Are rankings driving university elitism?

By Danny Byrne (Editor of TopUniversities.com). Ellen Hazelkorn's article "Do rankings promote trickle down knowledge?" makes an interesting case for the link between international university rankings and the concentration of resources by governments in a handful of elite institutions. There is no doubt that having the best universities and attracting the best minds is a common goal of governments around the world. But governments' reasons for harbouring this goal are bound up in forces much more powerful and far-reaching than the annual exercises that compare international university performance. The motivations driving nations to increase their participation rates, and those factors motivating them to create world-class universities, are very different. The former is driven primarily by an exponential increase in demand for skilled labour in a variety of industries.
Anthony P Carnevale and Stephen J Rose of Georgetown University's Centre of Education and the Workforce have released a report, entitled The Undereducated American, which argues that in the US the rise in the number of graduates has long been smaller than the increase in the number of skilled jobs. An educated mass workforce is required to keep feeding economic expansion. This trend is even more pronounced in a country like China, in which the demand created by accelerated industrial development led to a quintupling of the university participation rate in the decade following 1998. However, the motivating factor driving what Hazelkorn calls 'elitist' policies of prioritising investment in a small number of research-intensive universities is the need to innovate. This is largely separate from the drive to expand participation.
The ring-fencing of selective, research-intensive institutions is a fairly uniform policy among primarily state-funded systems. China has its C9 League, Japan its Global 30, Australia its Group of Eight, Canada its Group of Thirteen, the UK its Russell Group, and France its grandes ecoles. All but one of these groups was established long before the advent of international university rankings. In reference to Asia, the economist Richard Levin has identified the creation of world-class universities as a secondary phase that follows expansion, and he gives two primary motivations for doing so: "First, these rapidly developing nations recognise the importance of university-based scientific research in driving economic growth, especially since the end of the Second World War," Levin has said.
"Second, world-class universities provide the ideal context for educating graduates for careers in science, industry, government and civil society, who have the intellectual breadth and critical thinking skills to innovate and to lead." Governments may rightly or wrongly be hedging their bets on the assumption that a concentration of the world's brightest people is likely to drive innovation and stimulate economic growth (what Hazelkorn calls the 'trickle down' theory). Time will presumably tell, though it doesn't seem to have worked out too badly for the US. But even if it is an incorrect assumption and they would be better advised to adopt a more egalitarian funding model, this is still not an argument against university rankings.
Ranking performance might be viewed as a symptom of the success or otherwise of government higher education policy. But to make the logical leap from this to inferring that rankings themselves are the cause of elitist policies is to create a straw man and thereby ignore the far bigger global economic forces at play. QS World University Rankings® are about empowering prospective students to make informed choices, not dictating long-term government economic policy. Of course, as they have become more established and generated huge levels of interest, compilers of rankings need to take responsibility for the kinds of incentives we are creating, particularly for individual upwardly mobile institutions.
There is no getting away from the fact that if they prioritise prescriptive measures too heavily, rankings run the risk of exerting an unhelpful influence on universities' strategic planning. In September last year The Chronicle of Higher Education argued that packing a ranking full of prescriptive measures risks creating perverse incentives. I would briefly argue that in the case of the QS, the way we avoid this scenario is by being comparatively non-prescriptive. Our QS World University Rankings use six clearly defined and mutually distinct indicators, and our emphasis on academic and employer views means that we avoid dictating a rigid model to which a university must adhere in order to be successful.
Insofar as our rankings make use of qualitative data, our emphasis is on outcomes, in the form of recognised research excellence and the quality of graduates being produced, rather than the model that creates these outcomes. The job of rankings is to reflect existing excellence, not dictate the form that it should take. Of course, we realise that these six indicators do not cover every aspect of university performance. Our response to the demand for greater detail has been to create new, more targeted exercises rather than cramming more indicators into a given table - which in our view simply creates confusion.
This is why QS has this year for the first time released QS World University Rankings by Subject in 26 narrow disciplines, and why in the coming months we will be launching the QS Stars rating system. This will rate an unlimited number of universities in 30 areas, and is devised to overcome the obvious limitation that rankings can only assess a small, elite portion of the global higher education system. These innovations are unlikely to have any significant effect on long-term governmental policy or the global economy. But they might help students make more informed decisions about their study destinations.
See also: "L'élitisme républicain" and University Mergers Sweep Across Europe.