THE ATENEO’s drop in the recent Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World and Asian Rankings is not a cause for alarm, according to University President Jose Ramon Villarin, SJ.

The Ateneo’s QS world rank, released on September 2012, dropped nearly a hundred places from its previous rank of 360. The Ateneo is presently in the 451-500 bracket.

For the QS Asian Rankings that were released last June, the Ateneo ranked 109th, dropping 23 places from its position last year.

Based on the two rankings, the Ateneo lags behind the University of the Philippines-Diliman, which ranks 67th in Asia and 348th in the world.

Despite the Ateneo’s fall in rank however, Villarin assured the Ateneo community that the Loyola Schools (LS) remains one of the top universities in the Philippines.

He said, however, that the Ateneo has been working to improve its global competitiveness since last year through the creation of the Office of the Vice President for University and Global Relations (VPUGR).

Villarin said that the Ateneo is working hard to address its “weakest links.”

“As far as the Ateneo is concerned, what we will be doing is ramping up our research efforts and doing something about that academic reputation, which also depends on research and internationalization,” he added.

A national weakness

The QS is a British company that ranks and provides information regarding top universities from all over the globe.

The QS ranks schools based on the following: Academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty-student ratio, papers per faculty, citations per paper, international faculty review, international student review, as well as inbound and outbound student exchanges.

According to Villarin’s preliminary analysis, Ateneo’s decline in rank was caused by the increase in the research output of other schools and the establishment of new universities in Asia.

“Those with the lower ranking also overtook us. We went down in terms of research,” Villarin said, adding that research output is a national weakness for Philippine schools.

Acting LS Vice President Rudy Ang added that the Ateneo “is not a research university.”

“We do research and we have quality research, but we are not a research university in terms of the resources that we can afford to put into research,” he said.

However, Ang noted that the overall research output of the Ateneo has tripled within the last five years.

Funding support

School of Social Sciences (SOSS) Dean Filomeno Aguilar Jr., PhD said that the universities that rank high in the QS rankings receive a generous amount of funding support from their government.

School of Science and Engineering (SOSE) Dean Evangeline Bautista, PhD further explained that many of the schools in the top QS ranks are also state universities.

“We (the Ateneo) live by the tuition fee we are getting from the students and that’s usually just enough to get things running the way they are right now,” Bautista said.

As an example, she explained how the research projects of SOSE are quite expensive for the Ateneo to financially support.

“How do we survive? How do we keep the research going? We go to DOST (Department of Science and Technology). We look for funding, [which is] usually government funding,” she said.

Standard of the Ateneo education

Management engineering supersenior Lovette Regner believes that the Ateneo’s drop in the QS rankings is “agonizingly disappointing.”

“It reflects our decreasing competitiveness with other excellent universities. This signal is a call for us to be magis,” she said.

Like Regner, interdisciplinary studies sophomore John Brian de Asis said that rankings shouldn’t be taken lightly.

“If the Ateneo wishes to remain as one of the top schools, they should strive to be the standard rather than catch up with the standards,” he argued.

However, Ang said that a drop in ranking doesn’t necessarily mean a drop in the standard of education, as there are many factors to be considered.

“There are many other measures of the quality of education and they are not captured in [the] QS [rankings],” he said.

“And yet, if you look at those (other factors), I daresay people will say we’ve got a great education and that it’s better than it was before,” Ang added.

School of Humanities Dean Maria Luz Vilches, PhD agreed, saying that the rankings do not factor in teaching.

“As a university that puts premium on formation of individuals for good citizenship, we have long been known for our excellent teaching tradition that we assiduously strive to maintain and pass on to young faculty members through structured programs,” she said.

SOSS Dean Aguilar added that while the Ateneo is a relatively small university, “the fact that we are making it despite all these well-funded universities is already [a feat in itself].”

Sanggunian President Dan Remo believes that the Ateneo should look at the rankings from a “holistic standpoint” and from the “university’s direction.”

“Ateneo is not just going for quantitative amounts of improvements… we’re also looking for the development of the whole person,” he said.

Ang further emphasized this by saying that the Ateneo education is not accurately captured by any form of ranking that tries to standardize rankings across many countries, often with different contexts, different states of development and resources available.

Internationalization efforts

SOSE Dean Bautista believes that while internationalization is “not a prime intention” of the Ateneo, improving the school’s global competitiveness could also help increase its QS rankings.

“There is 10% [allotted for] internationalization and that’s where we’re really good,” Bautista said, referring to the QS’s international student index and international faculty index criteria.

Last school year, University President Villarin created the office of the VPUGR and appointed former SOSS Dean Jose Cruz, SJ as vice president.

According to VPUGR’s official website, Cruz’s office is tasked to direct the “formulation and implementation of strategic initiatives in order to strengthen the capacity of the university to operate in a global environment through effective engagements with universities and other organizations abroad.”

According to Bautista, there is no other university in the country that can top the Ateneo in terms of internationalization.

“We can boost that (internationalization)… because I think there’s still a lot of room to go,” Bautista said, adding that the Ateneo can invest more in internationalization through exchange programs like the Junior Term Abroad program.

“There is now a need to be a little bit more global,” she added.