Comments on an Article by Andrew Oswald

I have already referred to an article by Andrew Oswald (14/12/2007) that contained some acerbic comments on claims to excellence by British universities derived from their showing on the THE-QS rankings.

He recently had an article in the Independent suggesting three measures that would allow universities to rise in the rankings. I will skip the first and third and just look at the second. He proposes that universities should be free to pay the market rate for highly rated researchers and offers Dartmouth College, which built up a top economics faculty by paying outstanding researchers appropriate salaries.

Dr Oswald is quite right but a lot of people are going to be depressed after reading his article. How can universities in Africa, Latin America and Asia get anywhere if they cannot afford to pay Ivy League level salaries? Is there anything that a university without a big pot of money can do?

The answer is that there is. In Moneyball Michael Lewis described how the Oakland As baseball team performed dramatically well even though they had only a comparatively small amount of money with which to buy players. They did it by simply ignoring the intuitions of talent scouts and looking at crude statistical data.

Basically, Oakland did the equivalent of a university scrapping search committees, interviews, personality tests, references and looking at the research done by applicants. Or choosing undergraduates by testing cognitive skills, literacy and numeracy rather than holistic assessment of leadership, communication skills, response to adversity, community involvement and so on.

At least one American university has done something like this. George Mason University has built up an excellent economics department by recruiting academics specializing in unfashionable fields that were undervalued by the academic marketplace.

Asian universities and others might consider systematically recruiting researchers whose personal characteristics and choice of unpopular research topics put them at a disadvantage when applying for academic positions. They might end up with a collection of unpleasant eccentrics but they might also see their ranking scores inching upwards.