International Rankings
By Richard T. Griffiths (November 2010)

The Netherlands has thirteen public universities – seven fully comprehensive universities, three technical universities and two that have developed from having been economics universities and one agricultural university. There is also a small private business university.

As a whole, the Netherlands does well in the university rankings. In the QS Rankings it comes third in countries (joint with Germany) with all 12 universities in the top-200, behind the USA and UK. It comes fifth in the THES rankings with 10 universities in the top-200, behind the USA, UK, Canada and Germany. And it comes seventh in the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Rankings with five universities in the top-200 behind the above-named universities, Australia and France. This is remarkable given its population size and the fact that it lies outside a major language zone. On the other hand, few of its universities find their way into the top-100. There are several reasons for this:

• The higher education system and government expenditure does not encourage the emergence or promotion of ‘national champions’
• There is no tradition of private funding to boost elite universities
• There is no practice of selecting elite students from those with appropriate school-leaving qualifications
• The language is relatively inaccessible, reducing knowledge of what goes on in the system and the reach of many academic publications
• The legacy of separate higher education institutions for technology and economics has inhibited the emergence of very large comprehensive universities (and there is a premium for size in most rankings)

We should bear these factors in mind when looking at the place of Leiden in the rankings. I will go from what I consider the best to the worst ranking systems, which is a bit unfortunate since Leiden performs better in the worst. On the other hand, the Humanities Faculty, in which the MA-EUS is based, fares best in the best. The results are summarized in the Table below, after which we will analyse the different schemes.

	Leiden University				Humanities Faculty
	World	Europe	Continental Europe	NonNative English	World	Europe	Continental Europe	NonNative English
THES	124	37	20	35	34	10	1	1
QS	82	31	15	23	38	14	8	10
Shanghai	70	20	12	11	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
n/a=non-applicable, no separate humanities analysis

The best, in the sense of being the most transparent and employing the most diffuse range of data, is undoubtedly THES Rankings. These used to be coupled with the QS rankings surveyed below. However disquiet over the arbitrary nature (and the weight) given to the academic peer review among the THES readership led them to part company (with QS retaining the same basic methodology). The THES has raised the number of indicators from 6 to 13 and has reduced the weighting of opinion-based components from 50% to 34.5%. The other major change was a reduction of the weight of the staff-student ratio (which is easily manipulated and not a good indication of quality) from 20% to 4.5%. The final weighting and Leiden’s rank in each is shown below:

Element in Weighting	Contribution to Index	Leiden’s Rank
Teaching	30%	132
International Mix	5%	131
External Funds	2,5%	1
Research	30%	78
Citations	32,5%	150
TOTAL	100%	124

The THES analysis placed Leiden 124 in the World rankings and 37 in Europe. It was the top placed ‘comprehensive’ university in the Netherlands (topped only by the Technological University in Eindhoven). Nonetheless, this is a curious table. On external funds per staff member the university scores a perfect 100 – I must say I hadn’t noticed, but someone somewhere must be doing something right. Unfortunately, this factor only carries 2.5% of the weighting. Leiden also scores very well in its (well-deserved) research reputation , though one can always moan whether this accurately reflects current quality. Still, it contributes a useful 30% to  the total. Notice, the discrepancy, however, between the reputation and the citation index (weighted for subject areas) which reflects the impact of non-English articles in citation indices, and that is another 30-odd per cent. The teaching index , however, bears the brunt of my criticism. Having veered away from opinion-based data, the THES still has fully half of this component based on opinion. Now, I have worked in three different national systems and even I would have difficulty in ranking teaching (research is a different matter) within these countries, let alone outside. I am a little suspicious, for example, to learn that every Asian university, bar two, teaches better than Leiden, or that we are worse than 68 of the 72 US universities in the top-200. But there’s another 30% of the Index gone out of the window. And, to think, the THES Index is the best on offer!!
website Times Higher Education  (World University Rankings 2010-2011) 

In the separate analysis of Arts and Humanities faculties, Leiden fares considerably better with a ranking of 34^th in the World (10^th in Europe). If we remove the English language universities (some of which, I admit, are far better than we) and measure separately for non-native-English language institutes we come top in the World, and we are also first in Continental Europe. The margins are small, but we find ourselves in a cluster with the Free University and the Humbolt University, both in Berlin, and the Catholic University of Leuven and trailing a little behind is Amsterdam. The reason for this better outcome is partly, indeed, that Humanities is particularly strong in Leiden. But it is also because the specialist respondents know more about what is going on in the field than do those making general pronouncements on universities as a whole (I have a included a little illustration of this phenomenon at the end of this piece)
website Times Higher Education (Top 50 Arts and Humanities Universities)

The next worse are the QS Rankings. In 2010 they placed Leiden 82 in the World (31st in Europe) with a score of 68.81. The best performing indicator for Leiden, ironically in the light of the THES findings (see above) was the citations index. In terms of citations per faculty, Leiden emerged with a ranking of 14, 3^rd in Europe, behind Mannheim and Zurich, and wiping the floor with Oxford and Cambridge…. which makes me feel that there is something not altogether right. Still, that was an easy 20% of the ranking. Another 40% of the ranking is obtained by peer review , asking 15,000 academics to list the best 10 institutions in a range of academic fields. Again there is a danger that established reputation (and size) takes precedence over current quality….and if you are not mentioned sufficiently in the top ten, the slide begins. In this part of the ranking, Leiden came in at 72. In terms of the staff:student ratio, which accounts for 20% Leiden does not figure in the top 100 (but here it is better to have a large technology bias). Leiden does not cut the top 100 in the employers review   either. This accounts for 10% of the weighting but the compilers of the index admit themselves that they have difficulty in securing information for humanities and social sciences (and if you add law, you have most of Leiden’s student intake). Evidently educating one queen and one crown-prince, the current prime minister and the current deputy prime-minister do not count for much these days! We do not reach the top-100 in the proportion of foreign students and foreign staff either, each of which account for 5% of the index. So basically we owe our position to having a research reputation and, especially, to scoring high it the (somewhat freakish) citations index results.
see results on the website

The Humanities Faculty fared somewhat better in the rankings with a place of 38 (14^th in Europe). We were considered large, with a very high quality of research and a comprehensive coverage. And, of course, the MA European Union Studies is based there!! Natural Sciences and Social Sciences did well too, with rankings of 64 and 70 respectively. Here, however, there is no further breakdown.
see results on the website 

The Shanghai Jiao Tong University Rankings are also well established. In 2010 it placed Leiden University at 70 in the World rankings and 20^th in Europe. This is a gratifying but a little surprising given the bias in favour of natural sciences in its weightings. It likes Nobel prizes and Fields medals to alumni and current staff and gives it a combined weighting of 30%. That imparts a heavy bias to physics, chemistry, medicine and mathematics. Luckily Leiden managed a few many years back before big, concentrated spending put most of these out of range. This bias is reinforced by a full 20% allocated to publication in the journals Science and Nature and another 15% to the Science citation index (the Social Science Index taking another 15%). Whilst we stayed in the game with the prizes, it is in the publications that Leiden again held its own.
see results on website

NOTE on University/Subject Area disparities in the THES index
In the field of technology, the Netherlands has one university in the top-50, and it is not Eindhoven, which is higher in the overall world ranking but Delft. Eindhoven does not make the cut to the top-50 at all. Now, Delft does little else but technology, so one would be forgiven for thinking that composition of its scores would not differ from one index to the other… but not so:

Element in Weighting	Contribution to Index	Score in World rank	Score in Eng/Tech
Teaching	30%	55.5	75.8
International Mix	5%	47.4	44.3
External Funds	2,5%	99.4	84.2
Research	30%	67.7	83.1
Citations	32,5%	29.0	30.3
TOTAL	100%	51.3	63.2