Review of Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education

Citation

Kim, J. and Bastedo, M. (2012), "Review of Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education", Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 19 No. 3, pp. 431-432. https://doi.org/10.1108/14635771211243030

Every year, various evaluative entities compare colleges and universities, rank them in order, and release the results. The media covers the results, noting which college ranks where and which has gone up or down. The public, including students, parents and alumni, consumes the information and judge institutions' performance. Countries look for how many colleges from their country are in top 100 or 200 of global rankings. Most of all, higher education institutions themselves have a keen interest in rankings. They criticize the measurements used for producing rankings, but use the ranking results for marketing themselves for students, donators, and alumni. The rankings phenomenon invokes a set of questions: why are stakeholders interested in rankings? What do rankings measure? Are rankings valid measures of institutional performance? Should we be using rankings to benchmark our institutions, and what are the social consequences for higher education more broadly?

Ellen Hazelkorn's Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education explains why rankings have been influential and how various stakeholders including governments, higher education institutions, and students respond to them. Rankings consciousness around the world has risen in response to globalization and the pursuit of new knowledge as the basis of economic growth, and the drive for increased public accountability and transparency. Especially after the recent global financial crisis, governments are eager to have high‐performing universities that can contribute economically by growing human resources. Rankings function as a proxy to measure and compare performance, and some governments link the results to funding, focusing limited resources on high‐performing institutions. Yet, the policy options and strategic choices vary by a country's value and the culture that is attached to higher education. While some nations focus on creating elite “world‐class universities” by competition, others try to establish a “world‐class system,” balancing teaching and research.

On the other hand, students have become savvy consumers. The increasing costs of higher education lead students to assess benefits and opportunity costs that institutions and programs bear. This process requires more consumer information through guidebooks or comparative benchmarking data. Reviewing the research, Hazelkorn argues that rankings are more influential on student college choice than ever before. Rankings are most likely to influence international, graduate, high‐achieving, Asian, and affluent students. Although institutional reputation and quality matters to students, further investigation is needed to understand the extent rankings matter in student application behavior and college choice across different country contexts.

Institutions believe rankings influence key stakeholders, including government, funding agencies, and students. Regardless of their opinion about the validity of rankings, almost all institutions want to improve their positions in domestic and international rankings. Hazelkorn provides examples of significant management changes in universities' strategic planning, institutional research and data collection, organizational change, marketing and advertising, and resource allocation. Nonetheless, she argues that increased competition may have negative consequences as institutions place higher priority on research than teaching, and may manipulate the data they provide to ranking agencies.

The book provides a critical reflection about the impact of rankings on higher education, how and in what way rankings influence policy, institutional management, and students. Researchers will get a solid, research‐based picture of the influence of rankings students and institutions. For administrators, the book opens an opportunity to reflect on their own practice and to question how to use rankings constructively, if at all. Although the book describes how rankings have affected higher education, it also challenges its readers to reflect on the fundamental problems of rankings: what is “quality?” Are rankings valid measures for higher educational institutions' performance? Is it valid to compare institutions across different contexts? How can we use rankings for helpful purposes?

The book supports the argument that the global environment will sustain rankings and institutions will react to them. With an extensive literature review and detailed description of rankings responses across different countries, institutions, and students, it contributes to a more dynamic understanding of the rankings phenomenon. As Hazelkorn concludes, there is no single or obvious way to assess and measure quality and performance across diverse public and private higher education institutions in different social, economic and national contexts. Ideally, rankings should consider diverse ways of measuring the performance of institutions with different characteristics. They also need to take various purposes of different stakeholders into consideration when designing ranking measures.