A question of incentives

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, published today, are the 20th edition of an exercise that first appeared as a more modest list of 200 universities in 2004.

That was also the year that gave birth to TheFacebook, as it was known then, a business that went on to reshape society in all sorts of ways – look at a list of famous people born in 2004 and they are almost all social media influencers (full disclosure: I have not heard of any of them).

Some would argue that rankings have had a similarly elemental impact on higher education, ramping up the focus on competition and reputation, but also facilitating collaboration and internationalisation.

In both cases, though, it would be a mistake to see this impact as purely extrinsic, rather than tapping into and building on existing trends and traits.

Rankings reflect the sector’s goals and motivations and, by providing robust and comparable datasets to help measure and benchmark performance, create incentive structures that over time have played a role in channelling universities’ efforts in particular directions.

That makes them incredibly influential and puts great responsibility on rankers to incentivise the right things.

There are, of course, examples where this responsibility is eschewed, most egregiously in the case of rankings – not THE’s – that reward inputs over outputs to disincentivise and harm fair access.

On the other side of this coin, however, are the many ways in which rankings that are constructed with care and in close and constant collaboration with the sector can also provide powerful positive incentives, guiding university decision-making in ways that further society’s goals.

One way in which they do this is by providing a mechanism to demonstrate return on investment – a point that is particularly important now, with questions about relevance and cost high on the agenda in many countries.

An example is the development over recent years of the THE Impact Rankings, which provide a different but complementary view of performance to the World University Rankings, incentivising and demonstrating the value of efforts to address the most pressing challenges facing the world.

As for the world rankings published today, THE continues to adapt and evolve the methodology to ensure that the exercise is as robust and accurate a reflection of university performance as possible.

Explaining the changes in this year’s rankings supplement, Duncan Ross, THE’s chief data officer, points out that this evolution is, again, a reflection of the higher education sector itself and of “the outputs of the diverse range of research-intensive universities across the world, now and in the future”.

The methodological updates were made after extensive consultation, he adds.

His comments bring us back to the point that rankings should not be seen as an externally imposed straitjacket, but as an exercise that provides data to support an ever-changing ecosystem of universities, which are themselves part of an ever-changing world.

Thinking back over the 20 years, the big sector trends have been around funding (the shift in many systems from public to private), internationalisation (initially a seemingly irreversible move to more of it) and expansion (as middle classes with the money as well as aspiration to pursue tertiary education grew).

Today some of those trends remain in place while others are under pressure – internationalisation in particular has faced headwinds that few would have foreseen a decade ago.

On a more human scale, there has been a trend over that time for growing unease about working conditions and precarity in higher education, and a harder commercial edge to the operating environment.

While some critics lay these shifts at the door of rankings, the reality is that they reflect broader shifts, including funding systems that in many cases are close to breaking point.

With those pressures in mind, our cover feature this week offers something completely different: a personal guide from a variety of contributors on how to be happy in higher education.

In an age when it can seem that we only value what can be measured, it’s a reminder that humans are far more complex than that – and that, yes, we are all more than our rank.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com