I’m spending part of this week in Shanghai at the bi-annual World-Class Universities conference, which is put on by the good folks who run the Shanghai Jiao Tong Rankings. I’ll be telling you more about this conference later, but today I wanted to pick up on a story from the last set of Shanghai rankings in August. You’d be forgiven for missing it – Shanghai doesn’t make the news the way the Times Higher Education rankings does, because its methodology doesn’t allow for much change at the top.
The story had to with Saudi Arabia. As recently as 2008, it had no universities in the top 500; now it has four, largely because of the way they are strategically hiring highly-cited scientists (on a part-time basis, one assumes, but I don’t know that for sure). King Saud University, which only entered the rankings in 2009, has now cracked the top-200, making it by far the fastest rise of any institution in the history of any set of rankings. But since this doesn’t line up with the “East Asian tigers overtaking Europe/America” line that everyone seems eager to hear, no one published it.
You see, we’re addicted to this idea that if you have great universities then great economic development will follow. There were some surprised comments on twitter about the lack of a German presence in the rankings. But why? Whoever said that having a few strong top universities is the key to success?
Strong universities benefit their local economies – that’s been clear for decades. And if you tilt the playing-field more towards those institutions – as David Naylor argued in a very good talk last spring, there’s no question that it will pay some returns in terms of discovery and innovation. But the issue is one of opportunity costs: would such a concentration of resources create more innovation and spill-over benefits than other possible distributions of funds? Those who make the argument for concentration (see, for instance, HEQCO’s recent paper on differentiation) seem to take this as given, but I’m not convinced their case is right.
Put it this way: if some government had a spare billion lying around, and the politics of regional envy wasn’t an issue, and they wanted to spend it in higher education, which investment would have the bigger impact: putting it all into a single, “world-class” university? Spreading it across maybe a half-dozen “good” universities? Or spreading it across all institutions? Concentrating the money might do a lot of good for the country (not to mention the institution at which it was concentrated – but maybe dispersing it would do more. As convincing as Naylor’s speech was, this issue of opportunity costs wasn’t addressed.
Or, go back to Shanghai terminology: if it were up to you to choose, do you think Canada would be better served with one institution in the top ten worldwide (currently – none) or seven in the top 100 (currently – four) or thirty-five in the top 500 (currently – twenty-three)? And what arguments would you make to back-up your decision? I’m curious to hear your views.
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Shades of David Smith’s Framework for a Research Policy for Ontario (1997).! The late David Smith “got it right’ in 1997 – he was quite prepared to let peer review and open competitiion address concerns about ‘differentiation’ and he argued rather forcefully about the critical role of research in universities. Today, policy-makers spend an extraordinary amount of time on ‘differentiation’ and neglect the core challenge – how to properly fund the research enterprise; they could learn a lot by revisiting insightful papers like David Smith’s Framework for a Research Policy for Ontario.
Hi Ken. Thanks for that. is it still up on the COU web site, do you know?
http://www.tcu.gov.on.ca/pepg/publications/research.html
Available on the TCU website.
My experience is that every university can be described as having areas of research that for historical and cultural reasons, they do very well. Further, every university goes through ebbs and flows of vigour and activity because of the varying effectiveness of leadership that occurs at the Departmental, College and University levels. Finally, professors select what universities they study in for a variety of reasons, many of these reasons are linked to lifestyle and family (there are some excellent posts in the Chronicle in Higher Education about this). Thus, I would argue that a country would be best served by having a variety of institutes contributing to the higher education system. Having such a situation provides a wide range of opportunities to students, industry and academics.
Concentrating all of our resources on the U of T, McGill, UBC and U of A would be a bad idea. These are all fine instittutions and they demonstrate their strengths in national competitions. The day they don’t have to demonstrate their strengths, is the day they begin to stagnate. Furthermore, the other universities then are focussed on ‘catching’ the big four and thus are continually innovating to become more competitive, good examples are the Rivers Institute at UNB or Lethbridge’s focus on water, or my own Universities focus on Toxicology. The day, that these smaller Universities can’t compete because of a tilted playing field is that the day that they too begin to stagnate.
I have no data to back up this viewpoint but I will say from personal experience that diversity breeds success.