Marguerite Clarke, an international education consultant based in Adelaide, South Australia, discusses the rise in the demand of university rankings and their impact on students.
University rankings can be found in more than 20 countries around the world. Their growth has been fuelled by several major trends in higher education, including increasing participation rates, higher costs, and the view of students as consumers who demand value for money. While there has been considerable debate over the methods used to create these listings, there has been little or no attention paid to their impact on students. This article pulls together the available evidence on the impact of university rankings in three student-related areas: access to higher education, choice of school, and opportunities after graduation. While most of the data pertain to commercially-produced rankings in the US and the UK, there are useful lessons for other countries.
Studies show that university rankings can threaten higher education access for disadvantaged students by creating incentives for schools to recruit students who will be “assets” in terms of maintaining or enhancing their position in the rankings.
This dynamic appears related to the student-selectivity indicators used in some university rankings, such as test scores for entering students and the percentage of applicants that a school accepts. In order to improve their performance on these measures, schools engage in various strategic activities, including implementing early-decision programs (students receive an early admissions decision from their first-choice school), offering larger amounts of merit aid (e.g. scholarships), and investing heavily in infrastructure such as sports facilities and upmarket dorms.
While these strategies can help schools compete more effectively for academically high-achieving students, they tend to have a negative impact on access for low-income students and other underrepresented groups, particularly to the more selective schools. (This is because these students are less likely to apply through early-decision programs or to earn the top scores on standardized tests that would qualify them for scholarships).
Ironically, while higher education institutions are becoming increasingly obsessed with rankings, evidence from the US and Europe suggests that rankings do not play a large role in most students’ choice of a university or graduate program. For example, of the 221,897 undergraduate students who responded to one survey, 11% saw university rankings as a very important factor in their choice of school while 60% found them not at all important. Students who found university rankings to be very important were more likely to be high-achieving, from high-income families, and from families with college-educated parents. Low-income and first-generation (i.e., children of parents with no higher education experience) college students were least likely to view rankings as important.
What about the effects on student opportunities after graduation? Studies in several countries have found a relationship between the perceived status of the degree-granting institution (a characteristic that relates strongly to university rankings) and employment and earnings outcomes for graduates. These studies suggest that the impact is temporary for most students, although there can be a more enduring effect for low-income students and graduates of professional programs.
Only a small amount of research directly examines the effects of rankings on employment and earnings outcomes; these data suggest that rankings may have some impact in these areas, at least for business school graduates. For example, one study found that companies pay higher salaries to graduates of the top-ranked US business schools even when they know that lower-ranked schools offer a better education.
At the same time, rankings appear to have little or no sway on employers who hire graduates in very specialized or newly established program areas that are in high demand. For instance, data from the UK reveal that while graduates of the highest-ranked institutions tend to do best overall in terms of employment prospects, graduates of some of the lower-ranked universities also do well if they have specialized in an area highly regarded for particular professions.
The last few years have seen a new addition to the rankings scene: so-called “world” rankings that purport to be lists of the top universities or programs in the world. The best-known examples are the Times Higher Education Supplement-Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings, and the Academic Ranking of World Universities produced by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Early data suggest that these global ranking systems are helping to better inform prospective students in many countries about the available choices, including where they can obtain a high quality education for a reasonable price.
Reservations remain, however, about the potential impact on access given the strong likelihood that such rankings will encourage higher education stratification within and across countries. In fact, some countries are explicitly moving in that direction because they see rankings and stratification as the means to create “world class” universities and thus meet the challenges of increasing global competition.
Producers of university rankings should periodically review their methodologies and take note of how their rankings are being perceived and used by various audiences. Since at least some of the adverse impacts of rankings are related to student selectivity indicators, one issue for rankers is whether to replace measures that reward schools for recruiting already academically high-achieving students with those that recognize schools for their success in educating students.
It is also important for higher education institutions to reflect on their use of ranking information. This involves considering whether rankings may be unduly influencing priorities and processes in certain aspects of institutional life, including admission decisions. In addition, it is important for students to recognize that rankings reflect only one aspect of an institution’s profile and are not necessarily predictive of the quality of the education that they will receive, or of the opportunities that will be available to them after graduation.
Both producers and consumers may benefit from consulting The Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions. These principles, which offer standards of quality and good practice in the development and use of rankings, are available at http://www.ihep.org/.
Access: policies and procedures put in place by universities, or programs within those institutions, that directly impact on the entry of traditionally under-represented student groups
Choice: factors that affect a student’s decision about which school to attend
Opportunity: employment and earnings outcomes for graduates and how they are influenced by the institution attended.
Ranking: a list of institutions (e.g., universities) or programs (e.g., MBA, doctoral) organized according to each school’s relative performance on some measure(s) of quality.
Dr. Clarke is an International Education Consultant based in Adelaide, South Australia. Her research focuses on equity and quality issues in education, particularly in relation to the development and use of assessment and accountability systems. She has worked in the Australian, Chinese, Irish, Japanese, and U.S. education systems and served as a consultant on World Bank projects in Uganda and Mongolia. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and other awards, Dr. Clarke has published extensively on academic quality rankings; the impact of testing on teaching and learning; and the use of tests for promotion, graduation, and college admission decisions. She is a member of UNESCO's International Rankings Expert Group and is on the editorial board of the journal, Theory into Practice.
Clarke, M. (2002). Quantifying quality: What can the U.S. News and World Report rankings tell us about the quality of higher education? Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10(16).
http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n16/
The Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions
http://www.ihep.org/
Add comment