Category: Universities

As I noted yesterday, the basic fight over rankings in higher education boils down to two questions: should institutions be judged as whole entities, or on the basis of their constitutent parts?  And, should rankings give primacy to the existing hierarchy of values of higher education (i.e. research and publication), or to something else? Let’s start with the first question.   There’s absolutely nothing stopping us from ranking individual bits of the university, as opposed to the entire institution.  We’ve had

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