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OPINIONS
uNIvErSITy rANkINgS: TO BE Or NOT TO BE by Wong Kah Keng
T
hE RAPID GROWTh in the demand of access to higher education has sparked the demand for information on academic quality across the globe. The university rankings system has so far served as a rough guide to help prospective students make informed choices. Besides, the lucrative business in the higher education sector has induced global competition to attract the highest quantity and quality of students, and the university rankings system has assumed one of the key roles in achieving this prospect. However, the university rankings system has continued to face criticisms and there has not been an international consensus on the measurement of teaching and research quality in these rankings. All rankings are imperfect. One may want different rankings for different purposes such as ranking by research versus ranking by teaching. Even rankings for the same purpose, research or teaching, there is no consensus on which factors are important, how to measure and weigh them. The public would dispute the criteria used for an individual ranking, even though both of these methods are used in some international rankings: 1) Objective approach: an evidence-based system that gathers a welter amount of information based on input measures (e.g. entry standards) and output measures (e.g. unemployment rates, quality of research by scholars), and crystallise them into a ranking. While this approach might get fine-grained detail “wrong”, it nevertheless gets the broader coarse-grained ranking decently accurate.
S C I E N T I F I C M A L AY S I A N
2) Subjective approach: a system based on word of mouth, employers’ or students’ feedback, and peer reviews, all of which are gathered from a limited number of people or selected authorities. This methodology runs the risk of prejudices and criticisms. Thus, rankings often end up based on what is quantifiable rather than what is truly important. However, there are several aspects of university rankings that confer their accuracy. The main strength of rankings is the positive correlation between different rankings based on various criteria and weights. For instance, between the rankings of United Kingdom universities in the international and UK-based rankings. The precise rank in which a university appears varies from table to table but there is still a high correlation. One may be unable to tell precisely which university is ranked 30th or 35th in the world based on international rankings, but these rankings are still informative in distinctively differentiating between the universities in the top 30 from those in the top 90, and more so as the gap widens. It is also wise “not to let the best be the enemy of the good”, that is getting obsessed
