Developing Objective Ranking System for Tertiary Institutions in Developing Nations

Samenvatting

 University ranking has become increasingly important in recent years because it creates a platform for competition amongst universities and also serves as a marketing tool in communicating performances of universities which could help them to build international reputation. Also, ranking could serve as a guide for prospective students seeking admission into tertiary institutions. There are many ranking systems used by developed nations but some of the parameters employed by these internationally accepted ranking systems, such as economy activity and employers rating of universities, are not easily available in the developing world, and some parameters that are important in developing nations such as number of programmes with full accreditation, proportion of academic staff at professorial cadre and students' completion rate are not included in the global rating. Hence, an objective ranking system that will capture the parameters relevant to the universities in developing nation is desirable. Here, we propose an objective ranking system that will capture the peculiarities of the universities in developing nations. Ten existing ranking systems were considered in this study and seventeen criteria were identified from them and used to propose a new ranking system. Some of the criteria used are number of full professors in the university, h-index of the university and the total number of students in the university. Weights were objectively assigned for each criterion based on their degree of importance and the number of ranking systems using the criteria that were used in developing the proposed system. The proposed system was implemented using Nigerian Universities and web crawling techniques were developed and employed to extract the values of the criteria for each of the universities used as a case study. A total score based on the weight of criteria was calculated for each university and used for ranking. System implementation was carried out using PHP and Python. The best five universities from the proposed ranking system were University of Ibadan, Obafemi Awolowo University, University of Lagos, University of Benin and University of Ilorin. The proposed ranking system will give a better result in ranking of universities in developing nation than the existing systems because it contains more objective and useful criteria that will capture the peculiarities of universities in developing nation.