Take rankings with grain of salt

Recent coverage of world university rankings would have us believe Canada’s universities are failing to maintain quality. In particular, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE) — which aim to measure world-class status of universities — received much attention across Canada. Commentary focused on how most had dropped in rank and argued our universities are doing poorly.

As a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Alberta, studying university rankings, performance metrics and governance, here are three things to keep in mind.

1) The rankings measure a particular idea of what a university should be doing. Most rankings try to measure research and teaching, but do not actually measure the quality of the educational process. Instead, most measures are focused on research inputs such as money and outputs such as publications. It is important to be wary of what rankings actually measure.

2) There’s a danger of only ever looking at a university’s position in the top 100 or 200. That is exactly what happened when the THE released its rankings and the media declared Canada’s universities had dropped in rank. The subscales and comparisons of these across institutions are more telling, but are often ignored. All the scores for Canadian universities actually increased, so if you believe that rankings truly measure what they are supposed to and that universities should do what the rankings say they should do, there is no cause for alarm.

3) Rankings are relative. The hierarchical structure means a university can only increase in position if others decrease. This relativity, combined with the fact that universities have adopted practices of continuous improvement, means a university can only climb the ranks if it’s able to improve its scores to a greater degree than others. So while Canadian universities are improving according to the THE measures, they may not be doing so as quickly as others in the world.

Is there a crisis in Canadian universities? No, not even according to the rankings.

The more important question is whether Canada should allow rankings to define how we make decisions about our universities, instead of facilitating a conversation about what Canadians want universities to become. Gary Barron, Calgary