University choice is a crucial life decision. Whether you want to be immersed in campus culture or graduate with less debt, there are many factors to consider.
Just like you might read reviews before booking an accommodation, hiring a driver, or purchasing a product, Studyportals provides student ratings and reviews to help you find your best international university.
1. Research
The research carried out by universities is one of the most important factors in determining their reputation. Increasingly, employers are looking for graduates with strong industry connections and relevant on- and off-campus experience, so it’s worth researching what kinds of research projects are being undertaken by a university that you’re interested in studying at.
University rankings are an increasingly popular way to assess the quality of a university, but it’s important to keep in mind that each ranking organization measures universities in different ways and gives different weightings to similar criteria. For example, some rankings take into account research income and expenditure, surveys of academics and employers, and staff-student ratios, while others use bibliometric indicators such as the number of publications and citations per researcher.
The Shanghai Jiao Tong ranking, for example, places more weight on traditional prestige-based research indicators such as the number of publications in Nature and Science and the number of Nobel or Fields Medal winners employed at a university. It also scores universities more heavily if they have researchers with high h-indices – that is, the number of papers that have been cited by other scholars.
Another important factor to consider is whether a university has a good track record of producing spin-off companies from their research. This is an indicator of a university’s ability to translate its research into practical applications, such as medical devices and treatments, computer software, data sets, physical collections, and educational materials.
If you’re not sure where to start, try consulting domestic rankings that focus on teaching and learning, such as QILT (Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching). However, if you have a good idea of the subject you want to study, then it may be more helpful to look at subject-specific global rankings, such as the U.S News & World Report and the Times Higher Education.
2. Teaching
When it comes to determining the best university for a student, teaching is important. QS rankings include a teaching pillar, which assesses the quality of professors and lecturers and student-to-teacher ratios. It also considers student feedback and whether the courses are relevant to the real world.
Harvard and Oxford remain top of the teaching pillar in this ranking, with Cambridge jumping from joint fifth last year to third this time. In the research pillar, Oxford remains at the top and the University of Edinburgh is fourth. There are 177 universities in this ranking, with five entering for the first time.
This ranking is different from others in that it focuses on the scientific impact of universities rather than their size and prestige. This means that smaller technical universities, such as Eindhoven and Technical University Munich, appear higher than expected. The report states that it has been difficult to find European universities with a comparable impact score to the world’s elite institutions. When students were asked what was important to them when choosing a university, high-quality teaching came first and the opportunity for continuing learning came second.
3. Engagement
Student engagement is key to understanding what makes a university the best one for a student. This type of engagement refers to the time and effort a student invests in activities that are empirically linked to their desired outcomes in college. In addition, student engagement also refers to the emotional bonds a student builds with an institution. These bonds can affect a student’s success and retention rates in college. The most successful colleges recognize the importance of engaging students and offer numerous opportunities for them to get involved. These activities include everything from service learning to undergraduate research.
This body of literature rejects notions of the student as a consumer and focuses on student engagement with their studies. The idea here is that students are active partners with academics on their journey through higher education and the development of their own disciplinary or professional knowledge. This degree of student engagement is usually referred to as ‘engagement to form understanding’ or the ‘partnership model’.
Other long-standing objects of student engagement are rooted in the work of student representation. These can be traced back to medieval Bologna University where students organized themselves into student nations to provide mutual welfare and security against local authority. The idea here is that students are a resource for higher education and that they can provide valuable insights into policies and their implementation (Klemencic, 2012b).
Finally, the final object of student engagement is the work of creating new objects of student engagement to change the focus and degree of that engagement. This shifts the focus from who is doing the engagement to what is being formed and in turn helps analyze the relations between different degrees of engagement. It highlights three broad objects of engagement: engagement to form understanding; engagement to form curricula; and engagement to form communities.
Also Read : HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF UNIVERSITY FOR NEW STUDENTS?
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