French politicians are joining university President Dan Mote in the category of people who think university ranking are bull-merde.
Institutions of higher education across the globe are ranked annually by China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University and read more or less the same with each new edition: Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley again took the gold, silver and bronze medals out of 100 competitors this year, with American universities dominating most of other spots as well. The highest-ranked French university was Université Pierre et Marie Curie, at No. 42.
Sacre bleu!
France’s legislators, upset by their universities’ poor showing, issued a report arguing that the Chinese researchers were clearly biased towards English-speaking universities. The methodology behind the rankings includes the number of alums who win Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals and the number of papers published in Nature and Science, both of which are published in English.
Why all the fuss? France’s reaction is proof of a growing global obsession with school rankings as higher education becomes an international enterprise – and rankings are fueling a host of administrative and financial decisions on behalf of universities looking to improve their scores, reports Aisha Labi of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Growth in the number of universities looking to set up international partnerships also fuels the rankings obsession. Most administrators want to be certain that they are forging links with institutions of equivalent heft.
International-rankings tables, which did not even exist a decade ago, are also increasingly used by the world’s roughly three million international students to decide where to study.
“Rankings have gone global at exactly the same time that universities are fighting over global students as a resource,” says Robert J. Coelen, vice president for international affairs at Leiden University and founder of a regularly held international symposium on rankings at Leiden.