What’s the future for international rankings?
Over the past year, dozens of American colleges, and in particular medical and law schools, have announced they would no longer cooperate with U.S. News & World Report’s rankings. My colleague Francie Diep recently took stock of the fallout, asking other rankers if they too were worried about possible boycotts. (Not at all, they maintained.)
What about internationally? Could the American anti-rankings fever become a global contagion?
The answer is complicated. In many parts of the world, rankings are deeply entrenched. While in the United States, rankings have typically been seen as more of a consumer tool, many foreign governments — in Nigeria, Russia, and Taiwan, among others — have built rankings into official policy, using them as standards of quality and incentivizing universities to move up the tables. In fact, one of the big three international rankings, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, better known as the Shanghai ranking, was originally developed by Chinese officials as a way to benchmark the country’s universities against institutions around the globe.
But some foreign universities have begun to push pause on rankings. Last month, South Korea’s top research universities jointly announced they were boycotting another of the major international rankings, the QS Universities Rankings. A number of the Indian Institutes of Technology, among the country’s most elite universities, have been refusing to participate in a third global ranking, by Times Higher Education, for the last three years.
Still, such boycotts are not rejections of rankings, per se. In an email to The Chronicle, the South Korean universities said they were upset by a methodological change in the QS rankings that they argue penalizes institutions in non-English speaking countries. Korean universities, as well as some well-known institutions in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, experienced sharp drops in the most recent QS rankings. (The company has said the declines were caused by other factors.)
In the email, the South Korean universities objected to the “radical and abrupt” change in the metrics. “The competitiveness of Korean universities is steadily increasing in many respects,” they wrote, “thus, there is no reason that Korean university rankings drop this drastically.”
Likewise, the Indian institutions, known as IITs, have criticized a lack of transparency in Times Higher Education’s methodology, not the idea of rankings as a whole. For the past eight years, the Indian government has released its own rankings of the country’s higher-education institutions, which includes IITs. Government officials have said it better reflects domestic priorities like diversity and outreach to women and low-income students.
Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley, said international rankings may be losing their hold as “the global higher-education space become much more fragmented post-Covid.
“Ten years ago, global-competitiveness programs were thriving,” Chirikov said, referring to governments’ efforts to move their universities up the rankings. “Now, the focus is much more internal.”
Even some Chinese universities have pulled out of international rankings, heeding the call by Xi Jinping, the country’s president, to develop “world-class universities with Chinese characteristics.”
Moving forward, new rankings could be more specialized, said Chirikov, who has been critical of ranking companies that sell consulting services to the universities they rate. Both QS and Times Higher Education now rank universities by geographic region, by academic discipline, and even on sustainability and social impact.
Even as objections to rankings have grown louder, the standings have found new footholds. India, for example, plans to permit only top-ranked foreign universities to open branch campuses in the country. In the past year, a number of governments — in Britain, Singapore, and Hong Kong — have announced changes to their immigration systems to make it easier for graduates of the world’s top universities, as determined by some combination of global rankings, to get skilled-work visas.
The plans for so-called talent visas have sparked fresh objections: Should academic rankings really be used in setting immigration policy? Do such plans discriminate against developing countries whose institutions tend not to fare well in global rankings? And what about shifts in methodology that could cause graduates of particular universities to qualify as top ranked one year but not the next?
Get ready for a new round in the international-rankings debate.
