UNIVERSITIES ‘TO MOVE AWAY FROM GLOBAL RANKINGS’
As Xi calls on higher education institutions to ‘blaze a new path’, withdrawal from rankings decided by overseas bodies gains support
The reported withdrawal of Beijing’s prestigious Renmin University of China (RUC) and other institutions from taking part in international university rankings has met strong support domestically, reflecting a rejection of standards defined by foreign ranking systems as the country aims to develop “worldclass universities with Chinese characteristics”.
News of the university’s plans to withdraw from the rankings first spread online earlier this month, with national broadcaster China National Radio (CNR) citing sources confirming that the university’s administrators had reached a consensus.
“[It] conforms with the overall direction of China’s education development and will become a trend,” a source said in the CNR report, adding that the withdrawal reflected the autonomy and courage of Chinese universities, education and culture.
RUC, a public research university known for humanities and social sciences, said there was no official announcement yet and declined to comment further.
This development comes days after a speech by President Xi Jinping at the university on April 26, in which he called for Chinese universities to “blaze a new path” instead of “blindly following others or simply copying foreign standards and models”, according to a report by Xinhua.
Besides RUC, Chinese state media reported that two other institutions – Nanjing University in eastern Jiangsu province and Lanzhou University in northwestern Gansu province – had also withdrawn from all international rankings. Nanjing did not respond to calls from the South China Morning Post, while Lanzhou declined to comment.
However Nanjing University’s Communist Party committee said in April that the university “no longer considers international rankings a development target”.
In China, some of the most prominent global rankings of the world’s top universities include the QS World University Rankings, the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, the US News and World Report Best Global Universities Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).
Each is based on a different methodology but in all, research carries a lot of weight, accounting for 50 per cent of scores, although how this is measured also differs.
Historically, the rankings have had significant influence on student enrolments, teacher recruitment and resource allocation.
But education experts in China said university rankings had long been a controversial issue that required further consideration.
“Universities in China have different ideas of education compared with those abroad,” said Chu Zhaohui, a researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences – a research arm of China’s Ministry of Education.
“The [international] evaluation standards can only provide a rough scope and framework, because different top universities have different performances.”
Chu said many influential rankings were created by private foreign institutions or media companies unfamiliar with China’s higher education environment.
None of the universities that reportedly withdrew from the rankings featured in the top 100 on any of the lists. Nanjing was closest at 101st on the ARWU ranking, while RUC and Lanzhou’s positions varied across different rankings, coming in between 300th and 800th globally.
The top-ranked Chinese universities internationally are Peking University and Tsinghua University, which share 16th place on THE ranking this year and both were in the top 50 of the other lists.
However, the rankings do not necessarily depend on universities actively taking part, so the Chinese universities’ withdrawal does not necessarily mean they will be now absent from lists.
Simona Bizzozero, communications director at QS Quacquarelli Symonds, said the QS World University Rankings had an inclusive approach when searching for data about an institution.
“We value and nurture engagement,” Bizzozero said. “However, in the rare instance a university decides not to provide us with the data we require, we use other trusted sources.”
A source from Lanzhou University told China National Radio the university had submitted information to QS once when approached by the institution, but had not done so since.
Phil Baty, THE chief knowledge officer, said the organisation’s conversations with RUC were “ongoing” but he did not elaborate on whether the university would appear on future rankings. He said Lanzhou had never featured on the ranking, while Nanjing had completed the data submission process this year and would be ranked in the 2023 list.
“We will continue to provide clear, international data benchmarking for all Chinese participants,” Baty said.
Chu said withdrawing from international rankings did not mean Chinese universities should disregard all evaluations. Instead, universities should downplay the rankings but promote more comprehensive and diverse criteria.
But he said China could not develop an evaluation system of its own behind closed doors. “To really build a first-class university, it must be beyond national borders,” he said.
In 2015, Beijing launched a Double World Class (DWC) project to promote the construction of “world-class universities” by offering funds to a group of the nation’s elite universities to develop expertise in certain academic disciplines.
The scheme has seen mainland universities steadily improve in global university rankings, notably through a massive increase in the volume of research. In 2019, China overtook the United States in terms of mostcited scientific studies.
In February, Chinese ministries revealed plans to lift the country’s universities to worldclass level, listing 147 universities and more than 300 of their disciplines, from science and engineering to social sciences, that it said should be developed to become “first class”.
The ministries said the goals were to develop top talent for the country, boost China’s competitiveness internationally, serve national strategic needs and encourage cross-disciplinary research, with the government set to increase investment in scientific and new cross-disciplinary subjects.
While the DWC project indicates China has not given up on its ambitions to be recognised globally as an education hub, recent developments suggest it is turning away from international rankings as a measure of success, instead aiming to set its own standards.
“A key feature of the DWC is that it encourages university differentiation,” Hamish Coates, a tenured professor at Tsinghua University’s Institute of Education said. “One might guess, therefore, that future ‘rankings’ will see many more forms of institutional performance lists as they each seek to display their own unique value.”
In 2020, RUC established its own centre to evaluate higher education in what it said was “weak international discourse power in education evaluation, unreasonable domestic higher education evaluation standards and lack of humanities and social science evaluation indicators,” according to its website.
The RUC centre aims to evaluate higher education with Chinese characteristics and an international perspective, and answer key questions such as how a “worldclass university” is defined, measured and built.
In the rare instance a university decides not to provide us with the data... we use other sources SIMONA BIZZOZERO, QS RANKINGS