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The Society for Research into Higher Education

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Paul Temple


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Merchant rankers

by Paul Temple

I blogged a while back on THE’s transformation from a publisher of news and opinions on higher education to a producer and vendor of rankings data. Every issue of the magazine it seems now comes with the latest rankings publication, often thicker than the parent publication. The latest one that I’ve seen gives the “2019 University Impact Rankings”. You’ve got to admire the ingenuity of THE’s Chief Knowledge Officer, Phil Baty, and his team in dreaming up ever-more varied ways of ranking universities – and the cleverness of these latest rankings, examining contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is that a wider range of universities than just the usual suspects can claim their place in the sun. So expect to see Kyung Hee University in South Korea boasting of its top world ranking under SDG 11, “Sustainable cities and communities”.

The UN has developed 17 SDGs taking in a wide sweep of worthwhile objectives, including peace, health, welfare, equalities, sustainability, and more. Probably all universities contribute in different ways to many of these goals, but how should their varying achievements in this field be ranked? Well, the difficulty of adding incommensurables together to produce a single number in order to create a league table has never so far got in the way of people with a ranking product to sell. So you won’t be surprised to hear that it turned out to be a piece of cake to add a university’s contribution to, say, “good health and wellbeing”, to a number reflecting its work on “gender equality”, to its number on “climate action”, to compare that total number to a number from a university on the other side of the world which says it contributes to a different set of SDGs – and to come up with a league table. (The University of Auckland came top, since you ask.)

As I said in my earlier blog about the THE annual university awards, you might think, where’s the harm in universities doing a bit of mild boasting about their contributions to perfectly worthwhile aims? Well, I think there are a couple of problems. One was brought home to me recently at a graduation ceremony, where the speech by the presiding member of the UCL brass was almost entirely about how well UCL and its constituent parts had done in the recent QS rankings. This both misleads families and friends, and probably many graduates, into thinking that rankings are some sort of unarguable, football league-style assessment, with a university’s work being counted in the same way as a team’s goals. But it also misses an opportunity to tell your own institutional story – “we are a terrific university, and this is why” – rather than sub-contracting the job to someone with a commercial axe to grind. What happened to institutional self-confidence?

The other problem is that the more universities appear to buy in to rankings like these, the more THE and other rankers are encouraged to offer consultancies based on their rankings. This is dangerous territory. Rather than claiming, however implausibly, that their consultancy services are entirely separate from their rankings activities, THE goes out of its way to link them. Imagine then a marketing director of a university in difficulties of some sort reading the several full-page ads for THE’s consultancy services in the Impact Rankings publication, with their offers of “expert guidance” and “tailored analysis for advancement” drawing on THE’s “deep expertise” with THE experts becoming “an extension of…universities’ marketing departments”. It wouldn’t be surprising if they thought, “Hmmm, maybe working with these guys might help us move up some of these rankings – at least we’d understand more about how they’re put together and we might then make some changes in what we do….”

So sets of methodologically worthless data become turned into income streams for rankings producers because university leaderships take them seriously, which in turn will drive universities’ policy-making in the direction of moving up one league table or another, which in turn will encourage rankers to produce even more league tables in order to exert more power. How on earth did we allow this to happen?

SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.


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What is Times Higher Education for?

By Paul Temple

Have you been to a THE Awards bash? If not, it’s worth blagging an invite – your University must be on the shortlist for Herbaceous Border Strategy Team of the Year, or some such, as the business model obviously depends on getting as many universities as possible onto the shortlists, and then persuading each university to cough up to send along as many of its staff as possible. A night out at a posh Park Lane hotel for staff whose work most likely is normally unnoticed by the brass: where’s the harm? I went once – once is enough – mainly I think because our Marketing Director wanted to see if I really possessed a dinner jacket. (She was generous enough to say that I “scrubbed up nicely”.)

I mention this because THE itself seems to be becoming less a publication dealing with higher education news and comment and more a business aimed at extracting cash from higher education institutions, with the weekly magazine merely being a marketing vehicle in support of this aim. The Awards events are the least bothersome aspect of this. The THE rankings – highly valued as “how not to use data” examples by teachers of basic quantitative methods courses – have now entered the realm of parody (“Emerging Economy Universities with an R in their names”) although the associated conferences and double-page advertising spreads in the magazine rake in a nice bit of revenue, one imagines. THE might fairly respond by saying that nobody makes these universities come to their conferences or buy corporate advertising in their pages, and anyway they weren’t the ones who decided that the marketization of higher education worldwide would be a good idea. True, but their profit-making activities give the ratchet another turn, making it harder for universities trying to survive in a competitive market to say no to marketing blandishments, and so helping to move yet more spending away from teaching and research: something regularly lampooned by Laurie Taylor in – remind me where his Poppleton column appears?

The newer, more problematic, development is THE then selling itself as a branding consultancy to the same universities that it is including in its rankings and maybe covering in its news or comment pages. Now it goes without saying that a journal with the standards of THE would never allow the fact that it was earning consultancy fees from a university to influence that university’s position in the rankings that it publishes or how it was covered editorially. It would be unthinkable: not least because it would at a stroke undermine the whole basis of the rankings themselves. Audit firms similarly assure us that the fact that they are earning consultancy fees from a company could never affect the audit process affecting that company. The causes of misleading audit reports – on Carillion, say – should be sought elsewhere, we’re told.

But wait a minute, what’s this on the THE website? “THE is the data provider underpinning university excellence in every continent across the world. As the company behind the world’s most influential university ranking, and with almost five decades of experience as a source of analysis and insight on higher education, we have unparalleled expertise on the trends underpinning university performance globally. Our data and benchmarking tools are used by many of the world’s most prestigious universities to help them achieve their strategic goals.” This seems to be saying that the data used to create the THE rankings are available, at a price, to allow universities to improve their own performance. Leaving aside the old joke about a consultant being someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, referring to the data used to produce rankings and in the following sentence proposing using the same data to help universities achieve their strategic goals (and I’d be surprised if these goals didn’t include rising in the aforementioned rankings) will suggest to potential clients that these two THE activities are linked. Otherwise why mention them in the same breath? This is skating on thin ethical ice.

SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.