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Mahesh

05/10/24 11:16 AM IST

An obsession with ranking is harming India’s universities

In News
  • In this digital age, we reduce everything to numbers.
  • This trend has consumed the education ecosystem, as seen in the rise of global ranking agencies, which assign ranks to universities across the world every year.
  • India has its own National Institutional Ranking Framework to rank universities in the country.
Overemphasis on research
  • The global university ranking system is one-dimensional. It places huge emphasis on research activity.
  • A university’s research output is quantified using criteria such as the number of papers published, the impact factor of the journals in which they are published, the amount of research funding acquired, and the number of PhD students who were admitted and graduated.
  • These numbers by themselves cannot capture the quality, content, relevance, and impact of research.
  • Sadly, despite being aware of this flaw in the ranking process, Indian universities are all in the ranking race.
  • A world rank makes the university ‘visible’ and helps attract international students, world-class faculty, and academic partners, philanthropists, and donors. Universities and the government even tweak or alter policies to improve ranks.
  • A university that is not ranked may as well not exist — such is the power we have accorded to global rankings. 
The importance of teaching and mentoring
  • The metrics-driven, global rank-aspiring higher educational system has had an adverse impact on the teaching community.
  • The undue emphasis on research to the exclusion of other vital functions, especially teaching, has created a sorry situation in which university job aspirants are often judged by the number of research papers they have produced, the impact factor of the journals they were published in, and the numbers of their citations; and not by their ability to be an effective communicator, teacher, and mentor.
  • Once selected as a faculty member of the university, the candidate’s subsequent career advancement depends on additional metrics such as the amount of research grant funds secured and the number of PhD degrees awarded.
  • This obsession with metrics ignores the faculty member’s actual teaching and mentoring capacity as a determinant of career advancement in the higher education ecosystem.
  • Unlike in the case of research, teaching is not amenable to quantification using metrics.
  • It is the unmeasurable something that metrics cannot deal with.
  • So, the role for teaching has declined in the education system. In fact, in the perspective of a typical university professor, writing a paper or working on a grant application takes precedence over teaching today.
  • Ironically, teaching is a distraction from ‘all important’ research. University professors have become contractors churning out research papers to improve the university’s ranking. 
Way forward
  • Universities must realise that the scientific content of a paper and its possible societal and economic impact are more relevant than the impact factor of the journal in which it is published or the number of citations it garners.
  • Teaching must be recognised as an important function of the university and teachers must be encouraged to improve curricula.
  • Careful, unbiased judgment must replace metrics. Universities must enable a paradigm shift in their institutional culture to value and enable the success of both research and teaching efforts that collectively contribute to their overall mission as being centres of higher education and learning.
  • The metrics-focused system or ‘metricocracy’, if you will, which we mistakenly believe is synonymous with meritocracy, has created a situation which implies that education is a market rather than a citizen’s right and the state’s duty; knowledge is a commodity and not a means of becoming more humane; and students are customers, instead of future citizens.
  • This warped ecosystem views academic rigour as detracting from the business of delivering the product to the customer.
  • It kills creativity and the enthusiasm to learn, does not prepare students for the real world, and is harmful to future generations.
Source- The Hindu

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