Impact Of University Excellence To Advance National And International Rankings

Be it Times higher education or QS Singapore, ranking agencies in higher education are creating a new angle to look at the higher education system across the world. BW Businessworld higher education conclave has organised a session on the impact of Universities excellence to advance national and international rankings. This has highlighted multiple aspects of how such agencies have ranked and how reliable are these rankings to create advancement in excellence.

Today, all the stakeholders in education across their spectrum regularly refer to rankings as a measure of economic strength and ambition, students use them to help inform their choice, and universities use them to help set and define targets or brand and advertise themselves. Despite methodological flaws, global rankings do more than benchmark performance. 

They have become an exemplar of the marketization of higher education and the global battle for world-class excellence. By ranking higher education, they provide a framework through which national/supra-national and institutional ambition and competitiveness can be measured as the number of knowledge-producing capacity and talent-catching Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the top 20, 50 or 100.

Ashwin Fernandez Regional Director of QS Singapore has shared that India is also doing a good job at academic level besides, none notices it. He has also shared that how they or any ranking agency actually ranks for students as their core recipients but many of the stakeholders of education fraternity keeps an eye on any such international ranking.

By privileging particular disciplines and fields of investigation, outputs and achievements, rankings – like similar research assessment exercises – help to reaffirm a traditional understanding of knowledge production and research, and its international division of labour.

Drawing on research conducted in association with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the International Association of Universities (IAU) and the Institute of Higher Education Policy (IHEP), this paper examines the extent to which rankings shape our understanding of what constitutes research and the contribution that individual higher education institutions (HEIs) can and should make.