The Global Academic Rankings Game

Changing Institutional Policy, Practice, and Academic Life

Maria Yudkevich, Philip Altbach, Laura Rumbley, Maria Yudkevich, Philip Altbach, Laura Rumbley, Maria Yudkevich, Philip G. Altbach, Laura E. Rumbley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317387374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

The Global Academic Rankings Game provides a much-needed perspective on how countries and universities react to academic rankings. Based on a unified case methodology of eleven key countries and academic institutions, this comprehensive volume provides expert analysis on this emerging phenomenon at a time when world rankings are becoming increasingly visible and influential on the international stage. Each chapter provides an overview of government and national policies as well as an in-depth examination of the impact that rankings have played on policy, practice, and academic life in Australia, Chile, China, Germany, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Global Academic Rankings Game contributes to the continuing debate about the influence of rankings in higher education and is an invaluable resource for higher education scholars and administrators as they tackle rankings in their own national and institutional contexts.

1 Global University Rankings as the 'Olympic Games' of Higher Education

Citius, altius, fortius? ¹

Maria Yudkevich, Philip G. Altbach and Laura E. Rumbley

DOI: 10.4324/9781315677170-1

The most important thing in the Olympic Games

is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life

is not conquering but fighting well.

Pierre de Coubertin

What's in a Metaphor?

There are many metaphors that can be, and frequently are, applied to global university rankings. Some critics say that rankings are a kind of general disease that infects universities and even countries. These individuals treat rankings as a fever that make universities and governments crazy with concern about short-term, and often irrelevant, achievements in relation to positions on the league tables— sometimes neglecting the real quality of research and education in higher education. Some people compare rankings with bubbles, akin to the ways in which financial bubbles are perceived. Here, they say that ranking positions can be artificially improved in the absence of real advances in quality. Some experts compare rankings to auto races. Others say that rankings are like a type of game, built according to certain rules that universities can learn how to play. In the world of sport, the Olympic Games are arguably the most important games in the world and, from our perspective, the game-like attributes of global higher education rankings and the Olympic Games have a great deal in common.

The word ‘game’ can be defined in multiple ways, including “a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other,” “a procedure or strategy for gaining an end” (Merriam-Webster, 2015), or “a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2015). In general, we agree with the metaphor of rankings as a type of game. Moreover, we believe that, for many universities, rankings represent (as the Olympic Games represents for nations) very important, high-stakes exercises, which exert influences on institutions’ internal policies and affect their access to external resources and opportunities.

Rankings, in parallel with the Olympics, are highly competitive, offering participants the potential to earn prestigious prizes or rewards that can shape their prospects for the future in profound and quite tangible ways. For athletes, this may result in national and international fame; opportunities for lucrative endorsements; a secure post-competition place in the future of their sport, for example as a coach, spokesperson, or broadcaster; and even chances for cross-over careers into business and entertainment. Similarly, universities have much to gain from outstanding performance in the global rankings, including high international visibility; interest from desirable top-tier prospective students and faculty, domestic and foreign; money from private funding agencies, industry, philanthropists, and government sources; and greater opportunities for graduate employment with high-profile employers.

The Global Rankings 'Playing Field'

The widely recognized global rankings—specifically, the Academic Rankings of World Universities (ARWU), commonly known as the Shanghai Rankings, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and the QS rankings—are essentially the ‘university Olympics.’ There are other somewhat influential global rankings, such as:

• The CWTS Leiden Ranking, which ranks a select group of 750 universities and "is based exclusively on bibliographic data from the Web of Science database produced by Thomson Reuters" (CWTS Leiden Ranking, 2015, n.p.);
• The SCImago Institutions Rankings, which focus on research institutions that have "over 100 published works included in the SCOPUS database" during the previous year, and consider three main categories of indicators: research, innovation, and website size, plus the number of inbound links to the domain (SCImago Institutions Rankings, n.d.);
• U-Multirank, which considers the dimensions of "teaching and learning, research, knowledge transfer, international orientation and regional engagement," and is designed to allow users to customize rankings tailored to their own interests by allowing them to select the performance measures/ indicators that users consider to be most valuable or relevant (U-Multirank, 2015, n.p.); and
• The Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities, also known as the NTU Ranking, which is hosted by National Taiwan University (National Taiwan University Ranking, 2015).

And there are many national rankings, such as that produced annually by U. S. News and World Report in the United States and Maclean’s in Canada, along with Poland’s Perspektywy University Ranking, Germany’s CHE University Ranking, the Asahi Shimbun rankings in Japan, and that published by The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom, among many others. It has been estimated there are at least 58 national higher education rankings worldwide (IREG, 2015). In addition to presenting information on 19 different global university rankings, the Wikipedia webpage devoted to university rankings has a list of regional and country rankings that is quite long and very diverse. It provides information on ranking activities (often involving multiple ranking exercises per country) in some 28 different countries, and regionally in the European Union, Asia, and Latin America (Wikipedia, 2015a).

As with the Olympic Games, the global university rankings pull together actors who share both an appreciation for the highest levels of performance on a worldwide stage and a drive to compete to win. Not all entrants in these contests are created equal, however. To perform well in elite competitions such as the Olympic Games and the global university rankings game—which requires many years of consistently high quality, specialized training and often the fielding of large, multi-member teams, the development of unique strategies, and the reliance on high-cost equipment or facilities—being smart and rich helps. Deep familiarity and experience with the rules of the game is also a key asset, as success often hinges on leveraging key strengths and minimizing troublesome weaknesses.

It is often claimed that some countries hold distinct advantages over others in specific Olympic sports. For example, among the Nordic countries it is quite natural to be proficient in winter sports. These countries feature snowy mountains and long winters, therefore it is easier to develop a strong base in sports such as alpine skiing. Such inherent attributes may explain the success enjoyed by some countries in the Olympic Games. Indeed, if one looks at the list of medalists for Olympic events involving skiing (such as alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, or Nordic combined), it can be easily seen that this list represents countries where there are good natural training conditions. Not surprisingly, there are no countries from Africa, Southeast Asia, or the South Pacific on this list. More generally, athletes from African countries do not feature among the winners of the Winter Games at all—at least for the last few decades.

One can see parallels between the Olympics and the global rankings in relation to this phenomenon of inherent advantage. For example, it is generally accepted that the world’s English-speaking countries and institutions are in a much more favorable position (vis-à-vis the rankings), in comparison to those situated in the non-English-speaking world, because their academic systems function in the global language of science. Thus, academics at institutions in English-speaking countries can publish more easily and successfully in major peer-reviewed journals, many of which—incidentally—not only publish in English, but are administered by publishers or scholarly associations headquartered in the same select group of English-speaking countries. Further, those judging whether articles are accepted for publication—the peer reviewers—are generally concentrated in these countries. It would be as if all of the Olympic referees hailed from, or were concentrated in, just a few key countries. Of course, Olympic referees come from a much wider network of countries. However, like the academic peer reviewers, they share a common set of values across their relatively small community. For the referees, this means that they have likely been trained to appreciate established, mainstream norms for athleticism and technique. Similarly, academic peer reviewers esteem what they are most familiar with in relation to such matters as research methodology and standard approaches to academic writing.

The Medal Count: Going for the Gold

Rankings positions—just like Olympic medals—are a zero-sum game. At the Olympics, there is only one #1 (i.e., gold medalist), #2 (silver medalist), and #3 (bronze medalist). For universities competing for positions in the global rankings, the same holds true. There is only one #1 university, and only 100 institutions can be named in the top 100—even though, in reality, excellence is not limited to any specific number of academic institutions.

Simply participating in a highly competitive race is a mark of seriousness and prestige, and actually making a strong showing on the rankings (like medaling in the Olympics) is a source of national pride. The public discussion around these competitions is clear evidence of this. As soon as a new edition of a global ranking is released, these results receive a great deal of public attention, both in the mainstream media and in the media devoted to higher education. Both high positions in university rankings and large numbers of Olympic medals are interpreted as signs of national prosperity, in terms of human capital and in relation to ongoing relevance on the global stage. If, however, the results are not so good (in rankings or in Olympic competition) analysis and criticism often follow. Is the country inherently disadvantaged, somehow? Is low government support, or poor management of the resources allocated, to blame for the lack of positive results? Or is simple ‘bad luck’ the issue? In the most acute of circumstances, there may also be accusations of corruption or rigging.

In academic rankings, there is a good deal of consistency over time because strength that is built up in research or student selectivity does not quickly change. In the Olympics, athletes must prove themselves anew each time—although countries that invest in athletic facilities and the training of athletes over time, tend to do well—just as occurs with university rankings.

Some countries make substantial efforts to be serious contenders—both in terms of rankings and with respect to such major international sporting events as the Olympics—and spend a lot of money to achieve this goal. They name top performance in such arenas as a national priority and consider the achievements in these spheres to be important in terms of political dynamics, as well. Several of the university or higher education ‘excellence initiatives’ in a range of countries explicitly mention better performance in the rankings as a key goal. For example, the Russian 5–100 program aims specifically at ensuring that five Russian universities will place in the top 100 of one or more of the various global rankings by 2020 (Alexeev, 2014). The French government recently announced an initiative to create one gigantic university in France (merging several existing universities) “with the aim of building a university big enough to compete with global giants like Harvard or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)” (BBC, 2014). China has demonstrated immense (and rather effective) efforts to secure stronger and stronger showings in the leading global rankings by supporting a limited number of leading universities in the country through targeted programs, such as the 985 and 211 projects. These well-known initiatives have invested more than 18 billion USD in approximately 140 Chinese universities over more than a decade, and have yielded impressive results: 32 Chinese universities are now in the top 500 of the Academic Ranking of World Universities—as compared to eight in 2004—although only two of these institutions have made it into the top 50.

In China, as elsewhere, the various excellence initiatives name increased global competitiveness as an explicit goal—not unlike what we witness as national teams from countries around the world gear up for participation in the Olympics.

Excellence Begets Excellence: The Need for 'Feeder Systems'

Among the ranks of the world’s most elite athletes, and among the world’s top universities, it is rare for ‘winners’ to emerge from weak systems. This puts a premium on cultivating entire systems, which ultimately enable elite performance to emerge. To obtain top positions in rankings, it is necessary to invest in top universities, but also in the broader academic system in which these most competitive institutions operate—that is, with few exceptions around the world, it seems important to have a healthy multi-level system.

Experience indicates that it is not possible to create several world-class universities (with prospects for a sustainable future) in any one country without investing in the national higher education system as a whole. Why? There are multiple ways in which any system’s strongest actors rely on the health and dynamism of the broader ecosystem. For example, the best national universities need to have a renewable supply of young, talented, well-trained minds. Similarly, to be competitive in the Olympics, a well-developed and adequately funded infrastructure supporting child development and youth sports must be in place. World-class universities also rely on systems that allow for early recognition of children with intellectual promise, and support these youngsters in their studies, regardless of parental income or social circumstances. One can see the same situation in sports: For athletes to achieve their peak performance, it may be crucial to start working with them at an early age. And upon identifying those children with the most promise, mechanisms are needed to support them and their families to access opportunities for proper training.

For strong universities to meet their full potential, they require a competitive environment in which to operate. Ideally, they need to be placed in a position where they must actively compete with other universities for students, funding, and faculty. If some universities are simply singled out to ‘become the best,’ while the rest of the higher education system around them is in relatively bad condition, this can hardly provide a generalized context of quality, excellence, or healthy aspirations to excel. In other words, without a national environment where there are teaching and research activities of some quality, there will be little to no competition among universities at the local or national level. Lacking experience with a competitive environment at the local or national level, it will then be extremely difficult for those institutions aspiring to become competitive at the international level to do so. The same can be argued in the context of sports: The opportunity to practice with and compete against the best in one’s field provides aspiring champions with essential opportunities to discover their weaknesses, hone their skills, and stretch to new heights. It is significant that countries such as Germany and France—with a tradition of funding their universities fairly equally and in contexts of limited domestic competiti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Global University Rankings as the 'Olympic Games' of Higher Education Citius, altius, fortius? 1
• 2 Managing Expectations An Australian Perspective on the Impact and Challenges of Adopting a University Rankings Narrative
• 3 Global University Rankings From Afar The Case of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
• 4 Global Rankings and World-Class University Aspirations in China
• 5 Embracing and Rejecting Rankings The German Case
• 6 Imposing Global University Rankings on Local Academic Culture Insights from the National University of Malaysia
• 7 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Second among Equals in the Netherlands?
• 8 Global University Rankings in the Polish Context The University of Warsaw, a Case Study
• 9 The Ranking Game on the Russian Battlefield The Case of the Higher School of Economics
• 10 Middle East Technical University Quest for Academic Excellence not Driven by Global Rankings at One Turkish Institution
• 11 "There is a World Out There We Can Step Into" The University of Reading (UK) and the World Rankings
• 12 Meeting the Rankings Challenge How a Young American University Enhances its Global Position
• 13 Globalization and the Continuing Influence of Rankings—Positive and Perverse—on Higher Education
• Contributors
• Index