Focus on rankings all about money

Universities see world rankings as means to attract paying students, writes education correspondent Niall Murray.

A GLOBAL industry has grown up around the league tables by which the world’s universities compare themselves to each other.

As competition for research funding and fee-paying students intensifies, particularly in colleges reliant on dwindling public investment, efforts to improve performance are being driven harder within our colleges.

At the Union of Students in Ireland congress a year ago, President Michael D Higgins suggested that rather than concentrating on teaching ability, third-level colleges hire academics for their ability to attract investment in research, a major factor in determining places in most of the tables.

The spotlight fell on University College Cork this week over its recent efforts to boost participation in one ranking exercise. Its president Michael Murphy asked his academic staff to give their international colleagues a hint at their desire to do well in the survey whose results will account for 40% of scores in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, released every September.

UCC says the communication suggested by Dr Murphy should not influence how people respond, but QS will be watching the outcome carefully for any dramatic rise in favourable results for the college.

Along with the Times Higher Education rankings, these are among the most prestigious in the minds of Western university leaders.

For a country of our size, we are represented very well in the top 200 of the QS table: Trinity College Dublin was 67th last year, University College Dublin 131st and UCC 190th. NUI Galway improved slightly last year to 287th, Dublin City University to 324th, while Dublin Institute of Technology and University of Limerick are just inside the top 500, with NUI Maynooth just outside it.

The Times ranking last October also placed TCD highest (110th compared to UCD’s 187th), with UCC and NUIG in the 300-350 banding and NUIM in the top 400.

But what is the value of these various placings, if any?

Ellen Hazelkorn, head of DIT’s higher education policy research unit, firmly believes they have very little reflection of quality of teaching, dominated as they are by indicators that co-relate to wealth.

Irish universities have complained, in response to some recent slippages in these tables, that falling Government funding means they do less well on measures of staffing levels, although this indicator does not generally count as highly in overall rankings as the views of international academics.

“Reputation is an incredibly important part of the rankings but it is one of the things that is most open to biases,” said Prof Hazelkorn.

“Whatever about knowing the reputation of a researcher because you have read their paper, how could anyone possibly know how good someone is as a teacher?”

She said there was no consideration, either, of the contexts in which colleges operated; whether they had high or low numbers of students from less well-off backgrounds, or what proportion of their degrees were populated by mature students.

“The major concern people have about these rankings is that, because higher education is a beacon for mobile investment in talent and attracting foreign direct investment, governments are using them in ways they were not intended and that is deeply concerning,” she said.

Education Minister Ruairi Quinn last January espoused the same view that universities can sacrifice the pursuit of excellence by focusing too much on their league positions.

The U-Multirank system, which he relaunched at that event for the European Commission, seeks to act as an alternative, taking a wider view of a range of higher education factors and removing competitiveness by the absence of numerically ordering universities. It sounds like a worthy project but has proved challenging so far, as it needs more than 500 worldwide institutions on board to succeed.

But despite all the question marks, Irish colleges clearly want to maintain strong placements in the rankings that they can use as a marketing tool. They are particularly focused on using them to help attract the non-EU students whose fees they need.

It will be interesting to see if the plans to merge, amalgamate and reduce numbers of third-level colleges result in greater co-operation between them to sell Ireland as an international education destination.

By doing so, they might even become somewhat less reliant on their individual league positions.