The darker side of university rankings

UNIVERSITIES are facing tremendous pressure not only to reassess their curriculum but to restructure as well. Much of this is due to the onslaught of neo-liberal policies that had swept the planet from the Reagan and Thatcher years. The premise behind neo-liberalism is the marketisation and commodification of everything.

In so far as higher education is concerned, universities have to reorient and restructure from producing research and offering theoretical, scientific, and moral education to producing vocationally trained graduates who can get good jobs and pay taxes. In the neo-lib- eral education paradigm, “students” are now known as “customers” who are on the lookout for universities that offer the best value for money. This is where the craze in the rankings of universities comes in.

Every year, universities anxiously await the release of higher education rankings, and every year Harvard and Princeton are tied for top spot. But who determines that Harvard and Princeton are the best in the world? What is the methodology used?

The methodology used is flaky. Twenty-five per cent of a university’s score, for example, is based on its reputation. Another 25% on peer review or what administrators in other universities think about it. Every year universities are told to evaluate each other, and every year ranking agencies are willing to offer “advice” on how universities can improve their rankings. What the rankings game does is to divert universities from concentrating on their core activity that is teaching and learning and to focus on becoming a corporate university.

Under the neo-liberal education, universities are becoming cheap vocational schools. The vocational focus of higher education implies the centrally planned expansion of marketable programmes and the elimination of or radical reduction of theoretical fields such as classics, history of science, and philosophy. Non-marketable disciplines and unpopular sub-disciplines that have lower rates of graduation, most notably the arts, humanities and social sciences are under pressure to be eliminated from universities altogether.

The ranking exercise and curriculum reshuffling are in essence, self-contradictory as one policy undermines the other. The Ministry of Higher Education wishes our universities to move up in the rankings but they want to turn universities into vocational schools by teaching students skills that are in demand and dumbing down the curriculum.

While policymakers are trying to play catch up with Western universities, they are also aggressively enacting huge budget cuts. The cuts to the public universities system are devastating. They risk killing disciplines deemed “useless” and losing exceptional talents. Classes may be cut from course schedules and perhaps what is more alarming is the possibility of transforming public universities into corporations. What is most apparent is that the massive budget cuts will cripple a university system that already struggles to serve its students. This brings us back to my point at the outset – neo-liberal policies