The last decade or so has seen a lot of brouhaha about rankings, especially those of the global variety. Loads of books have been written about how rankings are driving consumerism in higher education (mostly an anglo-American complaint, it should be said), and how they are altering (for the worse) policy-making in the sector.
But one question which, to my knowledge, has not been addressed, is this: if rankings are so god-awful, why is higher education the only sector that screams so loudly about them?
Rankings are everywhere. In the automobile industry, JD Power and Associates uses survey data to measure glitches in new cars, and ranks different models accordingly. Law firms get ranked. So do hospitals. Countries get ranked all the time on things like competitiveness, transparency, and development. Cities get ranked in a way very similar to universities, by global media outlets like The Economist and Monocle.
Many of these rankings attract their share of criticism (Joel Kotkin’s takedown of city rankings is particularly good). But I’d venture a guess that the academic literature on the evils of ranking universities, and the methodological wickedness that goes on therein, is several times the size of the literature on all those other rankings, combined.
A reasonable question follows: why are universities so much touchier about rankings than other organizations?
One obvious possible reason is that, unlike lawyers and car manufacturers, universities are social entities with multiple objectives, which don’t have a profit motive, and are thus more difficult to rank. Fair enough, but the same could be said for cities and countries. Why is the UN Human Development Index (HDI) OK, but the Shanghai Rankings not?
The usual objection at this point turns to some form of criticism on the lack of measure for “value-added” – of course Harvard comes top of the rankings: they’re so rich! Again, a reasonable comment, but nobody handicaps the HDI by gross domestic product, and the mayor of Hanoi doesn’t whine about Munich having an unfair advantage due to being rich.
There are, as I see it, two reasons why university rankings are uniquely controversial. One is that many faculty view the university as a collection of individual departments rather than as a single entity, and they resent the fact that their own reputation is dragged down by being bracketed with the clowns in (insert department here). The second reason is that fighting over rankings is actually a proxy fight over the hierarchy of value within academia; people who care about teaching get really cheesed-off about the primacy given to scientific discovery in most rankings models.
Of course, there are solutions. But more on this, tomorrow.
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Alex, proxy fights over departmental and mission priorities are surely part of it. But they are, plausibly, subordinate to a much bigger issue. If cities or countries were (by and large) entirely dependent on year-to-year budget decisions by provincial or state governments, then they too might be rather sensitive to the worry that they are being evaluated according to measures that are typically misleading, and often simply daft. The prospect that rankings are, or will be, used to prioritize funding allocations both to universities and within universities is precisely what can incentivize strife over who’s really the best unit in the university, or what’s really the institution’s core mission.
There’s also the more mundane fact that universities are full of very curious people who study things by nature and by training, and have been professionalized to question assumptions, test hypothesis, debunk errors, and reveal confounds. Why would it be surprising that ranking claims directed at those people in their professional capacities would meet with more formal study, questioning, testing and debunking than analogous claims directed at a city hall?
Hi Tim,
Thanks for reading our stuff.
I would have said that North American rankings systems have proven to have almost no influence whatsoever on government funding decisions. And while I take your point about universities being full of professional questioners, I’m not sure that quite accounts for what we’re seeing here. If it were a matter of degrees, explaining why the volume of criticism is a bit higher in one field another, I could certainly see that as an explanation. But I’ve literally never head *any* criticism of those rankings from car manufacturers or mayors, or what have you (possibly they have them but are too savvy to make them public)…what does that say about universities?.
Thanks, Alex. I agree that the prospect of rankings-driven funding has thus far mostly been a mere prospect in Canada (though the extent of the persuasive role that rankings might play in competition rounds for capital funding, grad funding, etc., is an open question). That does not mean that the prospect doesn’t explain the engagement with rankings anyhow — especially when close cousins in, e.g., Britain have indeed had public funding allocations explicitly tied to rankings exercises for many years now.
The Canadian focus on rankings seems to have grown far more intense relatively recently in any case, perhaps as concerns about differentiation decisions, more than funding per se, are much on people’s minds. Either way, the fact that universities are (or are believed by administrators to be) highly dependent on government decisions makes it rational for those institutions to take a strong interest in managing public perceptions about their relative quality. Engaging with rankings is just one aspect of that increasingly full-court press on the PR and gov’t relations front.
My experience may of course be idiosyncratic, of course, but your own conjectured explanations don’t square with my experience in a key respect: If the focus on rankings is driven by inter-departmental beefs, and by teaching v. research-type disputes, we should expect rank-and-file faculty members to be the ones hottest for rankings talk. But they aren’t — at least, not that I’ve seen, not anywhere that I’ve seen it. It’s mainly driven rather by administrators (like me, this very second!), senior leadership, communications people, analysts… people who rarely have a dog in any fight between Dept A and Dept B, and for whom the research v. teaching question is, by and large, not an ideological matter of great heat. So whatever the explanation(s) for why universities talk a lot about rankings, I think they will most plausibly apply at the institutional level rather than the intra-institutional level in the first instance.