Yet another ranking of China’s international schools was released this week, but gaps in the data make the results suspect.
The China International School Competitiveness Ranking·2019 was announced by Kinglead, an education resources and services platform, on Dec 3. Kinglead organized their rankings in two separate lists, one using acceptances into US colleges, and the other using UK acceptances.
Based on its rankings, Beijing has four of the top 10 international schools in terms of US acceptances, and none in the top in terms of UK acceptances.
Kinglead also used two other ranking criteria on both lists: International Certifications and an evaluation of faculty based on data such as student-teacher ratio.
The deeper we dug into this data, the more we realized that its validity is suspect due to the incomplete nature of the data.
While the ranking criteria is quite robust, there is simply too many data points missing for the rankings to be truly useful. For instance, only 26 of Beijing’s international schools turn up on the list at all, with many prominent schools left off entirely, presumably due to not having any of the three data points available for analysis, or perhaps are sending a disproportionate number of students to non-US/UK universities such as the French School or the Canadian School.
Out of the 26 that were listed, a mere six had all three data points – Western Academy of Beijing (WAB), Beijing City International School (BCIS), Beijing Royal School, Harrow Beijing, Yew Chung International School of Beijing (YCIS Beijing) (and all ranked quite similarly).
As we blogged before, ranking in no way represents the quality or education found at a school, in a classroom, nor the impact a particular professor may have had on an individual student.
Like Hurun Education’s controversial rankings that were released earlier this year, Kinglead’s ranking system need to be taken with a grain of salt.
According to the Rankings, here are the Beijing schools in the top 50 for US and UK university enrollments with their corresponding ranking:
U.S
1. The Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University (SDSZ)
5. Dulwich College Beijing
7. The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China
8. Beijing No. 4 High School International Campus
12. International School of Beijing
29. Tsinghua University High School International – Chaoyang
30. Beijing Royal School
32. International Department of Beijing No. 35 High School
45. Western Academy of Beijing
48. Beijing City International School
50. The Affiliated High School of Peking University Dalton Academy
U.K
21. International Department of Beijing No. 35 High School
24. Dulwich College Beijing
28. Ulink College of Beijing
35. Harrow International School Beijing
36. Western Academy of Beijing
37. Beijing City International School
40. Yew Chung International School of Beijing
41. International School of Beijing
44. Beijing Royal School
In response to the Competitiveness Rankings of China’s International Schools 2019, we received some opinions from parents.
When asked if rankings such as this would ever influence school choice for his kids, Mike Signorelli stated, “The rankings had no influence on our decision. We focused on bilingual schools in our area and spoke with various parents and made visits to the top choices.”
Likewise, Tim Coghlan echoed a similar sentiment, “My kids too young, but basically we would totally ignore these lists in preference for actual personal research and school visits.”
“I like to look at these things just to see but they do NOT influence our decision at all. And I wouldn’t go in search of it either. We look at location, curriculum, have a school visit & definitely talk to other parents!” Said Elisabeth Koch.
Photos: jinglingedu.com, pexels.com
