EUROPE
A new ranking of engineering programmes offered by some of the main universities inside the European Union aims to create a “common market for engineering education” to help students pick the right courses, and employers find the best graduates, according to its founders.
The European Ranking of Engineering Programmes, or EngiRank, was launched at the Polish Science and Business Mission in Brussels in November and is the brainchild of the Warsaw-based Perspektywy Education Foundation supported by Poland’s National Agency for Erasmus+ and the European Solidarity Corps (FRSE).
Waldemar Siwiski, founder of the Perspektywy Education Foundation and president of the IREG International Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence, told University World News that as well as traditional indicators such as publications and citations or internationalisation, EngiRank takes account of collaboration with industry, joint research with business, patents, contribution to sustainable development goals, participation in the EU programmes, such as Horizon Europe and Erasmus+, and engineering accreditations through bodies like the European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education (ENAEE).
Questions about methodology
The ranking has received mixed reaction from European higher education stakeholders with some questioning the criteria and methodology used by the rankers and others suggesting it favours large comprehensive universities over smaller specialist institutions.
Siwiski told University World News that EngiRank is a ‘bottom-up’ rather than a ‘top-down’ ranking, unlike many university rankings, and builds up from seven ‘subject’ rankings covering the most important fields of engineering: chemical; civil; electrical, electronics and IT; environmental; mechanic; material; and medical.
“A university’s position in the institutional ranking derives from its positions in the subject rankings. In addition, interdisciplinarity is one of the main and weighted indicators,” he said.
A pilot ranking covering engineering education in 11 countries that joined the EU on or after 2004 was carried out first. EngiRank is partly based on the experience gathered from that project.
It includes only institutions in EU member states because it relies on EU data rather than asking universities for information. However, future editions may include Switzerland and Norway.
Siwiski said: “The European Union is one big market where goods and services and people can move freely, and it is natural that a company based in one country may well look for engineers with the right qualification among graduates of good schools in neighbouring countries.
“EngiRank also provides guidance to Erasmus students looking for good engineering programmes or places to do internships.
“All European countries need top-class engineers, and we believe our ranking will support the common education area that the EU represents.”
New perspectives
The top spot overall in the new rankings went to the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) followed by Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands and then KU Leuven, Belgium in third place.
DTU led three of the subject rankings: chemical engineering; environmental engineering and mechanical engineering. Delft also topped rankings for civil engineering; electrical, electronic and information engineering; and materials engineering. KU Leuven topped the medical engineering ranking.
Professor Rasmus Larsen, provost and DTU executive vice-president, was delighted his university was named “the best in Europe for engineering programmes”.
He told University World News: “EngiRank provides some interesting new perspectives on the European higher engineering education landscape. Because it focuses on the EU countries and can rely on EU data sources such as CORDIS and Erasmus+, the ranking provides new insights into research and innovation funding as well as student mobility.”
He said engineers have an important role in the ‘green transition’ and technical universities are playing a key part in helping to ensure that future engineers think in terms of sustainable solutions to challenges facing the planet like the climate crisis.
Professor Tim van der Hagen, rector of TU Delft, said he welcomed the EngiRank initiative to set up a European ranking for engineering programmes, telling University World News: “I believe that subject rankings are more relevant for our university than world university rankings as they compare universities with similar profiles and missions with each other.”
Other responses
However, the response to EngiRank was more measured from some sector stakeholders.
Professor Anne-Marie Jolly, chair of the Label Committee of the European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education (ENAEE), which awards the EUR-ACE label through a European accreditation system to high-quality engineering degree programmes and whose data was used to help compile EngiRank, had reservations about some of the results.
Jolly, who is also project manager at the CTI (Commission des Titres D’Ingénieur), the French, independent field-specific quality assurance agency in charge of accreditation of engineering schools and programmes, said: “The best thing in this ranking is that it is only for engineering and that it also applies to the different fields of engineering.
“But I think that some work is still necessary [on] choos[ing] the elements you rank, it is not KU Leuven that you must rank but the Faculty of Engineering of KU Leuven, for example. It is the same for France, the firsts in the rankings are not considered in France as faculties of engineering.”
The top French institutions in the overall EngiRank league table were Université Grenobles Alpes at 22nd spot and Université de Lorraine at 25th place.
Jolly told University World News most experts in French engineering education would have put Mines ParisTech (École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris) or CentraleSupélec in top places for engineering programmes in France but suggested they may have dropped down the pecking order “because they are small compared to new universities” and don’t include so many fields of study.
CentraleSupélec was ranked at 53rd and Mines ParisTech only managed to get 79th spot in the “Institutional” table – way behind some of the more comprehensive French higher education institutions.
Frank Ziegele, executive director of the German-based CHE Centre for Higher Education think tank and one of the founding directors of the European Union-supported U-Multirank, which claims to take a more multi-dimensional approach to compare university performances than the traditional world rankers, also had mixed views about EngiRank.
He told University World News: “It’s a classical ranking, offering a league table, composite scores, focussing strongly on bibliometric indicators and on research intensive institutions. In these respects, it’s different from the ideas of U-Multirank.
“To measure teaching quality only with the number of accredited programs is, for instance, quite a limited approach.
“However, if it helps to create attention for engineering and to attract more students to engineering, which is a crucial issue in Germany, this effect would of course be welcome. We have a dramatic decline of first-year students in several fields, for example in mechanical engineering,” said Ziegele.
Put success in context, says EUA
In its response, the European University Association (EUA), which represents more than 850 universities and national rectors’ conferences in 49 European countries and plays a major role in the Bologna Process and in influencing EU policies on higher education, research and innovation, renewed its scepticism about the value of rankings in general.
Rathe than evaluating this specific ranking, Monika Steinel, the association’s deputy secretary general, re-emphasised conclusions made in the EUA’s recent briefing on the use of rankings by higher education institutions.
She said: “There is no single definition of quality for university activities. Success must be considered in the context of national, institutional, and departmental or subject-specific parameters.
“It takes critical analysis to identify what kind of indicators are used in rankings, and what they are intended to measure.
“Some of the most influential university rankings use indicators that exclusively or predominantly relate to research activities and research outputs. This is not a problem per se, if users know what product they are getting and how they should go about using it: a research-based ranking system should not be used to select a taught undergraduate programme, for example.”
EngiRank said the rankings were prepared by the Perspektywy Education Foundation supported by the Poland’s National Agency for the Erasmus+ Programme and the European Solidarity Corps (FRSE). Data came from Elsevier’s Scopus, European Patent Office PATSTAT, Horizon Europe, accrediting organisations for engineering studies (ABET, ENAEE), and the Erasmus+ database. A total of 178 institutions appears in the first institutional rankings.
Nic Mitchell is a UK-based freelance journalist and PR consultant specialising in European and international higher education. He blogs at www.delacourcommunications.com
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