Worth Reading 3

Matthew David, Fabricating World Class: Global university league tables, status differentiation and myths of global competition

accepted for publication in the British Journal of Sociology of Education


This paper finds that UK media coverage of global university rankings  is strongly biased towards the Russell Group, which supposedly consists of elite research intensive universities, emphasises the superiority of some US universities, interprets whatever happens in the rankings as evidence that British universities, especially those in the Russell Group, need and deserve as much money as they want.

For example, he quotes the Daily Mail as saying in 2007 that "Vice chancellors are now likely to seize on their strong showing [in the THES-QS world university rankings] to press the case for the £3,000 a-year cap on tuition fees to be lifted when it is reviewed in 2009," while the Times in 2008, when UK universities slipped, said: "Vice chancellors and commentators voiced concern that, without an increase in investment, Britain's standing as a first-class destination for higher education could be under threat"

The media and elite universities also claim repeatedly that lavishly funded Asian universities are overtaking the impoverished and neglected schools of the West.

David argues that none of this is supported by the actual data of the rankings. He looks at the top 200 of the three well known rankings QS, THE, ARWU up to 2012.

I would agree with most of these conclusions, especially the argument that the rankings data he uses do not support either US superiority or the rise of Asia.

I would go further and suggest that changes to the QS rankings in 2008 and 2015, plus ad hoc adjustments to the employer survey in 2011 and 2012 plus changes in rules for submission of data, plus variations in the degree of engagement with the rankings, plus  the instability resulting from an unstable pool from which ranked universities are drawn would render the QS rankings invalid as a measure of any but the most obvious trends.

Similarly THE rankings, started in 2010, underwent substantial changes in 2011 and then in 2015. Between those years there were fluctuations for many universities because  a few papers could have a disproportionate impact on the citations indicator and again because the pool of ranked universities from which indicator means are calculated is unstable.

If, however, we take the Shanghai rankings over the course of eleven years and look at the full five hundred rankings then we do find that Asia, or more accurately some of it, is rising.

The number of Chinese universities in the ARWU top 500 rose from 16 in 2004 to 44 in 2015. The number of South Korean universities rose from 8 to 12, and Australian from 14 to 20,

But the number of Indian universities remained unchanged at three, while the number of Japanese fell from 36 to 18.

David does not argue that Asia is not rising, merely that looking at the top level of the rankings does not show that it is.

What is probably more important in the long run is the comparative performance not of universities but  of secondary school systems. Here the future of the US, the UK and continental Europe does indeed look bleak while that of East Asia and the Chinese diaspora is very promising.