Green University Rankings: Research Note 30 December 2020

Background

During the last decades, attempts to measure the performance of universities have multiplied. These performance scores, rankings, or league tables as they are called in the UK, are used by universities for their brand and reputation management, by students to determine their university choice, by academics to decide their career moves, and by several other stakeholders for different purposes.

Lately, there has been criticism of university rankings, mainly for not being well governed or transparent, and lacking rigor, as well as external validity (Gadd, 2021). We fully endorse their warning against the uncritical use of university rankings and research metrics in the higher education sector. The authors, however, based their arguments on deficiencies in the handling of data on research output, not in the lack of measurement of universities teaching performance or other activities. In order to address this, we argue that considerable additional efforts must be made to harmonize teaching effectiveness and outcome measures. 

Three Myths about Papua New Guinea’s Development

Background

UNESCO’s latest report Global Education Monitoring Report: Inclusion and education – All means all (2020) sheds more light on the global learning crisis. In the Global South an insufficient number of children finish primary and secondary school, and many when they are able to go to school, learn almost nothing. The Brookings Institution, for example, famously pointed out that developing countries are 100 years behind in terms of providing access to schooling as compared to industrialized countries (Winthrop & McGivney, 2016). Similarly, the OECD’s PISA for development show dismal learning outcomes for 15-year-old in reading, maths, and science in the participating developing countries (OECD, 2020).

This year’s UNESCO report includes an analysis of school completion rates in Papua New Guinea (see below), made possible by the recently published 2016-18 Papua New Guinea Demographic and Health Survey (PNG DHS 2016-18). For the first time in November 2019, Papua New Guinea (PNG) made all the data available for researchers. The survey was implemented by the National Statistical Office from October 2016 to December 2018 and included 16,021 households (15,198 females and 7,333 males from 15 to 49 years old) across the country. Since the male sample may suffer from selection bias (e.g. overrepresentation of unemployed males), the data for females are deemed more reliable.

Papua New Guinea: Failure to Develop or Developing to Fail – a rejoinder

Background

Last Tuesday 15 December 2020 the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) published the 30th edition of the Human Development Report (HDR) containing its development statistics for 2019. Here we wish to assess long-term economic and education development in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in comparison with neighbouring Pacific Island Countries (PICs) and with its large Asian neighbours which have been successful in dealing with their development challenges: Indonesia, India and China. 

PNG's ranking last year was 156th, and this year’s is 155th, placing it at the bottom of the "medium human development" category, with 34 of the total of 189 countries doing worse. Changes in composite indices, however, are tricky to interpret, and looking at constituting factors may be more useful for distilling policy recommendations.