The popularity of worldwide league tables

The dynamics of higher education are first and foremost a result of the competition for reputation. Higher education systems are characterized by a “reputation race”. The recent popularity of world university rankings only appears to amplify the higher education reputation race. Institutions that at one time compared themselves only to others in the same country now look across national boundaries for peers. One major consequence of this is the intensified competition among universities to prove their performance through global university league tables or ranking exercises. The annual Academic Ranking of World Universities by ShanghaiJiaoTongUniversity (commenced in 2003) and the Times Higher Education/QS World University Rankings (commenced in 2004) provide extra stimuli for both policy makers and higher education institutions to try to conquer higher positions at the global ladders of institutional reputation. They have already had discernable effects on institutional behavior. Because they largely tend to favor traditional academic performance, particularly in research, these ranking instruments lead to an increase of mimicking behavior (imitating the high reputation institutions), and hence to more homogeneity, rather than diversity.

One of the most frequently cited of these global rankings is that undertaken by ShanghaiJiaoTongUniversity in China, which developed a ranking system for evaluating universities worldwide in terms of their relevance to the postgraduate and research needs. The criteria by which they evaluated the top 500 universities are listed in the table below. Despite the narrowness and selectivity of this ranking scheme, in particular its neglect of teaching quality, student learning experiences as well as its bias towards natural science research, it has met so far few concerted efforts to discredit the ranking process, and thus has been widely cited as providing a legitimate evaluation of universities. The THE/QS WorldUniversity Rankings has initiated a similar index in 2004. What is evident from both these developments is the fact that there is now a clear international attempt to develop a league table of world universities.

Apparently, league tables of this type would reinforce the status of the comprehensive research university model, thus contributing to institutional integration and hierarchization. To excel in the global competition for reputation, universities increasingly turn to and focus on research domain. Those universities taking up top positions in the league table often attribute their success to research excellence. Shortly after the Times Higher Education announced its result of World University Rankings 2008, a few winning institutional leaders shared their successful stories:

-          “While the very idea of comparing universities is fraught with methodological problems, we are beginning to see a pattern in these surveys that mirrors the research excellence that we have fostered at UBC.” “Research focus and commitment to interdisciplinary and internationally collaborative scholarship have contributed to our success.” (Stephen J. Toope, President of University of British Columbia) (UBC Media Release, October 9, 2008; THE, October 9, 2008)

-          “Our distinguished faculty have a long history of success in attracting competitive research funding. And in the global race for talent, smart people attract other smart people.” (Heather Munroe-Blum, Principal of McGillUniversity) (THE, October 9, 2008)

-          “We are internationally known for our research strengths in engineering and computing, life sciences and biomedicine, social sciences, and natural sciences, among others.” (Tan Chorh Chuan, President Designate, NationalUniversity of Singapore) (THE, October 9, 2008)

-          “We have built upon this tradition by ensuring that we have the most able staff and students from around the world, investing heavily both in attracting high-calibre researchers…and in research training for young Australians.” (Michael Spence, Vice Chancellor, University of Sydney)(THE, October 9, 2008)

Notably, the above mentioned universities take up in a sense the next-to-the-best positions in the THE/QS 2008 league table (between 20 and 37). Their successful stories indicate to a large extent their endeavor to further strengthen research capacity and outcome in order to move higher along the ladder, a vision which should be shared by many more positioned even lower in this league table. Employing Foucault’s conception and analysis of disciplinary power, Sauder and Espeland (2009) argues “Rankings create a public, stable system of stratification comprised of unstable positions. The result is a social structure exquisitely suited for generating anxiety, uncertainty, meticulous monitoring, and discipline. Processes of normalization and surveillance change how members make sense of their organizations, their work, and their relations to peers. In this way, abstract systems become embedded in organizations and embodied in members and are the reason why organizations cannot buffer the effects of rankings.” (p. 79)

As a result, such major ranking systems quickly gain great international prominence, which is evident with the attention that universities worldwide pay to the results. Cheerful are not only those universities ranked top but also many ranked a couple of hundreds of posts below the top, as “there are about 30,000 universities in the world,” which is often noted by those that simply make the list, but not ranked high. It is not surprising that “less prestigious and specialist schools may move into international niches as a way to bypass (or move up within) national stratification systems of higher education.” (Marginson and Rhoades, 2002, p. 304) Consequently, these major ranking systems undermine or even legitimate the Emerging Global Model (EGM) of the research university.

The Emerging Global Model (EGM) of the research university

Research universities carry increasing international feature and nature. A group of research universities that represent the leading edge of higher education’s ride over globalization forces has been defined as the Emerging Global Model (EGM) of the 21st century research university. “EGM universities are characterized by an intensity of research that far exceeds past experience. They are engaged in worldwide competition for students, faculty, staff, and funding; they operate in an environment in which traditional political, linguistic, and access boundaries are increasingly porous. These top universities look beyond the boundaries of the countries in which they are located to define their scope as trans-national in nature. Their peers span the globe.” (Mohrman et al., 2008, p. 6)

The EGM is an intensification and globalization of the development of research universities indeed, though many of their features are rooted in the American experience of the past four decades. There may be only a few dozen fully developed EGM universities at this stage, but they are the institutions that head virtually every list of leading universities worldwide. This is evident with the fact that almost all the top positions in the major world university rankings are taken by the EGM universities: they consistently occupy most the top 20 posts in both the Academic Ranking of World Universities and the Times Higher Education/QS World University Rankings. At the same time, thousands of colleges and universities worldwide share to different degrees the features of the EGM, and this model is being embraced throughout the world (Levin et al., 2006; Altbach and Balan, 2007; Baker, 2007).

Notably, the EGM universities endeavor deliberately to connect their research activities in life sciences, technology, social sciences and humanities around global issues. In this regard, the mushrooming international university consortia, featuring mostly the research alliance type of relationship, would to a large extent serve to substantiate the EGM. These alliances include the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), Universitas 21, Academic Consortium 21, Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), League of European Research Universities (LERU), Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), and Association of East Asian Research Universities (AEARU), to name a few. Perhaps the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) can provide a good example to illustrate this phenomenon. Established in 2006, the IARU is an alliance of ten of the world’s leading research universities (AustralianNationalUniversity, ETH Zurich, National University of Singapore, PekingUniversity, University of California at Berkeley, University of Cambridge, University of Copenhagen, University of Oxford, University of Tokyo and YaleUniversity). It is a strategic drawing together of universities that share a similar vision and “work jointly on benchmarking.” Similarly, the Universitas 21 aims to facilitate a global-focused research perspective among the member universities and “to create opportunities for them on a scale that none of them would be able to achieve operating independently or through traditional bilateral alliances.” With the same stance, the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) visions to work together “across disciplines tackling the world’s global problems.”

References

Altbach, P. and Balan, J. (eds.) (2007). World Class Worldwide: Transforming Research Universities in Asia and Latin America. Baltimore, MD: JohnsHopkinsUniversity Press.

Baker, D. (2007). Mass Higher Education and the SuperResearchUniversity: A Symbiotic Relationship. International Higher Education, 49, 9-10.

Levin, H.M., Jeong, D. and Ou, D. (2006). What is A WorldClassUniversity? Presentation at the

Comparative and International Education Society 50^th Annual Conference, Honolulu, 16 March.

Marginson, Simon and Rhoades, Gary (2002). Beyond National States, markets and systems of higher education: A glonacal agency heuristic. Higher Education, 43(3), 281-309.

Mohrman, Kathryn, Ma, Wanhua and Baker, David (2008). The ResearchUniversity in Transition: The Emerging Global Model. Higher Education Policy, 2008(21), 5-27.

Sauder, Michael and Espeland, Wendy Nelson (2009). The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change. American Sociological Review, 74(February): 63-82.

Times Higher Education (October 9, 2008). World beaters: but what makes these universities special? Available online at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403834&c=1

University of British Columbia (Media Release, October 9, 2008). UBC’s Ranks in the Top 35 of the World’s Universities. Available online at http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/media/releases/2008/mr-08-135.html