University Ranking

Welcome back to the exciting month of university ranking again. Every year during this period, higher education institutions around the world capture headlines like never before. There will be joy for some institutions, setbacks for others and, worse still, these news and rankings might even cause some academics to lose their jobs. What does this means for the higher education sector?

Without doubt, university ranking has become an important component of the higher education sector. Initially, these rankings were supposed to provide a comparative benchmark among higher education institutions as a way to ensured that quality is upheld. However, with all the publicity associated to these university rankings, it has become a rat-race among institutions to compete among one another for a better standing. Today, institutions have to compete not only with institutions within the same country, but the competition has expanded both regionally and internationally. One wonders whether this is truly a competition over quality or merely competition for its own sake.

In the different rankings, institutions are evaluated with a different set of criteria. Some place more importance on peer-evaluation, research funding, publication, international reputation, while others include other criteria such as staff-student ratio or graduate employment. Although most of these rankings measure different criteria, however, when it comes to reporting the findings to the public, all these differences are masked behind statistical weightages and indices which reflect the "quality" of the institutions. In other words, the public is made to believe that University A is better than University B, simply because A is ranked higher than B. However, many fail to ask, "What makes A rank higher than B?"

This leads us to ask two more questions:

"What are the important criteria to measure quality in higher education?"

"Who should decide the components to be evaluated?"

Generally, a university has two major responsibilities: teaching and research. Does this means that quality of higher education institutions should be based solely on these responsibilities. This may not be the case. For example in the World University Ranking (THE-QS), the ranking is based on the following criteria: academic peer review (40%), staff-student ratio (20%), research excellence (20%), international faculty (10%), international students (10%) and employer review (10%). Is this the "correct" ratio to indicate quality?

On top of that, who actually determines that this is the "correct" ratio to measure quality? Are all the institutions being evaluated agreeable to the "ratio"? Furthermore, is this the appropriate ratio to measure higher education institutions around the world? Certainly, we cannot expect universities in US and UK to be evaluated on exactly the same criteria as universities in the developing countries.

Evaluating further the components in the tabulation of these ranking, there are several "questionable" indicators that could challenge the reliability and validity of these rankings. For example in THE-QS ranking, the research excellence criterion (20%) is based on citations, which measures how many times an academic's published work is cited. We ought to take into consideration that in the academia, published work is a form of academic debate. Therefore, there might be a possibility that when someone's work is cited, it does not necessarily indicate that the work is excellent. On the contrary, some shabby and questionable research could also be cited (in a bad and negative way) and challenged. Sad but true, both excellence and terrible research will be measured equally in tabulating the ranking.

On the aspect of teaching quality, the proxy measurement used is the staff-student ratio. In other words, the ideal ratio will be such that a university has a large faculty base and small student population. Such a measure, will expectedly favour the research-driven universities. Although theoretically, a low staff-student ratio is ideal, nevertheless, educational research about class size have not been able to proof the theory right. So in other words, having a low ratio does not necessary guarantee teaching quality. On the contrary, there has been many instances where teaching quality in research-driven universities is being questioned, whereby academics consider teaching as secondary or even as an unnecessary burden.

Although the issue of university ranking has become a publicity gimmick that captures the public's attention towards higher education, nonetheless, this once-a-year limelight provides a perfect opportunity for higher education institutions around the world to take a moment and ponder about the important question of quality. Academia should not compete for the sake of competition, but should rather, be committed to compete for the sake of upholding the true quality of higher education.