Instead they established “management statistics” which avoided ranking universities. The motivation behind the league tables has been to provide useful information to newspaper readers to help them in selecting universities.For years universities have successfully sidestepped government attempts to establish performance indicators because they were fearful of being labelled winners or losers. That is why the employment indicator has been dropped for now. But the Government wants to see one produced next year because it wants to concentrate universities’ minds on graduate employability.Until now, league tables have been compiled by a couple of newspapers out of data from the Research Assessment Exercise, which rates universities for research; the Teaching Quality Assessments, which rate them for teaching; and from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which pours out a multitude of raw statistics. Some universities have graduate employment figures of almost 100 per cent – but no one believes them.The idea that universities would be rated on such unreliable figures – and that funding might come to be tied to it – caused a furore.
It all depends how the university collects them, how much effort it puts into the exercise, and whether it counts students who have not replied, and those who are in temporary work flipping burgers in McDonald’s. One is the hot political potato of graduate employment; the other is university links with industry.Current graduate employment figures, based on statistics collected by universities, are supposed to show the proportion of graduates employed six months after graduation Everyone, however, knows that these figures are dodgy. That success might not show up on the RAE.Two areas in which performance indicators are to be developed are on hold for now while more work is done on the methodology of collecting statistics. Instead, the research output indicator examines the number of PhDs awarded, compared to inputs such as academic staff costs and research funding.Universities scoring high on that indicator will not necessarily be the same as the ones scoring high on the RAE. Those with only a small part of the institution producing PhDs but doing it very efficiently, could score well They may not score high on the RAE. Similarly, those with modest research funding but producing a comparatively large number of PhDs, would do quite well too.
Like Quality Assessment Agency figures, the RAE is widely available, so it doesn’t need covering again. Teaching Quality Assessments (TQAs) are being omitted as they’re widely available on the Internet anyway, and also because Hefce wants a set of indicators it can repeat year-on- year. The TQAs are not done for every institution every year.The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is not being included in the indicators to be published this year either. Again, it’s partly because Hefce wanted the year-on-year comparison and the RAE doesn’t provide that. A separate indicator examines each institution’s record at turning out students with qualifications.The indicators look at the efficiency of learning and teaching – how good universities are at getting students through their courses in the allotted period of three or four years. They measure whether students stick it out in higher education or whether they chuck in their studies. In some cases, there are different indicators for traditional- age students and for mature students.