The shadow of Brexit falls across the land

The western chattering and scribbling classes sometimes like to reflect on their superiority to the pre-scientific attitudes of the local peasantry, astrology, nationalism and religion and things like that. But it seems that the credentialled elite of Britain are now in the grip of a great fear of an all pervading spirit called Brexit whose malign power is unlimited in time and space.

Thus the Independent tells us that university rankings (QS in this case) show that "post Brexit uncertainty and long-term funding issues" have hit UK higher education.

The Guardian implies that Brexit has something to do with the decline of British universities in the rankings without actually saying so.

"British universities have taken a tumble in the latest international rankings, as concern persists about the potential impact of Brexit on the country’s higher education sector. "

Many British universities have fallen in the QS rankings this year but the idea that Brexit has anything to do with it is nonsense. The Brexit vote was on June 23rd, well after QS's deadlines for submitting respondents for the reputation surveys and updating institutional data. The citations indicator refers to the period 2011-2015.

The belief that rankings reveal the dire effects of funding cuts and immigration restrictions is somewhat more plausible but fundamentally untenable.

Certainly, British universities have taken some blows in the QS rankings this year. Of the 18 universities in the top 100 in 2015 two are in the same place this year, two have risen and 14 have fallen. This is associated with a general decline in performance in the academic reputation indicator which accounts for 40% of the overall score.

Of those 18 universities three, Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, hold the same rank in the academic reputation indicator, one, King's College London, has risen and fourteen are down.

The idea that the reputation of British universities is suffering because survey respondents have heard that the UK government is cutting spending or tightening up on visa regulations is based on some unlikely assumptions about how researchers go about completing reputation surveys.

Do researchers really base their assessment of research quality on media headlines, often inaccurate and alarmist? Or do they make an honest assessment of performance over the last few years or even decades? Or do they vote according to their self interest, nominating their almae matres or former employers?

I suspect that the decline of British universities in the QS reputation indicator has little to do with perceptions about British universities and a lot more to do with growing sophistication about and interest in rankings in the rest of the world, particularly in East Asia and maybe parts of continental Europe.