You might not have noticed, but we’re in the midst of the high season for global university rankings.
In mid-August, the annual Academic Ranking of World Universities, compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in China, was released. Close on its heels came the QS World University Rankings. A third influential list, from Times Higher Education, a weekly magazine based in London, is to be announced this week.
Worldwide, these academic rankings have generated a tsunami of headlines and news releases, celebratory and otherwise. But although American universities dominate all three, publication of the rankings has caused barely a ripple in this country. Indeed, the only ranking Americans seem to pay attention to is the one with U.S. in its name—U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges list.
U.S. News, of course, rates American institutions only.
This indifference toward global rankings puzzles many educators outside the United States. Love ‘em or hate ‘em (there’s little love), quibble about their methodology (many do), but these international comparisons have, over the last decade, generally come to be accepted as a byproduct of the globalization of higher education.
As more students leave their home countries to earn a degree, as faculty members work and conduct research internationally, as universities set up branch campuses overseas or forge deep partnerships abroad, as foreign governments invest in higher education to improve their economic competitiveness—rankings, despite their flaws, increasingly inform those decisions. They have helped create a global notion of quality, a shared understanding of what makes a university world class.
To be sure, an institution can be globally engaged and pay little mind to rankings, and rankings do not an international strategy make. But for American higher education to largely ignore international comparisons is to maintain an “insular fiction that the domestic competition is the ‘World Series’ in higher education,” says Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne and no rankings enthusiast.
Mr. Marginson acknowledges that the United States, because of the size of its system and the standing of a number of its best institutions, can probably continue to disregard international rankings, for a time. Over the long term, however, some experts say there could be negative consequences to this thinking. Could American universities, to mix sports metaphors, find themselves falling behind in a race they didn’t fully realize they were running?
Despite the lack of attention to the global rankings in the United States, they have a decidedly Stars and Stripes cast. All but two of the top 10 institutions in this year’s Shanghai ranking are American; they account for 11 of the 20 highest-ranked by Quacquarelli-Symonds, the British company better known as QS. In Times Higher Education’s 2012 World University Rankings, 76 of 200 are from the United States, more than double the number for any other country.
“If you’re medaling anyhow,” says Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a consulting firm in Toronto, “why care?”
Institutions in the United States ought to stack up well, Mr. Usher notes, because the rankings generally recognize the American research university as the standard bearer, weighting the sorts of things, like academic papers and citations, at which American professors excel. (Unlike U.S. News, the major global rankings rate only research institutions.)
Go beyond the very top, however—the MITs, Harvards, and Caltechs—and there are signs on all three rankings that American higher education could be losing ground. There are 30 fewer American universities on the latest Shanghai ranking than there were when it was first published a decade ago; on the others, the majority of American institutions have slipped below previous rankings. A 2010 study by Australian researchers found that, given its size and financial resources, the United States actually underperforms in the rankings: It should have about 10 percent more universities on the Shanghai list than it does, they concluded.
Even as American higher education, particularly its public universities, has gone through a period of retrenchment, governments around the world have been investing more, often with the explicit goal of moving one or more of the countries’ universities up in the rankings. China, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Nigeria, South Korea, Taiwan—even Russia, where Vladimir Putin signed a presidential order making it a priority to get Russian universities in the global top 100.
With universities in so many countries playing catch-up, is it inevitable the United States will be caught?
Take the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The 22-year-old institution was built in the image of MIT, if MIT’s vistas were breathtaking Clear Water Bay and not the gray Charles River.
Despite its youth, HKUST, as it is known, places on all three major rankings. QS, in a separate ranking of Asian universities, named it the best institution in the region.
Part of Michael Fung’s job as director of planning and institutional research at the university is to pay attention to the rankings. When the different lists come out, he and his analysts sift through the data to understand why HKUST and its peers and competitors fared as they did. Mr. Fung and his colleagues essentially reverse-engineer the rankings to look for areas of improvement. Among their questions: Is the university submitting data that “optimizes” its score? Are there disciplines for which the university’s reputational rating falls short of its actual academic or research strengths? Should a dip in particular metrics indicate a real cause for concern?
Mr. Fung’s role is far from unique—in fact, at universities throughout Asia and Australia, such “rankings professionals” are commonplace.
His university, Mr. Fung emphasizes, examines rankings data not simply to improve its place on the lists themselves but because it sees the ratings as one more information source for strategic planning. “Rankings are just a symptom, like running a temperature,” he says. “You want to look at the underlying cause.”
The rise of global rankings means that, for the first time, certain comparative information is available internationally. “If you look beyond the final score,” says Roland Proulx, a former director of planning at the University of Montreal, “you have a lot of material.”
With data in hand, are foreign institutions figuring out how to do the American research university better than some American research universities?
It may be natural in Hong Kong, with only eight public universities, to see things internationally. But for the United States, with so many quality research institutions, global rivalry has long been local. “International competition was down I-95,” says Daniel J. Guhr, a consultant who advises colleges on their global strategies.
That’s becoming less true, Mr. Guhr and others argue. If brain drain once flowed in a single direction, up-and-coming universities in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Middle East are now vying for the top faculty. China is spending big to lure leading Western-trained scientists.
The competition is on, too, for the best students. The United States remains the top destination for international students, but its share has been on the decline for more than 10 years.
How do those students choose where to study? Eighty-five percent of international students say global rankings and reputation play an important role in their decision making, according to research by IDP Education, a global-student recruitment firm. A third called rankings the most important factor.
Students and their parents aren’t the only ones consulting rankings. Glenn Shive, director of the Hong Kong America Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, tells a story of an Asian university that dumped its longtime American partner, a major urban university, because its new president decided it should work only with institutions ranked more highly than it was. Ellen Hazelkorn, director of research and enterprise at the Dublin Institute of Technology and a Chronicle blogger, has found that 40 percent of university leaders worldwide consider an institution’s rank before forming strategic partnerships.
Under proposed regulations, India would allow only overseas universities ranked in the top 400 globally to open campuses in the country. Brazil used rankings, in part, to select the foreign institutions at which students in a major government scholarship program would be permitted to study. And some countries have gone so far as to base part of their immigration policy on rankings. Denmark and the Netherlands favor potential immigrants who graduated from top-ranked universities.
But just because global rankings haven’t stirred up the same fervor as the U.S. News list doesn’t mean the United States doesn’t recognize global competition, says Brendan Cantwell, an assistant professor of educational administration at Michigan State University. International comparisons are increasingly driving political leaders and policy makers like President Obama, even if they don’t explicitly refer to rankings, Mr. Cantwell says.
Good or bad, says Mr. Marginson of Melbourne, global rankings are a fact of academic life. “It’s only a matter of time,” he says, “before continuing with an insular standard will become a definite handicap.”
