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Mahesh

04/03/24 11:25 AM IST

Relevance of University Ranking

In News
  • Since the first appearance of global university ranking systems around two decades ago, rankings have come to dominate the attention in higher education ecosystems around the world.
  • Today, many countries including China, Japan, and Russia have committed substantial resources to elevate the statuses of their universities to “world class” as defined by these rankings.
Ranking System
  • At present, the Times Higher Education (THE), the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), the Academic Ranking of World Universities (also known as the ‘Shanghai Ranking’), and the U.S. News & World Report are the most popular rankings schemes worldwide and hold significant weight and influence in shaping educational policies and priorities in the higher education sector in many countries.
  • A ranking system orders the higher education institutes in a place (country, region, etc.) by their accomplishments on various fronts — including teaching, research, reputation, industry-focused research, and collaborative efforts.
  • Each of these activities is complex, multifaceted, and highly contextual, but for the purposes of the ranking, an institute’s performance on each one is translated into a few composite indicators, which are then combined to create a consolidated score.
  • The highest ranked universities in various ranking systems are old, large, wealthy, research-intensive, science-focused, English-speaking, and in the Global North. Studies have also shown that higher scores in research excellence in rankings are influenced to a great degree by two factors: citations and reputation. 
Concern over rankings
  • The Igor Chirikov of the University of California, Berkeley, reported that “universities with frequent QS-related contracts had an increase of 0.75 standard deviations (~140 positions) in QS World University Rankings and an increase of 0.9 standard deviations in reported QS faculty-student ratio scores over five years, regardless of changes in the institutional quality.
  • In 2022, Harvard and Yale Universities led a boycott against the U.S. News & World Report’s ranking over what they said was a conflict between the careers they wished their law students to have after graduation and the careers the ranking incentivised.
  • Utrecht University in The Netherlands withdrew from the THE world rankings in 2023 for similar reasons. In India, several IITs have boycotted the same rankings.
  • To use the THE platform, website, and related services, universities are required to agree to an additional set of terms and conditions in addition to the general set.
Way forward
  • While rankings may have incentivised some improvement in the quality of some universities, there is growing recognition that they also incentivise a number of perverse and harmful behaviours and produce systemic long-term negative effects.
Source- The Hindu

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