Critical Review of University Ranking Systems

Introduction

The world of academia has undergone a sea change. Higher education is becoming more and competitive in a globalized scenario. Hence, students need to consider various issues when selecting and university or college to pursue their higher education. These considerations include: price, costs, courses/programmes availability, location, facilities, social life, and quality of faculty, industry collaboration, network and academic reputation (Bergerson, 2010). In this competitive scenario, rankings provide perceptions of reputation and make superiority explicit. They act as guiding light to make rational choices (Freid, 2005).Rankings are like indicators and to some extent help in measuring quality of students in terms of entry level, selection ratio, graduate throughput, employability and faculty quality. Ranking also provided other information like infrastructure facilities, alumni role, financial resources etc. This practice thus benefited older and well-endowed private universities as compared to new public institutions (Hazelkorn, 2011). With the demand for higher education increasing steps taken to widen access does not counterpart with lessening disparity (Vincent-Lancrin, 2008).

Currently with national and global rankings which are more influential in many countries, there is approach to even rank discipline based, for example, medicine, law and business (Baporikar, 2009). With globalisation and boundaries becoming blurred the landscape of higher education has become more international and competitive just like any other service sector or industry. Advertising, branding, positioning and market segmentation which were never ever referred to with respect to any institutions today is the talk in the corridor. Thus need for common measure and metric for comparison crept in, which is what rankings aim to do. Today, the world of academia is engulfed with different rankings country perse and even international ones. One can only ponder the question of what academic life was like before rankings. Today, there are national ranking in more than 50 countries, and 10 global rankings – some more influential than others are. In addition, there are discipline-based rankings, primarily focused on professional subjects such as medicine, law and business.

Whether rankings aid broader policy objectives of widening participation or provide merely strategies of selective excellence (Barrow, 1996) and only intensify reputational and social stratification still calls for a better observation in India. Adopting an grounded theory, in depth literature review of published annual reports and statistical data on Indian higher education collected from respective government organizations such as Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Universities Grants Commission (UGC), and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the chapter traces the history of rankings, reflect on the changes rankings have brought on the higher education landscape in particular and world of academia in general over the past few decades in the Indian context. In doing so it also delves into the rankings influence and implication for higher education core functions: teaching and research.