Global University Rankings and the Mediatization of Higher Education

Michelle Stack

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137475954
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

Higher Education Institutions simultaneously critique and participate in national and international rankings of universities. However, this creates a difficult situation since if universities do participate in rankings they acquiesce to a system based in media logics that has little to do with academic norms of research. If they do not participate in the rankings they risk losing public funding, students and donors in an increasingly competitive and globalized environment. This book delves into the influence of journalists, business tycoons and multinational corporations in defining what world class is and how it will be measured. Rankings provide us with a rich study for understanding how universities define, deploy and manage their assets and liabilities in a mediatized globalized economy.

1

The Spectacle of Global Rankings

Becoming an economic, ranked citizen

I was talking to some colleagues about young teens I knew who were anxious about getting into the right high school, which required an application process that necessitated more effort than I needed to get into a highly ranked doctoral program! I learned that for many children, this anxiety starts much younger than the teens. I was told about a film called Getting in ... Kindergarten that would explain it all to me: “Everyone is freaking out. It is a competition like no other. The contestants are four- and five-year-olds, their coaches obsessed New York parents. The goal – a spot at a good kindergarten” (15). The film provides stories of children attending one command “playdate” performance after another in what appears to be an endless quest for a spot in a “top” preschool. This endless quest shows how media-based educational rankings impact parental decisions before children know why their parents are suddenly concerned about their ability to draw a horse or put a peg in the right hole. Clearly media-created rankings will be part of many daily decisions that impact the choices made for them and by them. Arguably, children are socialized into this life of the spectacle so early that by the time children and their parents are looking at post-secondary options, it appears mere common sense to use rankings as a guide to decision-making. Children are also sorted into those families who make good choices for them and those who make bad choices. Absent is discussion of who has the resources to make choices and who does not. The spectacle is that everyone has choice.

Guy Debord famously declared that the “spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images” (16). The spectacle is focused on appearance. The spectacle of ranking conveys dramatic hope and fear. To be ranked highly is to be exceptional, and to not be ranked is to be a nobody in a society where spectacle – high visibility – is essential to be seen as having a worthy existence. To aspire to be highly ranked as an individual or institution requires a form of political labor: Children and adults must show they can make decisions, and making good decisions requires an understanding of relations of power. As the teens I have worked with explained to me, “the essay that shows I’m well rounded and doing stuff my peers do not do” is essential to getting into a top university. Standing out requires knowledge of relations of power. It is a form of political labor that is represented as personal – children and adults making good decisions.

Rankings are a performance in the field of higher education as well. How well institutions perform every year may be looked at as part of a larger spectacle of performance that determine excellence. For Van Parijs, rankings are akin to “being under the spell” of a mystifying dance: “... many universities have been jumping happily up and sadly down, sometimes quite spectacularly, from one year to the next, without this having anything whatever to do with any improvement or deterioration of their real-life performance” (17).

An HEI can be ranked higher or lower compared to other institutions without anything being different in the actual work of the institution or its performance (18). For instance, King Abdulaziz University shot up in the THEWUR and the ARWU rankings by offering lucrative contracts to over 100 foreign academics with strong publication records in the sciences for listing KAU as a secondary affiliation on all of their publications (19). Another example of an increase in ranking was caused by a changing methodology. Some rankers used per pupil expenditure as a proxy of quality, which sometimes has resulted in university leaders including water, library services and electricity as part of what they counted for per student expenditure (20).

Universities have not acquiesced to ranking merely for prestige but to gain international students, which are a key indicator for the “Big Three” (QS, THEWUR and ARWU) in determining whether an institution is world class (21). Some HEIs have merged in hopes that combining resources will improve their ranking. Larger institutions mean more citations, more students, more Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), and so a better chance at a higher ranking. The impact of rankings on policy varies: “The explicitly expressed motive behind this ‘big is beautiful’ reasoning is the urge to trim Finnish universities so that they can climb higher in the ladders of the international ranking lists of the world’s top universities” (22: pp. 289–290).

In an interview with Inside Higher Education, Ellen Hazelkorn, a prolific researcher on the subject of ranking, sums up why we should be concerned about decisions based on university rankings:

At the end of the day you can say they’re a commercial company; they’re a business. You want to eat McDonalds all day, we’re not telling you it’s the healthiest food but it’s your choice. But the problem is we have policy makers and others making serious decisions about higher education, about resource allocation and related issues, based on rankings (23).

Hazelkorn’s point about choice is central to this book. Rankings are not only used by individuals, but also by media and policymakers to frame winners and losers in the HE landscape. Moreover, rankings influence resource allocation decisions at the government level and the ability of HEIs to recruit students. Some studies maintain institutions are reinventing themselves to focus on research even if the institution historically was recognized for excellence in teaching and service. One study interviewed over 100 law faculty and administrators in the USA (20) to assess the impact of the US News and World Ranking Report on them. The authors found that rankings influenced admissions processes and students’ decision processes, creating differences through “the magnification of the small and statistically random, distinctions produced by the measurement apparatus” (20: p. 105).

A New York Times article aptly titled “Promiscuous College Come-ons” (24) provides examples of how HEIs encourage students to apply. It claims that HEIs “buy data to identify persuadable applicants and then approach them with come-ons as breathless as any telemarketer’s pitch.” Colleges, for example, send out VIP application letters to get numbers up so that they can reject more and increase their ranking on the all-important selectivity indicator (24). An analysis of U.S. News and World Report College Rankings found institutions that appear ranked on the front page of the ranking publication “experience a substantial improvement in admission indicators” (25: p. 432). In other words, universities that are highly ranked receive more applicants and can be more selective, which is helpful for future rankings. Perhaps the most apt and blunt response to the impact of rankings on the behavior of some universities came from Catherine Watt, a former institutional researcher at Clemson University, when asked about the ethics of deliberately manipulating ranking data:

We have been criticized for not fulfilling the mission of a public land-grant institution, Watt responded. But we have gotten really good press. We have walked the fine line between illegal, unethical, and really interesting (26).

Watt was swiftly criticized for her statements by a public affairs spokesperson from Clemson, but substantive evidence was not provided to refute her statement of data manipulation.

The role of public affairs staff as boundary workers who are expected to mediate between the academic and the media world will be elaborated upon in Chapter 6. Data manipulation is well known around rankings; however, a public relations official openly speaking about it is quite rare. These examples are illustrative of a “spectacular economy of education” (27: pp. 339–340). The branding or spectacular show of educational excellence can become more important than actually achieving excellence. Rankings, whether of universities or cities, are a powerful way to manufacture competition across entities or institutions that were previously not in competition with each other (28). As we will see, rankings also create publics or groups.

Adapting/acquiescing to media logics

The ranking process is one about which many HE leaders express ambivalence, while at the same time spending inordinate amounts of time and money to participate. However, there have been moments of resistance to rankings: The then-president of the University of Alberta, Indira Samarasekera, led a boycott in 2007 against the popular Maclean’s magazine, in which 25 out of over 90 institutions in Canada participated. Samarasekera stated: “It’s time to question these third-party rankings that are actually marketing driven, designed to sell particular issues of a publication with repurposing of their content into even higher sales volume special editions with year-long shelf life” (29). In the USA in 2007 the Annapolis Group, consisting of 125 predominately liberal arts colleges, asked members to refuse to fill out the U.S. News and World Report reputational survey or use the rankings in any promotional materials (30, 31). In 1999, 35 Asian universities refused to participate in Asiaweek (32), and in 2001 Asiaweek announced it would no longer produce the ranking (33). The resistance was short-lived, however; government funding cuts after 2008 in many jurisdictions has led to increased pressure to compete for funding.

After 2008, universities appeared in large part to acquiesce to the necessity of rankings and began to focus more on being ranked as “world class.” University administrators seem to agree that the rankings are flawed. Rankings presuppose a singular notion of education and that there is only one type of excellent, world-class university. A university’s ranking might improve if it channels efforts in this particular direction; however, such a shift should not be conflated with an actual improvement in education. Many rankers assume, for example, that money and class size are directly correlated to quality of education, yet numerous studies show this correlation is simplistic (34). Despite the methodological and epistemological flaws of popular rankings, they are hard to resist. In reference to the U.S. News and World Report rankings, Dean of Stanford Law, Larry Kramer, stated: “You distort your policies to preserve your ranking, that’s the problem. These rankings are corrosive to the actual education because this poll takes ... 12 criteria and now you have to fetishize them” (35). Kramer points to the conflicted reality experienced by university leaders: They know rankings are simplistic, flawed, and corrosive, but refusing to participate can lead to a loss of social and economic capital. Rankings have come to play a role in determining which universities are granted distinction, and universities with the resources to be constantly visible through the use of media logics are more likely to excel in the ranking game. Of course successful deployment of media logics does not in and of itself lead a university to be ranked as world class, as is clear from institutions such as the University of Phoenix; however, top-ranked universities do engage with media logics as part of the overall strategy to be visible – a prerequisite to “world-class” status.

Corporatization and technologies of visibility

Rankings could be approached as a technology of visibility in that through their deployment emphasis is placed on which institutions have exposure and which do not. As technologies of visibility, rankings are therefore implicated in shaping the landscape of HE. Andrea Brighenti advises that visibility is usually asymmetrical:

When a transformation in reciprocal visibilities occurs, i.e., when something becomes more visible or less visible than before, we should ask ourselves who is acting on and reacting to the properties of the field, and which specific relationships are being shaped. The field of visibility is distinct from all singular visibility flows. It is endowed with its own thresholds of relevance and its multiple ensembles of cones (36: p. 326).

Technology can make it appear that anyone can direct the flow of visibility, or that what is visible is what is popular. Hidden from view are the human decisions that go into how search engines work and how these decisions reshape how and what information is collected and given legitimacy. Technological developments in the last 15 years have changed how rankings render visible or obscure the location of different universities on the HE landscape. The rapid growth of rankings is parallel to the dramatic increase in the ability of technology to turn out massive amounts of what is often referred to as “big data.” Boyd and Crawford explain that big data is not merely about lots of data, but the changes in technology that allow the “capacity to search, aggregate, and cross-reference large data sets” (37: p. 665); central to the reverence of big data is a belief in its neutrality and objectivity. Yet, like any data, humans determine what to collect, how to “clean” data, and how to interpret and share it. The Web of Science (WOS), for example, is an influential citation index used by rankers to collect information for research productivity indicators, through a process that has become “conceived as ‘universal” (37: p. 617). Not surprisingly, WOS was created in academic centers that reached the top of the system they themselves created (38). Many regional and national rankings existed before the widespread use of the Internet; however, the proliferation of international rankings is in part due to the increasing representation of “big data” as a neutral decision-maker.

Algorithms, Latzer et al. argue, influence education and other areas of life through automating “nothing less than the commercialization of reality mining and reality construction in information societies” (39: p. 3). This process, the authors argue, is influencing all areas of life. In journalism, an editor looking at various events and news releases in the past would determine what she sees as most newsworthy; however, this type of judgment is replaced by “selection of news in which programmed command lines supplement – if not substitute – the selection of front-page editors, automatically prioritizing news stories” (40: p. 149). The argument could be made for a similar process of mediatization and automation in determining research productivity and excellence.

Closed clubs: a typology of visibility

Institutions with high reputational ranks continue to be ranked highly, with little room for institutions outside of the club to move in regardless of the quality of faculty, students and programs offered. The halo effect is protective for institutions who might not deliver all they state, but members will not publicly state so because association with the brand in and of itself is a powerful form of symbolic and often economic capital. The halo effect is a well-known phenomenon; in one study, for example, university students were asked to listen to a lecturer. The students who were told the lecturer was from a prestigious university and a well-known academic rated him higher and assumed he was 6 centimeters taller than did students who listened to the same lecturer but were told he was low status and from a second-rate university! (41) Simon Marginson argues that a halo effect can also be at play in how universities are perceived. If a university is well known, it is likely to get better reviews regardless of what is actually occurring at the institution (42).

Paradeise and Thoening (21) offer a typology of 4 groups of HEIs in terms of how they respond to rankings: top-of-the-pile universities, the wannabes, the venerables, and the missionaries. The top-of-the-pile groups rely on their massive capital – social and economic – and the order for the top-of-the-pile groups changes very little. The same universities appear in the top 10; Harvard might be 1st one year and 2nd the next, but large changes are unlikely. The wannabes are unlikely to upset a university in the top-of-the-pile, but they ardently hope to do so: “As compared with the agile elephants that top universities are, wannabes may look more like fragile gazelles. The faster they run to reach the top, the less they may build up a sustainable instrumentation” (p. 24).

These universities may have been focused on teaching or service, but to go up in the ranking requires putting these goals aside or at least lessening them to beef up research productivity (i.e. peer-reviewed journal articles counted in databases used by rankers). Wannabes and venerable institutions both have reputational capital, but venerable institutions abhor the external excellence criteria that wannabes jump to fulfill; venerable institutions have history and capital that allows them to appear to dismiss rankings. The missionary HEIs who work with disadvantaged students have clear teaching and service agendas; their concern for access and equity leads them to oppose the imposition of external standards that constrain opportunities for students already disadvantaged. They may try to ignore rankings but often see a decrease in their funding in consequence.

The typology is obviously simplistic but demonstrates how not all institutions respond in the same way to rankings, though all are impacted because of the importance funders – in particular, governments – place on rankings. A glass ceiling, for example, is created that results in high-ranking institutions only talking and recruiting from others in their club (43). African university leaders, for example, spoke to Hazelkorn about the difficulty finding collaborators to work with from high-ranked institutions because the collaboration would not assist their ranking (43). These dynamics suggest rankings reinforce and in some cases create clubs; universities may not have thought of themse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Spectacle of Global Rankings
• 4  Visualizing Excellence: The Times Higher Education Ranking
• 5  Mediatization and University Websites
• 6  Boundary Workers: University Public Affairs Workers
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1  Research Design, Methodology and Researchers Perspective
• Appendix 2  Biographies for Rankers and IREG Advisory Board Members
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index