GLOBAL: Do rankings promote trickle down knowledge?

By Ellen Hazelkorn. During the 1980s, US President Ronald Reagan promulgated a strategy for economic growth based on cutting the top tax bracket from 70% to 50% and then to 28%. 'Trickle down' economics or 'Reaganomics' argued that putting more money in the hands of the elite would create more jobs and lessen inequality. International evidence, however, shows the results have been the opposite of the one predicted: while there is some benefit eventually for those who are relatively poor, the distribution of income and wealth has been increasingly unequal. In fact, the huge budget deficits facing many countries today are the result of the low taxation policies favoured by this strategy.
Is there a lesson here for the way rankings are being used to justify concentrating resources in a few elite universities? Has self-interest become confused with public interest? For many governments, the world-class university has become the panacea for ensuring success in the global economy. This is especially true in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, albeit the trends were apparent before this. Institutions and nations are constantly measured against each other using indicators of global capacity and potential in which comparative and competitive advantages come into play, as part of a wider geo-political struggle. These factors are driving governments and institutions to make profound changes to their higher education systems, pursue more elite agendas, alter their education programmes and privilege some disciplines and fields of inquiry in order to conform to indicators set by global rankings.
Three brief implications of this phenomenon:
1- Excellence initiatives
France, Germany, Russia, Spain, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Finland, India, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam and Latvia - among many other countries - have launched 'excellence' initiatives to create what are euphemistically called 'world-class universities'. Individual US states (for example Texas and Kentucky) have also sought to build or boost flagship universities, elevating them to Tier One status, a reference to US News & World Report College Rankings. The prevailing response has been the neo-liberal model, which concentrates resources in a small number of elite universities, often referred to as the 'Harvard-here' model. The aim is to encourage greater vertical or hierarchical (reputational) differentiation between higher education institutions, with much greater distinction between research (elite) universities and teaching (mass) higher education institutions. Because few countries can afford the estimated EUR2 billion annually per institution required for a place among the world's top 20 without sacrificing other policy objectives, many governments are questioning their commitment to 'mass' higher education and asking whether their institutions are elite or selective enough. This comment by President Sarkozy in 2009 is typical: "We want the best universities in the world...How many universities do we have? 83? We're not going to divide the money by 83." Changes in UK funding policy are likely to intensify competition for elite students, increasing concentration in a handful of universities. Institutions have followed a similar strategy. There is mounting evidence of changes to admissions policies to attract more elite students because of the correlation between rankings and selectivity. This involves admitting students on a probationary or part-time basis or establishing associated colleges to hide weaker students from official data returns or limiting class or cohort size. Others have abandoned access or associated degree programmes because of their affect on graduation-completion rates.
2- The 'world-class teaching universities' retort
The over-emphasis on 'world-class' universities has provoked a retort which says we need not just 'world-class research universities' but also 'world-class teaching universities' - as if there are only two models. A much-criticised problem with rankings is their over-reliance on bibliometrics, which privileges basic big-lab research in the bio-medical sciences. But not only does this method value some disciplines, ideas and faculty as more important than others; it also assumes citation count is an appropriate measure of impact. It reduces research's contribution to society as something occurring only within the academy, and ignores the fact that global challenges require collaborative solutions and inter-locking knowledge and innovation systems. Likewise, assuming 'teaching' refers to educational provision, there is huge diversity in pedagogical, curricular, disciplinary approaches that is ignored by the simplicity of this construct. We would be aghast, for example, if all actors performed using the same technique! Not only is the diversity of institutional missions much broader than research versus teaching, but the attributes of research-teaching and 'world-class'-regional are not mutually exclusive.
3- The 'lift all boats' chorus
There is a strong and vocal chorus arguing that investment in a few elite universities or scientific disciplines will 'lift all boats'. This is based on the view that high-ranked universities are better than those lower ranked.
While it is true top-ranked universities produce the majority of all peer-reviewed papers, concentration is most relevant only in the four disciplines of 'big science'. However, it is not obvious that the elite model of knowledge creation will create sufficient, patentable or transferable knowledge that can be exploited and used by society. Indeed, there is mounting evidence that concentration could reduce overall national research capacity with specific "knock-on consequences for regional economic performance and the capacity for technology innovation", according to the 2003 Lambert Review.
The key factor underpinning improved research performance is the total level of investment. But ultimately it is the capacity to translate new knowledge into new or improved products and services - none of which is measured by rankings. The 'world-class' concept has promulgated a model of higher education derived from a handful of well-established US elite universities with considerable budgets and endowment earnings. But, should higher education policy simply be about "producing hordes of Nobel laureates or cabals of tenure and patent bearing professors", according to a 2008 Lisbon Council document?
Higher education operates within a complex eco-system; fundamental changes will have long-lasting implications for society and the economy. Governments and universities must stop obsessing about global rankings and the top 1% of the world's 15,000 institutions. Instead of simply rewarding the achievements of elites and flagship institutions, policy needs to focus on the quality of the system-as-a-whole. There is little evidence that trickle-down works.
Professor Ellen Hazelkorn is Vice President of research and enterprise, dean of the Graduate Research School and head of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU) at the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland. Her book Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education. The Battle for World-Class Excellence, is published by Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.