THE's Caucus Ranking

In Alice in Wonderland there is a "caucus race" in which everyone runs around frantically in different directions and eventually everyone wins a prize. Unfortunately, there are not quite enough sweets to go around as prizes and so poor Alice has to make do with her thimble which she gives to the Dodo who then presents it to her.

It seems that THE has come up with a caucus ranking. In the THE Impact Rankings universities expend a lot of energy, do a lot of amazing, astounding and very different things in very different ways and a lot of them get some sort of prize for something. 

These rankings are another example of the growing complexity of the ranking scene. Global university rankings used to be simple. Shanghai Jiao Tong University started its  ARWU rankings in 2000 with just 500 ranked institutions and six indicators. Since then the number of rankings has proliferated and there have been more and more spin-offs, young university, regional, business schools, national, subject  rankings and so on with more indicators and increasingly complex and often opaque methodologies. We are getting to the point where a university is incompetent or excessively honest if it cannot find a ranking indicator, perhaps finely sliced by age, size, mission, and/or subject, in which they can scrape into the top five hundred, or at the very least the top thousand, and therefore into the top 3 or 4 % in the world. 

Some of the recent rankings seem redundant or pointless, going over the same old ground or making granular distinctions that are of little interest. It is no doubt nice to be acclaimed as the best young university for social science in South Asia, and maybe that can be used in advertising, but is it really necessary?

Now we have the third edition of the THE Impact rankings. These, as THE boasts, are the only rankings to measure universities according to their commitment to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. But that is not very original. Universitas Indonesia's GreenMetric was doing something similar several years ago although not tied explicitly to the UN goals. They have indicators related to energy, infrastructure, climate change, water, waste, transportation, and education.

It seems a little odd that the UN should be accepted as the authority on the achievement of gender equality when its "peacekeeping" forces have repeatedly been accused of rape and sexual assault. Is the UN really the right body to lay down guidelines about health and well-being considering the dubious performance of the WHO during the pandemic crisis?

One also wonders why THE should venture into ranking contributions to sustainability when after a decade it has still failed to come up with a credible citations indicator, which would seem a much easier task. 

It is noticeable that participation in these rankings is very uneven. There are 1,118 universities in the latest edition but only 13 Chinese and only 45 American, of which precisely two are in California, supposedly the homeland of environmental consciousness. The higher education elite of the USA, UK and China are largely absent. On the other hand, Iraq, Egypt, Brazil and Iran are much better represented here than in the research based rankings.

The top of these rankings is dominated by English-speaking universities outside the USA. The overall top twenty contains seven Australian, five British, three Canadian, and one each from Denmark, Ireland, the USA, New Zealand and Italy.

The popularity of the Impact Rankings seems linked to the current problems of many western universities. Public funding has been drying up, academic standards eroding, research output stagnating. Many universities have resorted to importing international, often Chinese, students and faculty to keep up standards, bring in tuition money, fill up postgraduate classes, and do the work of junior researchers.

The international students and researchers have left or are leaving and may not return in significant numbers, although THE "believes" that they will. This is happening as universities trying to reopen face the prospect of unprepared students, dwindling funds, and a lack of interest from employers. Eventually this will impact the position of universities in the global ranking systems. Those universities once dependent on international researchers for their reputation and ranking scores will start to suffer.

It looks as though western universities are losing interest in research and instruction in professional and academic subjects and and are reinventing themselves as purveyors of transformative experiences to the children of the affluent and ambitious, guardians of the purity of cultural discourse, or as saviours of the planet.     

The Financial Post of Canada has published a caustic comment on the joyful proclamations by Queen's University about its ascent to fifth place in the Impact Rankings. A trustee, John Stackhouse, has claimed that its success there meant that it was fulfilling "the true purpose of a university." The article observes that those "who believe the true purpose of a university is to pursue academic excellence and ensure that students who pass through its doors have the skills to build prosperous lives for themselves as productive members of their community, might differ."  In the THE World University Rankings and others Queen's is doing much less well. 

The methodology of the impact rankings does little to inspire confidence. For each of the indicators there is a weighting of 27% for bibliometric measures, such as the amount of research on hunger, health, water, or clean energy. It is easy to see how this could be gamed. Then there is a variety of data submitted by the institutions. Even if every university administrator is a sea-green incorruptible there are many ways in which such data can be massaged or stretched.

Added to that, THE does not appear to be doing a rigorous validation. Universities are not  assessed  the same things, except for the partnership for the goals indicator. The University of Sydney, overall second this year, is ranked for clean water and sanitation, sustainable cities and communities, and life on land. Clean water and sanitation includes supporting water conservation off campus and the reuse of water across the university.

RMIT University, in third place, is ranked for decent work and economic growth, industry innovation and infrastructure and reduced inequalities.  Decent work and economic growth includes expenditure per employee and policies for ending discrimination. So, essentially THE is trying to figure out whether Sydney is better at reusing water than RMIT is at announcing policies that are supposed to reduce discrimination. Comparing research output and impact across disciplines is, as THE ought to know, far from easy. Comparing performance in using water with discrimination policy would seem close to impossible especially since THE does not always use objective criteria but merely examples of best practices. Evidence "is evaluated against a set oef criteria and decisions are cross-validated where there is uncertainty. Evidence is not required to be exhaustive -- we are looking for examples that demonstrate best practice at the institutions concerned."

But it seems that the a substantial number of universities will find these rankings a useful tool in their quest for income and publicity and there will be more editions, and probably sub-rankings of one sort or another, for years to come.