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• 22-Mar-2024

Understanding Rankings - The Hindu’s Take on the World’s University Ranking.

When you hit your 20s, it is time to take the most important decision of your life  - Which university to choose? This decision will affect your finances, career, and social life. Wherever you choose to go, whoever you choose to go with, life will entirely be dependent on this important turn. But there is a system that helps us make this decision - The university ranking. 

Two decades ago, the first appearance of the global university ranking system took the world by surprise. These rankings dominate the attention in higher education ecosystems around the world. It is a fact that countries like China, Japan, Russia, and many more have made substantial commitments to enhance the quality and status of their universities to meet global standards of excellence. This has granted them formidable political leverage.

 In the world of higher education, rankings have become a significant factor in measuring the success and prestige of universities. However, some institutions have chosen to distance themselves from this trend and have instead decided to opt out of being ranked. This decision is often driven by concerns about the incentives created by ranking systems and how they may or may not align with the universities' own goals. By opting out of rankings, these universities can focus on their unique missions and values without being constrained by external expectations. However, amidst the controversies surrounding these ranking systems, two important issues related to the companies behind them have been overlooked: conflicts of interest and data rights.

Let's see what these rankings do. 

University rankings are determined based on a range of performance indicators that measure the quality of academic programs offered by an institute. Although each university has its own set of parameters for assessment, they are required to evaluate the overall performance of their institute and present a well-researched report in the form of data. 

This data includes - teaching quality, student and staff ratio, student satisfaction, placements, and other factors. 

Some of the most popular ranking schemes worldwide are - The Times Higher Education (THE), the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), the Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Ranking), and the U.S. News & World Report. These have a significant impact on shaping educational policies and priorities in higher education sectors across many countries.

This system of ranking evaluates various aspects of higher education institutes, such as the quality of teaching, the level of research conducted, the institutes' reputation, their focus on industry-specific research, and their willingness to collaborate with other organizations. Based on these factors, the ranking identifies the institutes that excel in different areas and assigns them respective positions. The institute’s performance is evaluated in each attribute as composite indicators, and these indicators are combined to create a consolidated score that reflects the overall performance.

For instance, the Times Higher Education system has the following indicators grouped into 5 areas -

• Teaching (30%): Teaching metrics include a reputation survey, staff-to-student ratio, doctorate-to-bachelors ratio, doctorates awarded to academic staff ratio, and institutional income. 
• Research (30%) – includes a reputation survey, and measures research income and research productivity
• Research citations (30%)
• International outlook (7.5%) - proportion of international students and staff and international collaboration.
• Industry income (2.5%)

Concerns -

Are there any flaws in the ranking system?

Elizabeth Gadd, a research officer at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom, raised a pertinent issue in 2021, highlighting the problematic obsession of academic institutions with climbing up the rankings ladder. She criticized this trend, arguing that it closely resembles the flawed pursuit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the sole measure of a country's prosperity. 

Gadd's critique brings to light the need for universities to re-evaluate their priorities and strive for a more holistic approach to education that benefits both students and society as a whole. In the 2010 book Mis-Measuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up, renowned economists - Joseph Stiglitz,  Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi argued that using a single indicator to measure a country’s economic and social progress would ignore other important indicators like the environmental impact of its growth, inequality, and other critical concerns. Dr. Gadd believes that university rankings, like GDP, oversimplify the complex roles that universities play in society by reducing them to a single score.

According to experts, the highest-ranking universities are typically old, large, wealthy, research-intensive, science-focused, English-speaking, and in the Global North. Rankings are heavily influenced by research excellence, which is measured by citations and reputation. For instance, Bielefeld University's jump in rankings (250th in 2010 to 166th in 2020 in THE rankings) can be attributed to a single scholar's work, contributing to 20% of the university's total citations over two years. It has been found that a significant increase in citations can be attributed to the work of a single scholar. This scholar published 10 papers, which were co-authored with hundreds of other researchers, and most of them were published in The Lancet. The scholar's work contributed to 20% of the university's total citations over two years. It's worth noting that these citations are not fake but are overrepresented.

These arbitrary measures - Citations, can dramatically change the ranking of a university. For example, the Saveetha Dental College of Chennai ranked up while successfully manipulating the citations. 

Richard Holmes, an expert in ranking systems, conducted two analyses in 2016 and found that THE's regional rankings seemed to show favoritism towards universities that hosted important THE summits. Mr. Holmes explained that these changes in favoritism were made by adjusting the way the ranking system counted citations, among other things. There are many similar instances where universities are incentivized to rank highly due to the value placed on ranking schemes and the benefits that come with high rankings.

What are the worries regarding conflicts of interest?

It is worth noting that most of the entities that compile and publish rankings are privately owned organisations. These organisations often collaborate with universities to help them improve their rankings in their own systems. This practice, while not necessary unethical, can lead to concerns about the accuracy and impartiality of the rankings. It is important to carefully evaluate the methodology and criteria used by ranking entities before relying on their rankings to make important decisions.

In a 2021 paper, Igor Chirikov from the University of California, Berkeley, found that universities that frequently signed contracts with QS had an increase of 0.75 standard deviations (~140 positions) in QS World University Rankings and an increase of 0.9 standard deviations in reported QS faculty-student ratio scores over five years, regardless of changes in institutional quality. This study was based on the ranks of 28 universities in Russia between 2016 and 2021. Similarly, THE offers membership to an elite group called the "World 100 Reputation Network," which is intended for institutions ranked in the top 200 of one of the big four global rankings to share strategies for retaining their ranking topping status, according to Dr. Gadd.

In recent times, many well-known educational institutions have expressed their disapproval of traditional ranking systems. In the year 2022, Harvard and Yale Universities led a movement against the U.S. News & World Report’s ranking system, citing that it conflicted with the type of careers they wished their law students to pursue after graduation. Utrecht University in The Netherlands also withdrew from the THE world rankings in 2023 for similar reasons. Similarly, several IITs in India have boycotted the same rankings.

What about data security?

All universities participating in the ranking exercise allow ranking agencies unrestricted access to their data, compromising data security.

For instance, the THE platform

One example of the harmful and perverse behaviors incentivized by university rankings is the additional set of terms and conditions required by THE (Times Higher Education) platform and website for universities to use their services. Point 6 of these terms states that by agreeing to use their platform, universities grant THE a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, and fully sub-licensable right, and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display any data posted on the website worldwide and/or to incorporate it into other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed. Additionally, with respect to all data posted on the website, universities waive any moral rights they have in the data. Finally, universities agree to perform all further acts necessary to perfect any of the above rights granted by them to THE, including the execution of deeds and documents, at the request of THE.

Therefore, universities are to give THE a free and permanent right over the data without any future need of permission. The data includes - details of institutional, industry, and research incomes, and patents. 
According to the UN University's statement on Global University Rankings, rankings may have encouraged some universities to improve their quality. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that they also encourage several harmful and counterproductive behaviors that result in long-term negative consequences.

Source - The Hindu 

Link : https://www.thehindu.com/education/what-purposes-do-university-rankings-serve-explained/article67910252.ece