.
Maastricht University is now 197th in the THE’s ranking of thetop 200 universities (just before the University of Twente in 200thposition). However, as I am sure Maastricht was happy to report,also according to the THE Ranking, they were in the top 20 of theyoung universities worldwide.
Een hoogvlakte van allure
The Dutch university system may be judged as one of the best inthe world. All Dutch universities (with the exception of the OpenUniversity which has a special position in the system) are to befound among the world’s top 500 universities. If we accept for themoment the choices of indicators and methods used by the Shanghaiand THE rankings, we can, based on their data, make a ranking ofthe ‘best’ university systems in the world.
The Dutch university system indeed is an academic mountainplateau with some smaller peaks that, however, do not reach theheights of the giant summits of some universities in the US andUK.
A recent international report by Universitas 21 on theperformance of higher education systems worldwide places the Dutchsystem at a very respectable 9th position in a ranking of 48 highereducation systems. Better systems are found only in the US andCanada, Scandinavia, Switzerland and Australia.
Waarom zo goed? Geld?
However, if you take a closer look at this study, it appearsthat the Dutch universities do not reach this position becausetheir international enrolment or resource levels are so high butbecause of the large volume of academic output and particularlybecause our regulatory environment is seen as attractive. Comparedto other systems, the Dutch higher education system is seen ashaving a favourable policy context, in particular because of thesignificant institutional autonomy.
A crucial question of course is whether our university systemcan remain at this level of international performance and quality,and perhaps climb the ladder even further, or whether we shouldexpect that our position will weaken over the years to come.
The most recent (2012) Shanghai ranking seems to suggest that weare loosing some ground to the international competition. We shouldkeep in mind that this competition is strong and that manygovernments worldwide are trying to make sure that theiruniversities will operate at the cutting edge of intellectual andscientific development and are among the selected group of’world-class universities’ (Salmi, 2009).
