Kobe Bryant Shoes or Philippine universities fared badly above

Or Philippine universities performed poorly in this year's world university rankings by a highly regarded London-based agency - an underwhelming rating connected by Filipino authorities in higher education to declining government support.

None of the country’s elite schools made it to the top 300 in the latest rankings for 2011-12 released on Monday by the London-based Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a firm focusing on education and study abroad.

Still, the top Filipino school on the list, the University of the Philippines was ranked 332nd, falling 18 spots from the 314th position last year. Ateneo de Manila University placed 360th, down from 307th position last year.

Two other universities slipped further on the list, with De La Salle University dropping from the 451-500 bracket last year to the 551-600 bracket this year. The University of Santo Tomas was in the top 600 list, moving from the 551-600 bracket to the 601+ bracket from last year.

QS assesses world universities based on academic performance and employer feedback. The organization surveyed 32,000 academics and 16,000 employers this year, describing the initiative as the "largest of its kind ever conducted."

Criteria

The index measures how universities fare in the following: academic reputation (40%), faculty citations (20%), faculty-student ratio (20%), employer reputation (10%), proportion of international students (5%) and proportion of international faculty (5%).

Questions about the methodology of the QS survey have been raised, but the rankings are still recognized and documented globally as an index of the world’s best higher education institutions. UP does not participate in the survey.

"This could come as a disappointment, but perhaps not a surprise as thousands of students recently took to the streets in protest of the government’s budget cuts in higher education," QS said in a statement to the Inquirer.

The Aquino administration last year cut the government subsidy to state universities and colleges, prompting these schools to raise tuition and other fees. State subsidy for these institutions has decreased from P25.36 billion in 2009 to P23.4 billion this year.

Of the four universities on this year’s QS list, only UP is state-funded. No other state university made the QS top 600 list.

Student groups are protesting the budget cuts, saying it has further limited access to quality education among the poor.

Tragic and embarrassing

Danilo Arao, head of the UP System Information, said the UP administration would "work harder" to improve its QS ranking.

He said UP president Alfredo Pascual was to outline his vision for UP as a "great university" in his investiture address on Sept. 15.

Kabataan Rep. Raymond Palatino said the ranking "exposes the tragic and embarrassing Philippine education crisis."

The National Union of Students of the Philippines said the QS survey should serve as a "wake-up call" for the Aquino administration to increase its support for state schools.

John O’Leary, a QS advisory board member, noted that countries like Germany, Japan, and South Korea had kept their universities—among them state-funded—in the top bracket through investments in education. The opposite has gone to countries that have less.

Major Asian universities, mainly large institutions in Japan, Columbia, Hong Kong, and China, landed in the top 50, alongside European and American schools.

The University of Cambridge in the UK topped the list for the second consecutive year, edging out other consistent top five schools including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, and Oxford, QS said.

"The [rankings] give a clear example of the link between investment to cause higher education," O’Leary noted.