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INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION
Rise, and rise, of rankings
One of the minds that brings you THE’ s much-fussed-over league tables explains the source of their popularity, and why not appearing in them needn’ t be a bad sign for an institution.
By James Wells
What led to Times Higher Education becoming the university rankings giant it is today?
“ It was probably put together simply because if you are in journalism, putting lists in a newspaper is a great idea,” answered Duncan Ross, data and analytics director at TES Global, the company behind THE magazine, at the recent Australian International Education conference in Melbourne.“ If you put a list in a newspaper … people come to your newspaper [ and ] read your newspaper, to agree with the list, disagree with the list, wonder why they’ re not on the list or why they’ re not higher up, etc. Lists are great.”
THE published its first university ranking in 2004, in partnership with QS, its current rankings rival. Only 200 universities were listed, and the US’ s Harvard University topped the chart. By 2010, THE and QS had ended their partnership.
THE then moved to multinational mass media and information firm Thomson Reuters, to develop a methodology for publishing lists of universities. Thomson Reuters collected and analysed the data to develop the rankings. THE simply acted as the publisher.“ That made life quite interesting,” Ross says.“ If, for example, Monash University came to us and said,‘ Why have you ranked us [ here ]? Our answer was,‘ Because that’ s where you should be’, which wasn’ t very satisfying to either party.”
In 2014, THE took the rankings methodology in-house and began producing the seemingly endless lists the global higher education sector consumes today. Are the rankings useful to universities? Ross says this is a moot point, because publishing these lists has proven to be so successful for THE and its competitors.
“ Believe me, if we stopped publishing [ rankings ] tomorrow, someone else would come along and publish another one,” he says.“ Once rankings are out there, there’ s not much you can do about it in terms of turning the clock back. What you can do, however, is make sure rankings are as accurate and as useful as possible.”
The multitude of university rankings out there – including THE’ s, QS’ s and Shanghai Ranking Consultancy’ s Academic Ranking of World Universities( AWRU) – suggests Ross is correct. In THE’ s latest World University Ranking, Harvard was No. 6. QS ranked it at 3. ARWU – which, within its six-point metric for judging universities measures educational quality solely on the basis of how many of an institution’ s alumni have won Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals – placed Harvard at No. 1.
But as most in the sector would agree, the rankings have their issues. Ross admits they all have the same pertinent flaw: they disadvantage universities that prioritise teaching over research. He suggests this causes universities to over-prioritise research so they can keep moving up the charts.
“ If the primary purpose of your university is teaching, you probably will never end up in any of these lists,” Ross says.“ It doesn’ t make you a worse university, it just makes you a different university. There is a good reason why international university rankings look at research. The answer is simply [ because research data ] is more easily obtained across international boundaries. Citations are international by nature. We can measure those relatively easily.”
Ross also says the universities that have the best research, as measured by these rankings, often have the least engaged and unhappiest students. This insight emerged from work THE has done with The Wall Street Journal to rank the best teaching universities in the US.
“ There’ s an inverse correlation, a quite strong inverse correlation, between research productivity and student engagement,” Ross explains. [ For example ], students at Harvard, generally seem to have a horrible, horrible time. [ But ] they put up with it. … You know you’ re going to come out stronger and get a great degree, it’ s going to set you up for the rest of your life.”
After Ross explained this inverse correlation at the education conference, one audience member asked“ what does this mean for the future of universities?” Ross replied,“ possibly nothing,” but added that some universities were beginning to prioritise teaching more than they had in the past.
“ If you went back to when I was a student a while ago, universities – well certainly in the UK – didn’ t care for students,” Ross says.“ The students were necessary, but they, frankly, got in the way of all the important stuff. That’ s no longer the case. Universities around the world are putting more and more effort into teaching.” ■
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