The rise of global higher-education rankings may exacerbate inequalities between and within institutions, according to a new paper published in the research journal Minerva.
That’s because rankings may influence policy makers to direct money to a small number of select research institutions competing for “world class” status and, within those universities, disproportionately to programs in science and technology. Major global rankings—in particular the Academic Ranking of World Universities, whose latest version is being released today by Shanghai Jiao Tong University—tend to heavily weight scientific research output, including top international prizes and publications in premier scientific journals.
“Because of what they measure, rankings can encourage countries or higher-education systems to channel money to particular universities and to channel resources into specific fields,” said Brendan Cantwell, an assistant professor of educational administration at Michigan State University and the paper’s lead author.
Mr. Cantwell and his co-author, Barrett Taylor, an assistant professor of counseling and higher education at the University of North Texas, examined data over a six-year period, 2003 to 2008, for American universities that are designated as research intensive by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and for which data were available.
Using regression analysis, they identified a handful of variables that predicted whether a university placed highly on the Shanghai ranking or whether it was unranked. Among the factors that significantly predicted a higher score on the Shanghai rankings: the amount of federal research dollars an institution received and the share of its doctorates awarded in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Wealthier private universities were also more likely to be top ranked than their public counterparts.
These distinctions may be self-reinforcing, in that governments and other research-supporting organizations often reward institutions that do well on such measures by directing additional resources to them, widening the gap between these universities and the rest.
Rankings, Mr. Cantwell and Mr. Taylor write, “encourage competition along the lines that are measured by them and tacitly discourage activities not valorized by these metrics.”
However, Mr. Cantwell was quick to add that their model does not prove causality. That is, it’s not possible to say definitively that if an extra $10-million is spent on a university, or if it increases its number of Ph.D.'s in the STEM disciplines, it will rise a certain number of positions on the Shanghai ranking. After all, the rankings have a finite number of spots, Mr. Cantwell noted, so, mathematically, “not every university can move up two places.”
Even so, that has not stopped countries and institutions from spending more in an effort to climb the rankings tables. Countries as varied as China and Germany have undertaken plans to improve the quality of certain designated universities and have invested more in science and technology. Earlier this month, the Japanese government said that over the next decade, it would spend about $100-million apiece each year to help 10 of its universities break into the top 100.
In fact, the United States is somewhat unusual in that it has no systemic effort to improve the international standing of its universities and because universities here have historically paid greater attention to domestic rankings, like those compiled by U.S. News & World Report, than global ones. Nonetheless, Mr. Cantwell said federal policy does acknowledge the importance of global academic competition, such as in President Obama’s pledge to increase spending on university research.
Mr. Cantwell said it also was appropriate to focus on American universities in this study because institutions from this country dominate global rankings—indeed, the American research university largely is the model embraced by international rankers. On a practical level, limiting the analysis to a single country ensured that the researchers had access to comparable and extensive data for many institutions.