Dive Brief:
- Global university rankings are growing in popularity as a method of measuring the perceived values of various institutions in providing a degree that can have significant return on investment, writes The Economist. The publication mentions the ShanghaiRanking Academic Ranking of World Universities list of 500 global leading institutions as just one of around 20 now frequently referenced international league tables.
- Ranking systems have showcased the competition between not just institutions, but nations, in being able to produce "world-class universities." The trend has driven up competition and signaled a move away from teaching, with an emphasis on the production of quality research specifically for the hard sciences, which tends to get get more citations and more prestige.
- As students try to enroll in institutions associated with high status, global ranking systems gain more validity, which as the Economist notes with an expert interview, can lead to "the distribution of teaching further down the academic hierarchy," and encourage stratification over which institutions get the most funding. This "exacerbates social inequality"; though, rankings can also encourage internationalization of research and cross-border collaboration on knowledge growth.
Dive Insight:
Higher education leaders have often bemoaned university ranking systems as unfairly highlighting institutions that have empirically had a great deal of resources and large endowments, while positioning colleges that are working to enroll low-income, underserved students as being behind the pack. That was a major complaint behind the Obama-era College Scorecard initiative, for which a number of community college leaders said devalued their institutions and made them look less appealing to potential enrollees' parents.
They argued this is problematic because the ranking system, even though it may be created with the best intention, inevitably impacts funding and means the students who need the most support and greatest resources get the least, as they typically don't enroll in the top-tier institutions. When this is happening on the global scale, institutions with the highest resources overall will also gain greater attention in the enrollment game.
For instance, Rutgers University chancellor Debasish Dutta said last year that his No. 1 challenge as being the institution's new leader was making sure Rutgers could reflect itself accurately in national college rankings, because he was concerned that the New Jersey flagship — which does have students from less privileged backgrounds — was being poorly represented.
While institution ranking systems are here to stay, Martin Kurzweil, director of the Educational Transformation Program at Ithaka S+R explained during the Council for Higher Education Accreditation conference earlier this year, that perhaps leaders ought to encourage a more equitable benchmark system for accountability by creating peer benchmarking standards — while maintaining benefits of global ranking systems such as the promotion of international collaboration in research and sharing of best practices abroad and at home.
"I think a standard without reference to other standards that exist within the space is essentially arbitrary. It needs that context in order to make sure the provider is setting goals that are ambitious, but attainable. And the only way to do that is to look at what other are doing," he said. "Peer benchmarking can easily tip into rankings; I don't think that's the direction that I would want to go. I think an appropriate technique is to consider the historical results for a set of similar providers and use that to create a standard that is an objective standard."