Times Higher Education

• Rankings influence student matriculation numbers, attract talented faculty and justify donations from wealthy donors.
• University leaders rail against them, and some schools “withdraw” from them, but rankings are influential.
• A radical shift in the data underlying rankings is about to upend the rankings world – largely in favor of China’s position.
• China’s swift progress in science and technology, propelled by investments in research and university strength, has alarmed the United States and other nations.

Broader range of more sources

• But careful curation makes it the gold standard of academic indexing and one that journals and authors aspire to join.
• Reliance on curated databases is about to end with the introduction of rankings based on open data like that collected by OpenAlex.
• OpenAlex claims to include over 100,000 journals – of highly varying quality and editorial practices – compared with SCI’s 9,200.

Reflecting China’s research productivity

• As China has invested in education and grown its science and engineering capacity, many more people turn out scholarly articles.
• From a very small number in the 1980s, China had 2.2 million scientists and engineers by 2023, based on UNESCO data.
• China’s scholarly output of scientific and engineering articles shows a very rapid rise since the 1990s, with growth outpacing all other nations.
• Open-access publishing services have grown rapidly and offer fast publication times, but there are questions about the quality of their journals.
• Chinese researchers and their sponsoring institutions put a huge premium on publishing in international journals, even those hosted by questionable publishers.

Caroline Wagner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• The top 10 restaurants in our vicinity, the best cities to visit, the best movies to watch.
• To understand whether the rankings were any good you’d want know who was doing the ranking.
• These are exactly the same questions that are worth asking when looking at the international ranking of universities.
• The experts noted that rankings were massively overvalued, and reinforced global, regional and national inequalities.

Who does the ranking, and how

• They all ultimately generate an index or score from the data they collect.
• They are not completely transparent about what they measure and how much each component of the measure counts.
• For example, Times Higher Education sends out a survey to academics who are invited to rate their own – or other – institutions.
• The don’t count everything, they don’t count it equally and they don’t tell people who get the rankings how they have weighted what they do count.

Why should we care?

• In addition, a lot of public money goes into universities.
• We, the public, should care how that money is spent.
• That is a good university; it is fulfilling an important social function.
• There are so many important questions to be asking about a higher education system.

Do we have the right mix of tertiary education institutions and do they fit together well?
Are our research institutions producing enough high quality research to help us develop as a nation or region?
Are they producing enough master’s or PhD graduates to staff other tertiary education institutions (as well as other sectors in society)?
The rankings steer universities away from these key endeavours. An obsession with ranking creates perverse incentives to act to improve a rank rather than get on with the worthwhile work of universities.

What to do?

• Profit-driven companies will inevitably drive ranking systems towards making more profit rather than towards the public interest and social functions of universities.
• We need ranking institutions to be completely transparent so we can see whether it is useful information.
• Once we understand what the rankings are, and what they are not, we will not value their reports as much.

• Sharon Fonn works at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg South Africa and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
• She is a founder of and the co-director of CARTA.

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• TOKYO, July 7, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In a new record, Tokyo University of Science (TUS) has won the Times Higher Education (THE) Awards Asia 2023 in the 'Outstanding Support for Students' category, making it the first Japanese university to do so!
• The awards were announced on Wednesday, June 21, 2023, and honored outstanding work in academia, leadership, management, and professional services provided by universities across Asia.
• This year was the fifth edition of the awards, and THE Awards Asia received over 700 applications from 220 educational institutions in 20 countries and regions!
• The University impressed the judges with its three-tiered support programme—which includes learning, mental health, and peer support—ensuring that students face no barriers to achieving their educational goals.