Australia's University of Newcastle Embracing QS Stars

Australia’s University of Newcastle has embraced the new QS Stars rating service, as a means to identify institutional strengths and areas for improvement. Martin Ince, convener of the QS Academic Advisory Board, finds out more.

QS has been ranking the world’s most ambitious universities since 2004. But for institutions which need to know more about their standing, we have now introduced QS Stars, a thorough analysis of university performance in fields ranging from infrastructure to graduate recruitment.

Newcastle University in Australia has made QS Stars a major part of its thinking and planning process.

According to Professor Kevin McConkey, deputy vice chancellor for academic and global relations, the benefits began at the data collection stage, even before the university received its QS Stars rating.

Assessment across multiple areas

He says that the QS Stars process involved “investigation of some areas of university performance that had not been audited previously.”

And it looked at a wide range of measures of university quality. “Unlike other rating approaches that provide only a single score based on a number of measures, the QS Stars approach audits and reports performance across numerous areas.”

This broad remit involves QS looking into areas of university life including research volume and impact, graduate employability, teaching, and infrastructure.

Some of the measures used are of outputs, such as the percentage of alumni employed a year after graduating. Others look at inputs, in this case the number of careers advisors per thousand students.

These are the core QS Stars criteria. To them can be added an assessment of university performance in a range of advanced areas such as internationalization of the staff and student body, innovation, and public engagement.

Stars can also be used to assess performance in specific academic areas, in terms of both teaching and research.

Aiding strategic decision-making

While the QS Stars logo now appears prominently on the home page of the Newcastle web site, Professor McConkey insists that the rating is not a marketing device for the university.

Instead, he says: “Stars is a tool to assist improvement. Where the assessment criteria align with the University’s strategic direction, they are being used as additional measures of performance in this area to aid in strategic decision making.”

For example, the QS Stars findings pointed to the need to focus on Newcastle’s community engagement at the faculty, school and program level. QS Stars has also drawn attention to scope for more inbound and outbound student exchange.

This means selling the idea to Newcastle’s own students as well as promoting the university abroad as an exchange destination.

Professor McConkey describes QS Stars as an “independent, external assessment of strengths and of areas for development.” It has pointed to the need to refine Newcastle’s own data collection and to gather new streams of data whose importance had not been appreciated before.

He adds that as a result of the rating: “Areas where improvement could be made have been identified. Working groups have been established to improve performance in these areas.”

However, he also says that QS Stars also works “as a tool to demonstrate good performance and outcomes.” So as well as pointing out areas for improvement, it allows institutions to have more confidence that it is getting some things right.

• More on why universities are using QS Stars >