Getting my league table just right

One of the features of university life these days is the league table. As I mentioned in a previous post about a year ago, there are now some key rankings, both national and international, which we have to take very seriously. And while many academics express strong reservations about such tables, our stakeholders pay a lot of attention to them. Indeed the position of Irish universities in the world rankings published by Times Higher Education in particular has become almost a matter of national concern, with Irish media coverage and commentary of the results.

The global rankings are dominated by the United States, and to a slightly lesser extent the United Kingdom. It is clear that the standard criteria favour universities with a strong research performance and reasonably favourable student to faculty ratios. And so the European Commission has got in on the act and is planning a league table that, apparently, will focus less on research and more on teaching, in the hope that this will produce more European universities near the top of the rankings. I have some doubts whether such a system will produce very different results, as all the evidence from component parts of the more normal rankings show that research-intensive universities also score more highly when it comes to teaching. Though it will depend, of course, on what exactly the rankings will be asked to measure.

In the meantime, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Newcastle in England, Chris Brink, has also criticised the established league tables and declared himself in favour of ‘quality profiling’, setting out the institution’s own story like this:

‘Imagine, for example, that each university can respond to the question ‘Do you offer good-quality education?’ by exhibiting a profile of its educational programmes, its curricula, its teaching methodologies and technologies, its student cohorts, their entry- and exit-level performance, the contact hours offered, the teachers who will teach and the assessment methods used.’

I confess I can’t make anything of this at all. The framework he has in mind would clearly make rankings impossible. Actually, Professor Brinks suggests otherwise, but what he means is that you might still be able to say ‘whether one university was better than another’, but with the answer varying depending on ‘the needs of the person asking the question.’ In other words, no ranking. But the problem there is that, in reality, the only reason why league tables are taken so seriously is because they do rank the institutions with reference to empirical data, and that’s not about to change.

I suspect that many people working in higher education instinctively dislike league tables, but they have become a fact of life. By now, also, the criteria used are fairly well established. I suspect that trying to introduce new rankings which have as their starting point a desire to have some particular universities come nearer the top will be easily dismissed, as will tables that don’t supply rankings based on what will be described as objective metrics. Equally, we should not be mesmerised by all this, and above all should not plan all our strategies solely on the basis of what these might achieve in rankings terms. We should keep it all in perspective, and be relaxed. Particularly if we’re doing well in the tables…

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Tags: Chris Brink, Times Higher Education, university rankings

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